![]() It has the background of official corruption that Chandler’s novels had, and it has I suppose that in some ways this book will strike some readers as being Philip Marlowe Lite. The plot is complex but it all comes together quite satisfactorily. Mike Shayne is a slightly more cynical character than Philip Marlowe but he still manages to serve the cause of justice, although Shayne likes to combine this with a healthy personal profit as well. It soon becomes apparent that the disappearance is part of a wider conspiracy that ultimately proves to involve Nazi agents in the US, bogus silver mines, a crooked local election and an old love affair. Private eye Mike Shayne is engaged to investigate the disappearance of a soldier in El Paso. These were highly successful in their day and spawned a series of movie adaptations. ![]() Murder Is My Business is one of Halliday’s Mike Shayne mysteries. ![]() While the hardboiled fiction of people like Hammett, Chandler and Cain has remained in print and gradually gained a degree of literary respectability the works of their contemporaries have not fared so well. Brett Halliday’s 1945 novel Murder Is My Business is representative of the many hardboiled crime novels of the 30s, 40s and 50s that are now more or less forgotten. ![]()
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