She Woke to Darkness (1954) is the 25th novel in the Michael Shayne series by "Brett Halliday," a pseudonym of Davis Dresser, who celebrated this milestone by taking his hardboiled private eye series into meta-fictional territory – making himself the central character. The book opens with an "Author's Foreword" explaining the previous twenty-four novels were secondhand, fictionalized accounts of Shayne's real-life cases, but this case is a firsthand account ("this story happened to me, Brett Halliday").
Elsie has written a half finished manuscript, titled She Woke to Darkness, partially based on a real, unsolved incident that happened to her and had no problem writing down the first fifty pages on paper ("...because I was dealing with real facts"), but now she's stuck on the middle part – asks Halliday to read it and advise her what to do with it. Halliday reads the first chapter of the manuscript and discovers the story concerns a woman, named Aline Ferris, who wakes up from one of her drunk, blackout stupors in a hotel room with two dollars stuffed down her underwear and a dead man lying on the bathroom floor. She has no memories of what happened at the party she attended. After reading the first chapter, Halliday decides to give Elsie a phone call, but a man picks up the phone and discreetly hangs up without saying anything. But it sounded like a policeman's voice.
After a phone call to a friend, Halliday is told Elsie was found strangled after the police received an anonymous tip about a dead woman in the apartment. That's a problem for Halliday. Scores of witnesses had seen them leave the banquet together, his fingerprints were all over her apartment and her lipstick on him. So call Shayne back in Miami and asks him to get on the next plane to New York. By the way, the New York friend Halliday called to learn what had happened at Elsie's apartment is the real-life, true crime writer, Edward D. Radin, who's constantly in the background helping and covering for Halliday ("if they ever learn the truth, I'll be sunk in New York..."). Radin and Shayne tell Halliday to sit tight and go over the manuscript again while waiting for the law to catch up with him.
There's an interesting possibility arising from reading the manuscript as one of the characters clearly used Aline Ferris to arrange an alibi. Just one problem. Elsie told Halliday she had changed all the names and physical descriptions of the people involved. So while the manuscript clearly points in the direction of the killer, the trick is matching the fictionalized person to its real-life counterpart. Casting the tough, hardboiled private eye novel as a meta-fictional biblio mystery is a stroke of absolute genius!
Michael Shayne arrives in New York after the halfway mark and acts like he knows he has only half the normally allotted time to close the case. Not at all bothered by the fact that a private detective from Miami has no official standing in New York. Shayne simply shoves a big fist under the nose of every unwilling witness or potential suspect and tells them to “start talking.” So not the hardboiled analog of Ellery Queen I encountered in previous novels, but still tremendously fun as Halliday (the writer, not the character) was not above poking fun at himself. For example, Shayne gets told by one suspect to "check up on an out-of-town writer named Brett Halliday" who "writes those lousy books about a dumb redheaded private eye in Miami." Shayne races through the second-half to find the real killer, tear down alibi and clear his friend's name from suspicion of murder.
I should warn some of the people who follow this blog not to expect a multi-layered, grand-style whodunit or a tricky alibi-breaker. She Woke to Darkness is not that kind of novel. From what I understand, She Woke to Darkness represents a shift in the series as Halliday started to put more emphasis on "the sexiness and violence in dialog among a lower class of despicable characters." You definitely wouldn't pick this up to meet a bunch of pleasant characters who happened to get themselves involved in a double murder case. She Woke to Darkness is one of those transitional novels from the 1950s the previous era of the genre was starting to disappear in the rear view mirror. But how She Woke in Darkness was framed and played out carried everything to something more than an early, 1950s sleazy crime novel. Yes, the self-aware, tongue-in-cheek humor and cameos also helped making it something more than thin-ish, grimy plot underneath. She Woke in Darkness is together with Murder and the Married Virgin (1944) my favorite Shayne novel to date.
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