The Corpse That Never Was (1963) by Brett Halliday

Davis Dresser was an American crime writer and creator of the well-known, Miami-based private eye, Mike Shayne, who enjoyed "a long, successful, multi-media career" covering nearly 80 novels, hundreds of short stories, movies, TV-and radio shows and comic books – all done under the name "Brett Halliday." There even was a crime digest, Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, which ran from 1956 to 1985 and each issue featured "a novella about the eponymous detective." Dresser largely retired from writing in the late 1950s and heavily relayed on ghostwriters like Robert Arthur, Richard Deming, Dennis Lynds and Bill Pronzini. 

I called Brett Halliday a hardboiled counterpart to Ellery Queen and not merely on account of the multimedia franchise, employing ghostwriters and a long-running mystery magazine. Mike Shayne is not your average, dime rack detective who drinks, shoots and wisecracks his way through a case. While he's no stranger to fistfights, Shayne seldom uses a gun and prefers to rely on his brain to crack a tough nut. Sometimes, "Shayne solved classical locked room mysteries" as in Murder and the Married Virgin (1944) and This Is It, Michael Shayne (1950). That's how The Corpse That Never Was (1963) appeared on my radar as it's essentially a who-and howdunit without any of the hardboiled trappings and the promise of a locked room puzzle. But before delving into the story, the authorship of the book needs to be acknowledged. 

The Corpse That Never Was is listed in several places as having been ghostwritten by an unidentified house author, but, while reading, it struck me it might have been the work of Dennis Lynds – whose work as "William Arden" has been discussed on this blog in the past. So decided to play genre archaeologist and digging around the internet brought an archived post from May 4, 2005, to the surface in which Lynds was asked if he wrote The Corpse That Never Was. Lynds had an interesting answer, "when you ask if I wrote some of Dave's novels, you must remember that except for the last one, what I wrote was a 30,000 or 20,000 word novelette for MSMM for which I was paid 11/2 cent a word, which Dave then bought from me for about $500 and rewrote it into a 40,000-odd word novel in his own style." So "with that context, yes, I wrote The Corpse That Never Was" and "you can find it in MSMM probably under a different title." Lynds played the Frederic Dannay to Dresser's Manfred B. Lee. Now that's out of the way, let's take a closer look at the story itself. 

The Corpse That Never Was begins very homely with Mike Shayne, "completely and utterly relaxed as he had ever been in his life," enjoying a home cooked meal prepared by his devoted secretary, Lucy Hamilton. But the peaceful evening is shattered when they hear "the dull, muffled sound of an explosion" coming from inside the apartment house almost directly above them. Shayne rushes up the stairs where he finds residents of the building crowded around a locked front door halfway down "knocking on the door and rattling the knob and talking excitedly." So, as a man of action, Shayne drove his right shoulder with hundred and ninety pounds behind it against the door until it buckled. What he found inside the apartment were two bodies. The body of a once beautiful, expensively dressed woman lay in the middle of the sitting room with an overturned cocktail glass lying next to her on the rug. A few feet away, the body of a man was slumped in a deep, upholstered chair with a twelve gauge shotgun on the floor beside the chair and "the terrific force of exploding gases from the shotgun blast had literally blown the man's head from his shoulders."

Shayne discovered two suicide notes, signed Robert Lambert, which explains he and Elsa had decided to commit suicide, because his wife's religion makes it impossible for them to be together in life. So he has mixed two deadly drinks. 

The second note explains that the suicide pact had gone horribly wrong. Elsa had "tossed off boldly and happily" the poisoned drink, but Robert's drink fell to the floor and had to watch as Elsa died. This corresponds with a second cocktail glass and wet stain lying near the kitchen door. The second note ends with him telling that he has a shotgun in the closet and is going to finish the job without bungling it. Shayne remarked the next day, he had never seen "a more positively cut-and-dried double suicide set-up" than the one he crashed into last night. Only one problem. Elsa is the only daughter and sole heir of old Eli Armbruster, "one of the wealthiest men on the peninsula," who "wielded more behind-the-scenes influence on Dade County politics than any other single individual." Eli Armbruster refuses to buy the suicide pact theory and pays Shayne a ten thousand dollar retainer to find the truth with an additional fifty thousand dollars for evidence that will convict his son-in-law, Paul Nathan, of his daughter's murder.

Firstly, The Corpse That Never Was is not a locked room mystery. Yes, the front door to the apartment was locked and chain-bolted on the inside, but the bedroom window onto the fire escape was standing wide open. So no idea why some have called it a locked room mystery unless Lynds' original novelette can be counted as one. Even without the double murder having a locked room angle, it presents more than enough twists, turns and tricky questions to keep Shayne busy. Such as the mysterious identity of Robert Lambert, because nobody has any idea who he really was or how he could have "come out of nowhere" to "carry on a passionate liaison with one of the wealthiest women in Dade County" – nary a trace of who really was or where he came from. Or why Elsa had engaged the services of a shady private eye, named Max Wentworth, which eventually leads to the discovery of a third body. All throughout the story, Shayne acts as a cross between a private investigator and an official policeman as he pretty much gets a run of the place. Shayne even uses his client's money to pay the police department's forensic team to do a little overtime by going over the crime scene a second time. So he's pretty much occupied throughout the story with interviewing suspects or witnesses, gathering information and going over Max Wentworth's reports without any of the usual action or fights you come to expect from a hardboiled P.I. novel. Not even the obligatory blow to the back of the head, which these private eyes seem to take as regularly as a stiff drink. They really take more bumps than a professional wrestler. That's what really gave me the idea Lynds might have had a hand in it.

Some of you probably thought it was the vaguely promised locked room mystery and Lynds contributed a number of locked room mysteries to the genre (e.g. "The Bizarre Case Expert," 1970), but it could have just as easily been Richard Deming or someone else. The Corpse That Never Was discarded the usual hardboiled ingredients to present a much more conventional and cerebral detective problem, which also did in one of The Three Investigator novels he wrote as William Arden. The Mystery of the Headless Horse (1973) muted a lot of the usual adventurous and exciting elements normally obligatory in these juvenile mysteries as the three heroes have to dig through old archives, maps and yellowed letters to solve a 130-year-old family secret. Lynds obviously wanted to educate his young readers on the importance of proper research, critical reading and not to take everything on face value, but it brought the book to mind while reading The Corpse That Never Was. So it was nice surprise to discover my shot in the dark about the authorship hit home when I found that archived post.

But how well does The Corpse That Never Was stack up as a plot-driven detective story? I think most readers can probably make an educated guess about the main thrust of the plot as (ROT13) gur obbx-gvgyr naq n urnqyrff ivpgvz count as the least subtle nods and hints towards the solution in the book. The proper nods, hints and some genuine clues only confirm what you probably already suspect, but the plot, on a whole, is not bad. Admittedly, there are a few clever touches and details to the solution (ROT13/SPOILER: yvxr gur fubgtha oynfg boyvgrengvat obgu gur ivpgvz'f vqragvgl naq qrfgeblvat rivqrapr ur unq orra xabpxrq hapbafpvbhf). Just a little too much on the obvious side to be truly noteworthy. But it was fun to see an iconic gumshoe tackling a case as a normal detective who doesn't use his head to absorb blows and punches.