Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, Vol. 8, No. 3, February 1961

Mike Shayne’s Finest Hour

When we first met Mike Shayne we were younger than we are now by quite a few years — we refuse to tell you how many — and we didn’t know exactly how far he would go, and whether his clients would keep his Miami office humming with the kind of activity a private-eye thrives on. All writers — or most of them, anyway — feel that way when they meet the big, take-over character in all of their books for the first time and are a little awed when he starts talking. But we went right ahead and placed our bets on Mike and... well, quite frankly, we seem to have picked a winner.

Not only has the redhead’s Miami office drawn clients from all walks of life in just the way we’d hoped for... his popularity has spread to twenty-five million readers in all book editions. And now, in an hour-long show on NBC Television, starring Richard Denning as the one perfect Mike Shayne, the redhead has soared to a new peak of nation-wide popularity.

We feel both gratified and proud... and very humble. For we feel somehow that it is Mike himself who deserves most of the credit and that our role has been more or less that of a Boswell.

In this issue of MSMM, as so often in the past, the redhead keeps us, Boswell-wise, very busy, THE TOASTED CORPSE takes him out of Miami to nearby Nausau, where he tangles, with his usual forthright independence, with the stubborn blind spots of British justice. And there’s writing of an unusual calibre in the exceptionally brilliant suspense novelet by Paul Daniels, who gave us the memorable the ivory tower. It’s called the dark road home, and we’ve seldom read a more imaginative crime story.

Brett Halliday