Brett Halliday: Bodies Are Where You Find Them

I noted a subtle change in Mike’s inner character after Phyllis’s 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 book just because that suspect knows the answers and thus would end the book. In doing this, Mike naturally makes mistakes. But if you’ll study the books 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 books 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 books are successful. Certainly no writer ever had a better subject with whom to work.