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Brett Halliday (1904-1977) - Preudonym for Davis Dresser, also wrote as Asa Baker, Mathew Blood, Kathryn Culver, Don Davis, Hal Debrett, Elliot Storm, Anthony Scott, Anderson Wayne - Brett Halliday is also a pseudonym of Bill Pronzini, who writes as Robert Hart Davis, Jack Foxx, William Jeffrey, Alex Saxon, John Barry Williams. | |
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Prolific American writer, who published from 1939 to 1976 more than 60 mystery novels that featured the private detective Michael Shayne. Dresser wrote under several pseudonyms but his fame rests on these books written under the name Brett Halliday. His protagonist is a red-headed, wisecracking pulp hero, who follows his own code of right and wrong. The novels have been translated into several languages (among others into Finnish), made into motion pictures, television series, and radio plays. Brett Halliday was born as Davis Dresser in Chicago, but he grew up in West Texas. He lost an eye to barbed wire as a boy, and was required to wear an eyepatch for the rest of his life. According to some biographical sources, he joined the United States Army Cavalry at the age of 14 and rode with Pershing chasing Pancho Villa. (Note: About at the same time, during the Russian Civil War, the writer Isaak Babel joined Semyon Budenny's cavalry.) After army service, Dresser returned to Texas to finish the high school. He graduated from Tri-State College in Civil Engineering. For a time he worked as a badly paid engineer and as a surveyor, and then started as writer in 1927, two years before the Great Depression. Dresser wrote first for pulp magazines and published some love stories. As 'Anthony Scott' he published in 1934 Mardi Grass Madness and Test of Virtue, and under the pseudonym 'Elliot Storm', he wrote Two Femmes in Fairyland, which was published in 1935, Hot Date (Shame Girl), Two Tickets West and Strange Bedmates. It took four years and twenty-two rejections before Dresser found a publisher for Dividend on Death (1939), the first Michael Shayne novel. It appeared under the pseudonym Asa Baker. In the novel Halliday himself becomes the chief suspect in the murder of a young woman. He summons his friend Mike Shayne to New York. Shayne finds the real killer, and repays his debt to his chronicler. From this book Halliday's stories began to gain fame. The next book, Private Practice of Michale Shayne (1940), was a commercial success. Michael Shayne is a tall Irishman. His background is vague, but before starting his own business he was an employee of a large detective agency in New York. Since moving to Miami, he established a reputation as the city's ace private eye. (Halliday himself did not live in Florida, but in California, and the local color was not so vivid.) Shayne drinks Martell, which is quality cognac, with a glass of cold water, but he is far from such heavy-drinkers as William Crane, or Dashiell Hammett's Nick Charles. In The Uncomplaining Corpse (1940) he marries a young woman named Phyllis Brighton, who dies later in the series. Phyllis had earlier thought that she has "an Electra complex" - she is a lesbian. A new woman, Lucy Hamilton, takes place in the private detective's office in Michael Shayne's Long Change (1944). However, Shayne do not marry her. Other characters are the crime reporter Timothy Rourke, Will Gentry, chief of police of Miami, and a bad cop, Peter Painter, chief of detectives across the bay in Miami Beach. According to the author himself, Shayne's model was a real-life character, a tall redheaded American, whom he met in his youth in Tampico, at a bar. A fight broke out and the American dragged Halliday away from the fray. Four years later Halliday bumped into the same man at a bar in New Orleans. He then sought further information about the man, learning that he was a private detective. "He had a tall angular body that concealed a lot of solid weight, and his freckled cheeks were thin to gauntness. His rumpled hair was violent red, giving him a little-boy look curiously in contrast with the harshness of his features. When he smiled, the harshness went out his face and he didn't look at all a hard-boiled private detective who had come on the top the tough way." (from Dividend on Death) In the timeless world of Halliday's fiction Shayne survived well into the 1980s. The basic formula employed in 1939 remained intact, so that it was not difficult for other writers to continue the adventures. Sometimes Shayne solved classical "locked room" mysteries, as in This Is It, Michael Shayne (1950), where a scandal reporter is found dead in her office. In Murder and the Married Virgin (1944) a Katrin Moe, a Norwegian woman dies of gas in her room. She has worked as a housemaid for the rich Lomax family, but his fiancé doesn't believe that she committed suicide. Also a precious necklace has disappeared. The story is set in New Orleans, where Shayne has moved his office. Killers from the Keys (1961), ghost-written by Wallace Ryerson Johnson, follow Halliday's typical story lines, in which beautiful women are often treacherous, even when they ask Shayne's help. Only his secretary, Lucy Hamilton, is faithful to him. During his investigations Shayne also starts to suspect that he has become too soft in the tropical Miami. However, he doesn't give up his basic principles - he trusts in his two fists and doesn't carry a gun. The Shayne series eventually numbered some seventy volumes, and the hero was seen between 1940 and 1947 in twelve films. On radio, Shayne appeared in a CBS series in 1949, with Jeff Chandler as the private eye. In the film Time to Kill, based on Raymond Chandler's novel The High Window, the crime solver was not Philip Marlowe but detective Mike Shayne. Fox paid Chandler $3,500 for screen rights, adapting it for Lloyd Nolan as Shayne. In the story Shayne's services were needed in a case that involved counterfeiters of rare coins. Lloyd Nolan was one the most versatile actors in Hollywood, and his first Shayne film in 1940, based on Dividend on Death, had a more elaborate loking production than many B films. The script was written by Stanley Rauhn and Nabbing O'Connor. Nolan starred in seven films in 1941-42. Except this first, Michael Shayne, Private Detective, 20th-Fox did not use no further Halliday novels as sources for films. Several of the movies were adapted from novels by other authors about other detectives. Sleepers West (1941), remade of Sleepers East (1934), was taken from a Frederick Nebel novel. Blue, White and Perfect (1941), about diamond smuggling, was developed from a novel by Borden Chase. The screenplay was written by Samuel G. Engel. Clayton Rawson's novel about his hero, the Great Merlini, gave the plot to The Man Who Wouldn't Die (1942). In Time to Kill (1942), directed by Herbert I. Leeds, Shayne met counterfeiters of rare coins. It was remade as The Brasher Doubloon in 1947, starring George Montgomery. PCR made five features, starring Hugh Beaumont. Four of them were directed by Samuel Newfeld; William Beaudine directed one. A TV series was made in 1960, starring Richard Denning. Arnaud d’Usseau, who was placed on the blacklist in the 1950s, wrote the screenplay for Just Off Broadway (1942). From 1946 to 1961 Dresser was married to the mystery writer Helen McCloy. They were also partners in a literary agency that bore their names, as well as in Toquil Publishing Company, which from 1953 to 1964 published the adventures of Michael Shayne. Dresser retired virtually from writing in the late 1950s, and used ghostwriters, among others Robert Terrall, Wallace Ryerson Johnson, Dennis Lynds. James Reasoner continued the work after Dresser's death. Bill Pronzini also ghost-wrote some stories about Mike Shayne. Dresser's collaboratuion with Kathleen Rollins in Before I Wake (1949) and A Lonely Way to Die (1950) led eventually to their marriage; she was his second wife. The books were published under the pseudonym 'Hal Debrett'. Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine started to appear in 1956, until its cancellation in 1990. Dresser was a founding member of the Mystery Writers of America, and in 1953 he was given an Edgar Award for his criticism. Although Shayne's adventures were mostly set in Florida, Dresser's longtime home was in Southern California. He died on February 4, 1977. For further reading: Bodies Are Where You Find Them by Brett Halliday (1959); Encyclopedia of Mystery and Detection, ed. by Otto Penzler and Chris Steinbrunner (1976); Twentieth-Century Crime and Mystery Writers, ed. by John M. Reilly (1985); The American Private Eye by David Geherin (1985); Encyclopdia Mysteriosa by William L. DeAndrea (1994) Selected works:
Suomennettuja Mike Shayne -pokkareita:
Michael Shayne films:
Other films:
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