Brett Halliday: Mike Shayne's Torrid Twelve

The editor acknowledges with thanks the permission of the authors or their agents to reprint the stories in this collection: “Sunday’s Slaughter” by Jonathan Craig; “A Hood Is Born” by Richard Deming; “The Patsy” by Frank Kane; and “The Rites of Death” by Hal Ellson are reprinted by permission of the authors and the authors’ agent, Scott Meredith Literary Agency, Inc. “Water's Edge” by Robert Bloch and “The Toy-Head Man” by Franklin Gregory are used by permission of the authors and the authors’ agent, Harry Altshuler.

The twelve stories in this volume have been carefully chosen by Leo Margulies, publisher and editor of the Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, as the best that appeared between its covers during the first four years of its publishing life… prior to 1960.

I agree wholeheartedly with Leo’s selections, and thus I will go farther out on a limb and say that I consider them to be as fine as any published in an American magazine during that four-year period.

There are stories here to satisfy every reading taste. If you like them tough, there’s “Sunday’s Slaughter” by Jonathan Craig and “The Patsy” by Frank Kane. If you’re one of those readers who normally turns up his nose at “women writers,” I warn you not to disregard “The Musical Doll” by Helen Kasson or “The Fifth One” by D. E. Forbes.

“Three Wives Too Many” by Kenneth Fearing is a superb example of this noted writer’s fine craftsmanship, and “Death Dives Deep” I can modestly recommend as one of Mike Shayne’s most interesting personal adventures… one of which appears in every issue of the monthly magazine.

In asking me to write this introduction to his collection, Leo Margulies insisted that I stick my neck all the way out and name my personal favorite.

Fortunately, this is not difficult for me. My vote goes unreservedly to “A Hood Is Born” by Richard Deming. This is fine writing in anybody’s league. Richard Deming is a versatile and prolific writer whose name appears frequently in the top magazines, and on the covers of books. This story is quietly written and beautifully put together. It carries a terrific impact that will haunt your memory long after you put it aside. It is written with understanding and compassion around a theme that is as timely as the headline in today’s newspaper.

So, Leo Margulies and I sincerely hope you’ll enjoy reading every story in this collection from the pages of the Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, and that it will serve to introduce those of you who are not already fans to the high caliber of fiction available to you each month in the magazine.

Her name was Sandra — Sandra Ames. She was young, and she was beautiful. Black hair dropped to her shoulders, and unplucked black eyebrows arched above dark eyes that stared at Michael Shayne with calm speculation.

The redhead approved of unplucked eyebrows. He liked the rest of Sandra Ames too. Only her mouth disturbed him. It was an attractive mouth, not too heavily lipsticked. But it was also a hungry mouth, and he wondered what the hunger was that twisted it so subtly as she spoke. She was young, she was beautiful, her clothes showed she had money and knew how to use it to enhance her loveliness. But she wanted something, wanted it fiercely, desperately.

“Then you’ve no particular prejudice against accepting such a job?” Sandra Ames leaned forward a little in the chair beside Shayne’s desk. “A job where you have two employers, and must keep an eye on both, to see that one doesn’t try to double-cross the other?”

The redhead leaned back, crossed his legs, and grinned at her. “No prejudice at all,” he said. “Umpires do it every day of the baseball season.”

“Yes, that’s it.” She nodded. “You’d be a sort of umpire. But you’d have to be prepared to — well, perhaps to take action if one of the two parties did try to cheat the other.”

“Okay, if the possibility is recognized and made absolutely clear from the beginning,” Michael Shayne told her. “Would you be one of my employers?”

Sandra said without hesitation, “Yes, I am. You’ll hear from the other in about — let’s see, it’s five now. In about an hour.”

The redhead put his hands behind his head. “Would the other party be named Captain Tod Tolliver by any chance?” he asked.

Surprise flared in Sandra Ames’s eyes for an instant. “I’d rather not say yes or no,” she answered. But it was obvious that she had recognized the name. “You’ll still be here at six — maybe a little after?”

“I’ll be here,” he assured her. He stood up as she rose, and held the door for her. It was just as well, he thought, that Lucy Hamilton was taking a week’s vacation, visiting a friend in New Orleans. Lucy would have misinterpreted the hunger that unconsciously expressed itself in the set of Sandra Ames’s lips. He himself had no romantic illusions on that score.

She gave him a smile, not at all impersonal and for the barest instant he told himself she just possibly might be a little hungry that way too.

“I feel sure I’ll be seeing you again soon, Mr. Shayne,” she said. “After the other person has had a chance to talk to you. Until then, good-by.”

When she had gone, the redheaded detective went slowly back to his desk. He opened a drawer and took out a bottle of Coronet and a glass. He filled the glass to the brim. Then, after putting away the bottle, he took out of the same drawer a small cardboard box which had come in the afternoon mail, unregistered.

From the cardboard box he took a Spanish gold piece, somewhat worn and tarnished, but still clearly showing the mint date, 1670. It had a satisfying weight in his hand and it was obviously genuine. With it there was a crudely penciled note.

Dear Mr. Shayne: Please be in yr office abt 6 pm I may need yr help. There’s more where this came from.

Capt. Tod Tolliver.

Holding the Spanish gold piece, Shayne felt his pulse beat slightly faster. He knew that beneath the waters of Florida were many fortunes in pirate gold, but most of that submerged treasure was so deeply buried in sand and coral at unmarked spots along the coast that no one would ever find it. Simple deduction suggested that Captain Tod Tolliver — whoever he was — and Sandra Ames were engaged in a treasure hunt.

But which of them was afraid of being double-crossed by the other?

An hour later, and ten miles further up the Miami waterfront, two men waited in a dingy room above a waterfront restaurant. The smell of frying shrimps, strong and greasy, filled the room with an invisible fog.

“By grab, I’m gettin’ fed up with this waiting,” the tall, blond man said, and yawned, lying back on an old Army cot.

The short, plump man with black hair shuddered. “After three days of smelling nothing but fried shrimps, I can’t stand to look at the ocean,” he said. “Stand by your rig. The girl is just leaving. The old coot is going in his shack. He may make a call.”

“Three days he ain’t made no call,” the other said. “Why should he make a call now?”

“Who knows, Whitey?” The short man lifted binoculars to his eyes. Sitting in an old rocker just back from the window, he was invisible but could clearly see the old shack on a point of sand across the dirty water of the little cove.

In the cove itself half a dozen boats were tied up at rotting wharves, and a lone fisherman in a rowboat with an outboard was put-putting in toward the wharf of the restaurant underneath them. This was a dingy backwash of the Miami waterfront life, where dimes were as important as dollars were a couple of miles away.