That darn Michael Shayne
DIVIDEND ON DEATH
You have to love a moment like this. Our tough private eye has stolen the murder weapon from a homicide scene (not the last time he will do this). It's a big old butcher knife, and he cleans the blood off it and tosses it casually in his kitchen's silverware drawer. Later on in the case, with his client vanished and two police chiefs glaring at him, just aching to arrest him, the detective insolently starts to make himself a sandwich. ("The wooden-handled butcher knife came first to his hand, and his whistling lips twisted into an ironic grin as he began slicing bread with it under Painter's gaze... The detective continued to slice bread with his back to them, cutting each slice uniform and thin, pleased with the razorlike edge on the knife.")
This dark humour is one of the things I like best about the early Michael Shayne books. There's a perfectly fine plot about murders in the ritzy upper class, a young heiress going insane (or is she?), some hurried sex with a nurse and a large serving of violence (Shayne takes enough punishment to kill a mule in this one), most of the ingredients for a classic crime thriller. But it's the little bursts of whacky deadpan comedy that make these books stick in my mind. Not many of us are composed enough to rinse blood from a nightgown while making breakfast (the trick is to use very cold water while the stains are fresh).
DIVIDEND ON DEATH is from 1939, and was the first in the series. (There would be over seventy novels before the last one appeared in 1976, as well as hundreds of short stories in the magazine bearing Shayne's name.) Davis Dresser was the first (and best) to toil under the "Brett Halliday" byline, and I have come to regard him as greatly underrated. His early entries in this series are a great mixture of hardboiled action and complicated whodunit plotting, with just a bit of slapstick.
Right from the start, Dresser had Michael Shayne fully realized. By the second chapter, the big redheaded detective is happily at his Martell five-star cognac, "alternately sipping from the wineglass and the waterglass, lighting one cigarette from another." A few pages later, he is tampering with a crime scene, removing the murder weapon and his client's blood-soaked nightgown before anyone else is aware of the killing, and sauntering casually off with them. As soon as he meets the new Miami Beach chief of detectives, Peter Painter, Shayne is badgering and taunting the man as he will continue to do for decades to come ("I've been in worse jails than yours"), as Miami police chief Will Gentry tries to intercede. All that's missing from the formula is reporter Tim Rourke.
This also introduces Phyllis Brighton, the girl who will become Shayne's wife (only to unfortunately be killed off between books, a big mistake in my opinion). She enters as a very pretty, slim young brunette of nineteen who is on the edge of a major psychotic episode. Believing she has an Electra complex and is likely to either murder her mother or her new stepfather, Phyllis comes to Shayne's apartment-office all trembling and hysterical. One minute she is rushing to leap out the window, the next she is throwing off her clothes and diving into Shayne's bed (because if he's attracted to her, that means she's not a suppressed Lesbian, you see... my word, this kid has a lot to learn!).
As soon as they meet, there is that certain spark of chemistry between these two. At thirty-five, the big lug thinks he's way too old for a college girl, but it's fine with her. He also doesn't believe her predicament is her fault, either. As a pulp detective, he's been in too many stories solved too many cases) where the young heiress is driven insane to get at her fortune. Phyllis is acting pretty whacky all right, but that family doctor sure seems suspicious, and he's the one pushing this Electra business.
Right after Shayne agrees to accept a pearl necklace as a retainer (it's an actual pearl necklace, let's keep it decent here), he is approached by her family's doctor to keep an eye on Phyllis, a neat twist that amuses the detective. ("Now, if the old lady would come around and hire me as her bodyguard, the set-up would be perfect.")
Things get complicated after that, and there seems to be three or four plots going on at the same time. The stepmother is promptly killed, with her throat sliced open, and Phyllis is right there in a bloodstained nightgown and holding a butcher knife (whoops!).Shayne hides her at his place, then she disappears and is not seen for the rest of the story until the very end. What's all this business about a Raphael with someone's else signature? Why does this shady gangster Ray Gordon hire Shayne to find out the minute someone named Henderson enters Miami? And what about the body buried on the beach in a box? (Shayne reflects the sea water when the tide is in must have a pickling effect in the corpse.) What is the chauffeur hiding, and what about that enigmatic cablegram Shayne quickly confiscates?
Just what the heck is going on here? Worry not, all will be revealed as Shayne puzzles things out. By the final chapter, he has deftly maneuvered everyone together to resolve everything to his satisfaction. He even manipulates some bad guys into shooting each other in a way that the Avenger would have grudgingly approved.
One thing about Mike Shayne, he has a terrific healing ability. (He must take DHEA.) Right in this first recorded case, he takes four bullets, one of which breaks his collarbone so that he handles most of the story in a cast. If this isn't enough, he is brutally kicked and beaten into unconsciousness, left for dead but quietly getting up again to keep going. (It's a good thing his evening of sleazy sex with a nurse* from the Brighton household takes place before the shooting, when he has only been kicked senseless by a thuglike chauffeur.)
But this is all part of the business for him, and he makes sure everyone who abuses him gets paid back in full. And he comes out at the end with $24,000 profit, which in today's money would be, oh I don't know, a whole heck of a lot more. Still, you have to wonder why he doesn't end up looking like Quasimodo on a bad day after a few cases like this.
One note for the chronicles, this book has one of the very rare hints about Shayne's past ("... he was a freckled Irish lad kneeling by his mother's side in a Catholic chapel..."), as Davis Dresser in forty years never gave his hero a backstory.
_____
*Shayne doesn't seem to enjoy this much, and I figured his mind was already on Phyllis. ("His face was morose as he went back to the table and poured himself another drink. Something new had come into his life - and gone out of it.")
You have to love a moment like this. Our tough private eye has stolen the murder weapon from a homicide scene (not the last time he will do this). It's a big old butcher knife, and he cleans the blood off it and tosses it casually in his kitchen's silverware drawer. Later on in the case, with his client vanished and two police chiefs glaring at him, just aching to arrest him, the detective insolently starts to make himself a sandwich. ("The wooden-handled butcher knife came first to his hand, and his whistling lips twisted into an ironic grin as he began slicing bread with it under Painter's gaze... The detective continued to slice bread with his back to them, cutting each slice uniform and thin, pleased with the razorlike edge on the knife.")
This dark humour is one of the things I like best about the early Michael Shayne books. There's a perfectly fine plot about murders in the ritzy upper class, a young heiress going insane (or is she?), some hurried sex with a nurse and a large serving of violence (Shayne takes enough punishment to kill a mule in this one), most of the ingredients for a classic crime thriller. But it's the little bursts of whacky deadpan comedy that make these books stick in my mind. Not many of us are composed enough to rinse blood from a nightgown while making breakfast (the trick is to use very cold water while the stains are fresh).
DIVIDEND ON DEATH is from 1939, and was the first in the series. (There would be over seventy novels before the last one appeared in 1976, as well as hundreds of short stories in the magazine bearing Shayne's name.) Davis Dresser was the first (and best) to toil under the "Brett Halliday" byline, and I have come to regard him as greatly underrated. His early entries in this series are a great mixture of hardboiled action and complicated whodunit plotting, with just a bit of slapstick.
Right from the start, Dresser had Michael Shayne fully realized. By the second chapter, the big redheaded detective is happily at his Martell five-star cognac, "alternately sipping from the wineglass and the waterglass, lighting one cigarette from another." A few pages later, he is tampering with a crime scene, removing the murder weapon and his client's blood-soaked nightgown before anyone else is aware of the killing, and sauntering casually off with them. As soon as he meets the new Miami Beach chief of detectives, Peter Painter, Shayne is badgering and taunting the man as he will continue to do for decades to come ("I've been in worse jails than yours"), as Miami police chief Will Gentry tries to intercede. All that's missing from the formula is reporter Tim Rourke.
This also introduces Phyllis Brighton, the girl who will become Shayne's wife (only to unfortunately be killed off between books, a big mistake in my opinion). She enters as a very pretty, slim young brunette of nineteen who is on the edge of a major psychotic episode. Believing she has an Electra complex and is likely to either murder her mother or her new stepfather, Phyllis comes to Shayne's apartment-office all trembling and hysterical. One minute she is rushing to leap out the window, the next she is throwing off her clothes and diving into Shayne's bed (because if he's attracted to her, that means she's not a suppressed Lesbian, you see... my word, this kid has a lot to learn!).
As soon as they meet, there is that certain spark of chemistry between these two. At thirty-five, the big lug thinks he's way too old for a college girl, but it's fine with her. He also doesn't believe her predicament is her fault, either. As a pulp detective, he's been in too many stories solved too many cases) where the young heiress is driven insane to get at her fortune. Phyllis is acting pretty whacky all right, but that family doctor sure seems suspicious, and he's the one pushing this Electra business.
Right after Shayne agrees to accept a pearl necklace as a retainer (it's an actual pearl necklace, let's keep it decent here), he is approached by her family's doctor to keep an eye on Phyllis, a neat twist that amuses the detective. ("Now, if the old lady would come around and hire me as her bodyguard, the set-up would be perfect.")
Things get complicated after that, and there seems to be three or four plots going on at the same time. The stepmother is promptly killed, with her throat sliced open, and Phyllis is right there in a bloodstained nightgown and holding a butcher knife (whoops!).Shayne hides her at his place, then she disappears and is not seen for the rest of the story until the very end. What's all this business about a Raphael with someone's else signature? Why does this shady gangster Ray Gordon hire Shayne to find out the minute someone named Henderson enters Miami? And what about the body buried on the beach in a box? (Shayne reflects the sea water when the tide is in must have a pickling effect in the corpse.) What is the chauffeur hiding, and what about that enigmatic cablegram Shayne quickly confiscates?
Just what the heck is going on here? Worry not, all will be revealed as Shayne puzzles things out. By the final chapter, he has deftly maneuvered everyone together to resolve everything to his satisfaction. He even manipulates some bad guys into shooting each other in a way that the Avenger would have grudgingly approved.
One thing about Mike Shayne, he has a terrific healing ability. (He must take DHEA.) Right in this first recorded case, he takes four bullets, one of which breaks his collarbone so that he handles most of the story in a cast. If this isn't enough, he is brutally kicked and beaten into unconsciousness, left for dead but quietly getting up again to keep going. (It's a good thing his evening of sleazy sex with a nurse* from the Brighton household takes place before the shooting, when he has only been kicked senseless by a thuglike chauffeur.)
But this is all part of the business for him, and he makes sure everyone who abuses him gets paid back in full. And he comes out at the end with $24,000 profit, which in today's money would be, oh I don't know, a whole heck of a lot more. Still, you have to wonder why he doesn't end up looking like Quasimodo on a bad day after a few cases like this.
One note for the chronicles, this book has one of the very rare hints about Shayne's past ("... he was a freckled Irish lad kneeling by his mother's side in a Catholic chapel..."), as Davis Dresser in forty years never gave his hero a backstory.
_____
*Shayne doesn't seem to enjoy this much, and I figured his mind was already on Phyllis. ("His face was morose as he went back to the table and poured himself another drink. Something new had come into his life - and gone out of it.")