Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, Vol. 5, No. 3, August 1959

Mike Shayne as I Know Him by Brett Halliday

In a very real sense Mike Shayne has become a national institution. Not only is he the favorite private eye of twenty million mystery story readers (He has appeared in 34 books, on radio and TV and in many new stories in MSMM) he is known and admired by men and women everywhere, even by those who neglect books because the demands of daily living are so exacting... or exciting. And here’s the amazing story of how it all began, told by Brett Halliday himself.

Many of my readers are familiar with the dramatic first meeting between myself and the man who was later to become the central figure in a series of mystery novels featuring a red-headed, fighting Irishman whom I call Michael Shayne. This first meeting occurred on the Tampico waterfront more than a quarter of a century ago. I was a youngster then, working as deck-hand on a Pan American oil tanker, and on a stopover in Tampico a bunch of us spent the evening ashore in a tough waterfront saloon.

I noticed him before the fight started, and was intrigued by him even then. A big, rangy redhead with deep lines already forming on his face. He sat at a table in the rear, surrounded by lights and music and girls. There was a bottle of tequila on the table in front of him, and two glasses. One of the glasses held ice water and he was drinking straight Mexican liquor from the other.

I don’t remember how the fight started, but it turned into a beautiful brawl with half a dozen unarmed American sailors slugging it out on uneven terms with twice as many natives who seemed to be carrying knives or guns.

We were doing all right, as I remember, making what you might call a strategic retreat and almost out the door, when I got a crack on the head that sent me under a table.

I remember lying there and wondering dazedly, “What next, little man?” when I heard the crash of a rear table overturning and peered out to see the redhead sailing into the fracas.

He was a fighting man and you could see he loved it. Three or four Mexicans went down in front of his fists before he reached me, dragged me from under the table and tossed me out the door bodily.

That was all of that. I got back to the ship somehow; we sailed the next morning and I didn’t know who the man was or what he was doing in that saloon or why he came to the rescue of a fool kid he’d never seen before.

I still don’t know any of those things, though I believe I now know him better than any other man alive.

It was four years before I ran into that red-headed Irishman again. A coincidence? Sure. This story is full of crazy coincidences... the sort that happen in real life but that no writer would dare put between the pages of a story.

It was in New Orleans and I was four years older and maybe a little wiser. I was broke and jobless, and I wandered into a Rampart Street bar on a foggy night. There he was, sitting alone at a rear table with a bottle in front of him and two water glasses. One of them was half full of ice water, and he was sipping cognac from the other.

He didn’t recognize me, of course, but he did remember the fight in Tampico, and he grinned and gave me a drink of cognac when I thanked him for that time. He didn’t talk much, but he did say he was working as a private detective. He was friendly and we were getting along fine until a girl walked in and stood at the bar, looking the place over.

I saw his big frame stiffen and the lines in his cheeks deepen into trenches as she walked toward us. His left thumb and forefinger went up to rub the lobe of his ear as she stopped beside our table and leaned forward and said, “Hello, Mike,” in a throaty voice.

That was all. He didn’t reply, and in a moment she turned away and went swiftly out the door. Two men had followed her inside, and they began to move slowly toward us... casually but purposefully.

That’s when he leaned forward and told me swiftly to get out of town fast and forget I’d seen him.

He stood up before I could ask any questions, strolled forward and the two men closed in on each side of him. They went out in a group and disappeared in the swirling fog of Rampart Street.

That was our second meeting. I didn’t know who the girl and the two men were, or why Mike walked out with them so quietly.

I still don’t know, though I have a feeling that things happened then that had some bearing on the feud between him and Captain Denton of the New Orleans police... a feud which flared up anew during a case described in the book I titled MICHAEL SHAYNE’S LONG CHANCE.

It was years later when the next act occurred. I had begun writing books (not mystery novels) and was living in Denver, Colorado. I had never been able to put the memory of the redhead out of my mind, and there was a network radio program originating in New York which offered people a chance to broadcast an appeal for information concerning relatives or friends with whom they had lost contact.

Planning a business trip to New York to see my publishers, I wrote the manager of the program and asked to be allowed to tell my story over the air.

I did so, with an astonishing and completely unforeseen result. A few days after the broadcast I was informed from Denver that a man named Connor Michael Shawn, ex-actor, theatrical manager and private detective, had tuned in my broadcast on his deathbed and declared to his wife that he believed himself to be the man I was describing over the air.

Connor Michael Shawn died the next day, and when I returned to Denver a few days later I immediately visited his wife and discussed the situation with her. Many of the facts of his life as she knew them checked with the dates and places of my story. The photographs she showed me were not conclusive. I felt that Shawn might have been my “Mike”... but I couldn’t be positive.

I wasn’t positive until more than a year later when I was holed up in a one-room log cabin at Desolation Bend, on the Gunnison River in Colorado, trying desperately to write three novels in thirty days (which I did, incidentally).

Mike turned up one day in a cabin near mine on the river. That was when I learned his real name (which isn’t Shayne). He gave no explanation for his presence except that he was on vacation from a lucrative private detective practice in Miami, Florida.

This meeting, I now believe, was not so much of a coincidence as it appeared at the time. From small things he has let slip since then, I believe he had heard about the radio broadcast, and being in the neighborhood, had taken the trouble to look me up out of curiosity.

At any rate, that was the beginning of an intimate friendship that has now endured for more than a decade and has furnished material for thirty-four books and all the new stories that have appeared in MIKE SHAYNE MYSTERY MAGAZINE based on his cases.

We drank cognac together in his cabin and mine during the long lazy evenings that followed my stint at the typewriter, and talked about his work as a detective and my unrealized dream of writing mystery stories. There was no real compact reached between us at that time, but when he left to go back to Miami I had an invitation to visit him there whenever I wished.

I followed him south a couple of months later, and he seemed pleased when I turned up in his modest apartment on the north bank of the Miami River, overlooking Biscayne Bay.

That night over a bottle of cognac, he told me he had fallen in love for the first time in his life... with Phyllis Brighton whom he had just cleared of a charge of matricide.

Mike was a lonely and brooding man that night. He had sent Phyllis away, gently but firmly, a few days earlier, and he honestly did not hope ever to see her again. She was too young, he told me over and over again. Too young and too sweet and trusting to waste herself on a man like him.

I didn’t argue with Mike that night. Nor point out any of the obvious things. I did draw him into a discussion of the case just ended, and before the sun rose over Biscayne Bay he had agreed to turn his notes on the Brighton affair over to me for a novel which I called dividend on death.

Before this book was published, he had met Phyllis Brighton again (as I have related in THE PRIVATE PRACTICE OF MICHAEL SHAYNE) and when that case was ended Mike had capitulated.

I was best man at their wedding, and saw them installed in the larger corner apartment above Mike’s old bachelor quarters which he kept and fitted up sketchily as an office.

The next few years, I am positive, were the happiest Mike has ever known. Phyllis worried him sometimes by insisting as acting as his secretary and getting herself mixed up in some of his cases, but there was perfect companionship and understanding between them, culminating in a long-delayed honeymoon trip to Colorado — where Mike managed to get himself mixed up with murder in the old ghost town of Central City. He gave me the details of this case, and I used them in MURDER WEARS A MUMMER’S MASK.

Back in Miami, there was one more adventure together before that black night when I sat with Mike in the hospital waiting room, sweating it out with him while the baby which Phyllis so ardently desired was being born.

I went back to his apartment with him at dawn, and sat across the room from the big redhead in a deep chair while he wept unashamedly. Both Phyllis and the baby were gone, and the doctors didn’t know why.

He swore at that time he would never touch another case that dealt with death, and I think he might have kept that resolution had he not received a telephone call in the night that sent him out on the trail of a vicious gang of black marketeers. I wrote about that one in BLOOD ON THE BLACK MARKET.

I noted a subtle change in Mike’s inner character after Phyllis’ death. In some ways he became more ruthless and driving and demanding of himself, but the hard outer shell of assumed cynicism was cracked and for the first time in his life he wasn’t afraid to let traces of gentleness and pity shine through.

I was glad when he closed his office and went to New Orleans (MICHAEL SHAYNE’S LONG CHANCE), and gladder still after that case was ended and he had met Lucy Hamilton and acquired a new secretary.

People ask me now if Mike and Lucy are likely to be married. I have to answer honestly that I simply do not know. I am sure they understand and respect each other, and that Mike loves her as much as his memories of Phyllis will allow him to love any woman. They are happy together in the companionship and intimacy of dangerous work and that appears to be enough for them at the moment. Moreover, they are back at Mike’s old hunting grounds in Miami now, and that town is beginning to be known as much for Mike as for its famous climate.

About the man himself... I have written most of what I know in my accounts of his cases. I think his most important attribute is absolute personal honesty. He not only does not lie to anyone else; what is more important, he does not lie to himself.

I think the characteristic most important in his spectacular success as a private detective is his ability to drive straight forward to the heart of the matter without deviating one iota for obstacles or confusing side issues. He has an absolutely logical mind which refuses to be sidetracked.

Shayne is just an average guy, with average education, intelligence and common-sense. He has no special knowledge which puts him ahead of the reader in solving a case. His method of solving a murder is to move right into the case on a line of absolute logic (disregarding the personal risk involved). In other words, he is never led aside by plot twists which require him to avoid questioning a suspect in the middle of the story just because that suspect knows the answers and thus would end the story. In doing this, Mike naturally makes mistakes. But if you’ll study the Shayne stories carefully, I think you’ll find he always does the thing that seems right at the time. It may well turn out to have been the wrong thing in the end. But it is the logical thing from the facts in his possession at the time he acts.

He acts on impulse sometimes, or on hunches; but always the impelling force is definite logic. While other detectives are wandering aimlessly about in a maze of conjecture and doubt, Mike selects a certain path and drives forward inexorably in one direction until he is proved right... or wrong. When he makes a mistake, he wastes no time in idle repining, but adjusts his sights and turns just as inexorably in another direction.

At various times readers have complained to me that in my stories about him Mike seems to seek danger needlessly; that he seems to take an almost masochistic pleasure in thrusting himself into a situation which inevitably results in physical pain to himself.

To those readers I can only say that I fear they have not followed the published accounts of his cases carefully. I have never heard Mike say, “Had I but known.” Invariably, I have seen him calculate the risk involved carefully, weighing the results that may be attained by a certain course of action against the probable lack of results if he chooses to move cautiously. Once convinced that a risk is worth taking, he pushes forward and accepts the consequences as a part of his job.

It is this driving urgency and lack of personal concern more than any other thing, I think, that serves to wind up most of Mike’s most difficult cases so swiftly. In time, few of his cases have consumed more than one or two days. Readers have complained that he doesn’t seem to eat or sleep on a case. He does, of course, but only if there is nothing more important to do at the time. He drinks more cognac than any other man I have ever known, but I have never seen Mike drunk. Actually, while relaxing between cases he is a very moderate drinker.

This sums up Michael Shayne as I know him. The hardest work I do in writing my accounts of his cases is attempting to make my readers see Mike as he is, to feel what Mike feels, to know the man himself as I know him. Insofar as I succeed in this, my stories are successful. Certainly no writer ever had a better subject with whom to work.