Murder and the Married Virgin is a 1944 novel by Brett Halliday, the pen name for Davis Dresser.
It's another installment in the long-running detective series about hard-boiled private eye Michael Shayne. In this one, Shayne has relocated to New Orleans, where he went on a case at the end of previous novel Michael Shayne's Long Chance. Lucy Hamilton, whom Shayne met while on that case, has settled in as his secretary. One morning, Lucy tells Shayne that he has a client on the phone, a Mr. Teton from an insurance company. He has a second client, a Lieutenant Drinkley, waiting in the office. He takes the phone call first, and Mr. Teton wants Shayne to find an emerald necklace, stolen from the home of one Nathan Lomax.
Shayne takes that job and then meets with Lt. Drinkley. The grief-stricken officer tells Shayne that his fiancee, Katrin Moe, committed suicide the previous night—the night before they were to be married. Katrin, who worked as a maid, was found dead in her room, asphyxiated by the gas from the room's heating grate. It's been written off as a suicide since the room was locked from the inside, but Lt. Drinkley can't bring himself to believe it, and he appeals to Michael Shayne for help. Shayne, who is intrigued, gets more intrigued when he finds out that Katrin worked as a maid in the Lomax residence, and in fact the necklace was discovered missing at the same time that Katrin was discovered dead.
Tropes:
- Continuity Nod: Shayne has some pull with the New Orleans police because he cracked "the Margo Macon thing" for them—that's the previous novel, Michael Shayne's Long Chance.
- Defiled Forever: Discussed Trope, as Shayne and Lucy wonder if maybe Katrin killed herself over a sense of guilt, because she'd had sex before and was afraid to disappoint Lt. Drinkley. The lieutenant however insists that Katrin was a virgin and the autopsy confirms that she was.
- Drop Dead Gorgeous:Dr. Mattson the coroner describes Katrin Moe as "a slim, unsullied body, clean-limbed and full-breasted." He says he wishes he could meet women like that while they are "still warm."
- Drunken Master: Discussed Trope. Shayne actually drinks less in this book than he usually does, but when a beat cop says he heard that Shayne likes to drink on the job, he says "A snort of brandy puts me in touch with the cosmic forces."
- Extremely Short Timespan: Per the formula for the Michael Shayne series. A hectic 24 hours has Shayne get hired, go running around New Orleans, then solving the crime.
- Framing the Guilty Party: Sort of. Shayne has become convinced that Neal the chauffeur was involved with the murders. So he pays two people to pretend they saw Neal outside Dan Trueman's nightclub around the time Trueman was murdered. It works, as Neal eventually blunders his way into a confession.
- He Knows Too Much: The ultimate motive behind the murder of the unfortunate Katrin. Neal the chauffeur and Mrs. Lomax, who were lovers, were plotting to steal the emerald necklace so they could sell it. They staged a burglary, with the story being that Mrs. Lomax carelessly left the necklace in her dresser—except that Katrin, Mrs. Lomax's maid, would have known that the necklace was locked up in the safe. So Neal killed her.
- Ironic Nickname: Shayne contracts out with an old private eye acquaintance of his, Alex Lane, who is called "Gabby" because he is an extreme Terse Talker.
- Locked Room Mystery: Karin is found inside a locked room, with the gas on, with no sign of a struggle, and she wasn't drugged. It must be suicide, right? Nope, Neal the chauffeur piped in the gas through the air conditioning duct, then pretended to close the valve to the heating grate after breaking the door down, while in fact the gas to the grate was shut off the whole time.
- Never One Murder: Part of the standard Michael Shayne formula. Dan Trueman, the shady nightclub owner who's obviously mixed up in the case, is beaten to death in his office about halfway through the book.
- Never Suicide: Sure enough, Katrin didn't kill herself. Neal the chauffeur killed her by piping natural gas into her room through the air conditioning duct.
- No Full Name Given: Mrs. Lomax, Nathan's faithless wife who was having an affair with Neal and was involved in the theft of the necklace, is only ever called "Mrs. Lomax."
- Red Herring: There's the case of the escaped convicts, which Shayne thinks might be connected to the Lomax robbery/murder, and the fact that Katrin was apparently already married as she had a wedding ring (hence the "Married Virgin" part of the title). It turns out that none of this has anything to do with the crime, and Katrin wasn't even married. Her brother was one of the escaped convicts, and Katrin pretended to be his wife and got a ring so that she could visit him in jail, where he was under an assumed name.
- Shirtless Scene: There are a few passages in the book containing surprisingly homoerotic (surprising for the Michael Shayne series anyway, which usually had a lot of Male Gaze about Buxom Beauty Standard women) comments about Neal the handsome chauffeur. In one scene Shayne finds Neal working in the basement: "He was stripped to the waist and his naked torso glistened with sweat in the warm room. Back and shoulder muscles writhed beneath the smooth skin as he stretched on tiptoe."
- Shout-Out: Shayne says that "Philo Vance might be able to sort out the truth from the lies", but he has to dig up evidence the hard way.
- Terse Talker: "Gabby" Lane, a private eye whom Shayne hires to help him out with this case. Gabby rarely says more than "Yeah", "Yep", or "See you.""Some day," Shayne told Lucy, "Gabby is going to choke himself trying to find one word that’ll do the job of two."
