Brett Halliday

Brett Halliday was the working name of Davis Dresser (1904 to 1977), and after 1958 it no longer belonged to him alone. Dresser grew up in west Texas, lost most of the sight in his left eye at thirteen when a horse threw him into a wire fence, and wore a patch afterwards. He ran away at fourteen to enlist in the cavalry, surveyed land back in Texas, and turned to writing in 1927. Twenty-two publishers rejected the first Michael Shayne novel, Dividend on Death, before it reached print in 1939. The red-haired Miami investigator went on to carry some seventy-seven books, twelve films, a radio serial, a television series in 1960, and Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, which began in 1956 and lasted close to thirty years. Death Has Three Lives (1955) is Dresser's own work. Count Backwards to Zero (1971) is not: by then the Halliday signature was a house name, and Robert Terrall wrote most of the later entries, with Ryerson Johnson and Dennis Lynds also contributing. Dresser helped found the Mystery Writers of America and ran a literary agency with his second wife, the novelist Helen McCloy.