Re: RARA-AVIS: Mike Shayne Month!

From: Juri Nummelin ( jurnum@utu.fi)
Date: 06 Dec 2000


On Tue, 5 Dec 2000, William Denton wrote:

> Mr. Reasoner on the list actually *was* Brett Halliday for a while.
> Perhaps you could tell us about how you came to write for the Mike Shayne
> Mystery magazine, and what it was like? Are there any other Brett
> Hallidays on the list? In late September, Mr. Reasoner said:
> | Lynds wrote nearly all of the Mike Shayne stories in the magazine from
> | 1963-70. I forget what his total was, but it was more than anyone else
> | who wrote magazine Shaynes. I wrote 38 of them between '78 and '82. A
> | lot of people wrote Shayne stories for the magazine.

I've read one Brett Halliday by Lynds AKA Michael Collins, "Too Friendly, Too Dead" from 1963, if I remember correctly. It was a very good one and you could see very easily who it was written by. It was like reading "Act of Fear", but without Dan Fortune sermoning all the time. This would implify that the editors at Dell (?) didn't pay attention how Shayne was depicted and what the plotlines were like.

Furthermore I think that Lynds managed to bring Shayne a bit closer to a private detective really doing his work. In the Hallidays I've read that were actually written by Halliday, Shayne just gets into the trouble and somehow manages, but in this Shayne really does the foot work and all that stuff. Therefore I'd like to regard it more highly than the real Hallidays.

Juri

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