Armed... Dangerous...

Mike Shayne #54

by Brett Halliday

Mike Shayne hands a cool line to a hot blonde and finds that little white lies can be lethal.

158 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1966

About the author

AKA David Dresser
Excerpt from Wikipedia:

Brett Halliday (July 31, 1904 - February 4, 1977), primary pen name of Davis Dresser, was an American mystery writer, best known for the long-lived series of Mike Shayne novels he wrote, and later commissioned others to write. Dresser wrote non-series mysteries, westerns and romances under the names

Asa Baker, Matthew Blood, Kathryn Culver, Don Davis, Hal Debrett, Anthony Scott, Peter Field, and Anderson Wayne.

Reviews

[Chris Stephens · Rating 3 out of 5]

Boobs, booze and violence.
Pretty much sums up every Shayne story,
and coarse a cookie cutter mystery/thriller.

[Nic · Rating 5 out of 5]

After months of searching for any one of the seventy or so books in the Detective Mike Shayne series, I finally found one. After reading it, I can gladly say that I would have paid much more than $2 for it.

I first heard of the Mike Shayne books after watching the movie "Kiss, Kiss, Bang, Bang" which was loosely based on Halliday's "Bodies Are Where You Find Them." As you can imagine, I was not very happy that every book in the series is long out of print. Now that I have read one, I will surely be seeking out the entire series.

It's your basic hard-boiled detective stuff, but for some reason I liked it much more than your average pulp. I'm not sure what it was, but I do know this:

On the cover the name MIKE SHAYNE is bigger than even the title, and after reading the first 3 and a half chapters without a single mention of the the great and famous detective, I was wondering if I had somehow gotten the wrong book in the right cover. Then in the last line of chapter 4 I was smacked with, "Power? This is Michael Shayne. I'm in."

So was I, my friends ... So was I.