Re: RARA-AVIS: Mike Shayne (was Last Week's Reading)

James & Livia Reasoner (liviajames@itexas.net)
Wed, 15 Oct 1997 22:11:18 -0500 Hello, Laurent. Thanks for your interest in Mike Shayne. I tried to
e-mail you directly with some info, but my server kept returning it for
some reason. So I'll take this opportunity to talk about Mike Shayne (and
for those of you who know me, I'll try not to ramble too much).

Shayne was created by Davis Dresser and first appeared in the 1939 novel
_Dividend on Death_, published under the pseudonym Brett Halliday. Dresser
wrote fifty Shayne novels (with a little help from ghostwriters such as
Ryerson Johnson), all published first in hardback by Henry Holt, Dodd Mead,
and finally Torquil Books, Dresser's own imprint which was distributed by
Dodd Mead. Twenty-seven more Shayne novels were written by Robert Terrall
and published as paperback originals by Dell, still under the pseudonym
Brett Halliday.

Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine was started in 1956 by Leo Margulies, a
veteran editor from the pulp era. Margulies licensed the character of Mike
Shayne but hired other writers to produce the Shayne stories in the
magazine. The first editor of the magazine was Sam Merwin Jr., who also
wrote many of the Shayne stories. Others who contributed Shayne stories as
Brett Halliday include Dennis Lynds (the most prolific, with approximately
80 stories), Michael Avallone, Richard Deming, Robert Turner, Robert
Arthur, Frank Belknap Long, Bill Pronzini and Jeff Wallman, Edward Y.
Breese, Peter Germano, Hal Blythe and Charlie Sweet, and yours truly, who
did either 37 or 38 of them (I never can remember which). No doubt other
writers did some here and there, too. The final issue of the magazine was
August '85. It ran almost thirty years and there were over 300 Mike Shayne
stories published in it, ranging from 7500 word short stories to 20,000
word novellas (the most common length). In addition, the magazine
published many, many short stories by hard-boiled authors, especially in
the Sixties: Dennis Lynds, as Michael Collins, with the Slot-Machine Kelly
stories, the forerunners of the Dan Fortune novels; Richard S. Prather with
Shell Scott stories; Frank Kane with Johnny Liddell stories; Henry Kane
with Peter Chambers stories, etc. Today these issues are difficult to find
but worth looking for. MSMM was a good magazine, probably not the equal of
Manhunt at its height, but it hung in there for a lot longer.

Best,
James Reasoner

----------
> From: Laurent Lehmann <llehmann@club-internet.fr>
> To: rara-avis@icomm.ca
> Subject: Re: RARA-AVIS: Mike Shayne (was Last Week's Reading)
> Date: Saturday, October 11, 1997 4:54 PM
>
> On 1 Oct 97 at 22:15, James & Livia Reasoner wrote:
>
> > One point from the first half of the book that I'd argue with: in his
> > introduction to "Human Interest Stuff", Bill Pronzini quotes Art Scott
as
> > saying, "Mike Shayne is the Generic Private Eye." Well, Shayne may
have
> > ended up that way, but he certainly didn't start out like that.
>
> I've only read a half-dozen Mike Shaynes, and that was long ago, in an
> abbreviated French version, but I'd like to know more about Mike Shayne
> and Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine : How long did the magazine run, who
were
> the main contributors, who wrote the Mike Shayne stories,...
>
> Laurent
> ____
> "When you're slapped, you'll take and like it"
> Humphrey Bogart in The Maltese Falcon,
> from Hardboiled by P. Thompson & S. Usukawa.
> #
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