She Woke to Darkness is a 1954 novel by Brett Halliday, the pen name for Davis Dresser.
It is another installment in the long-running mystery series about Hardboiled Detective Michael Shayne. Except that for the first half of the book, Shayne does not appear. The protagonist instead is...Brett Halliday! (Or should we say Davis Dresser?) Brett Halliday is in New York for the Edgar Awards, the annualy awards given out by the Mystery Writers of America. After chatting with some Real Life writers, Brett meets a hot babe named Elsie Murray. Elsie is a big fan who owns all of the Michael Shayne novels in hardback. They hit it off and Elsie invites him to her apartment.
It turns out that Elsie wants two things from Brett Halliday: 1) sex, and 2) advice on her own hopeful career as a mystery writer. Brett and Elsie are getting hot and heavy when an ill-timed phone call ruins the mood. Elsie sends Brett packing, but not before giving him her unfinished manuscript, which she says is a lightly fictionalized account of something that happened to her in real life.
Brett goes back to his hotel and starts to read Elsie's book. To his surprise, it's about a young heroine named Aline, who strongly resembles Elsie Murray, and who wakes up from an alcoholic blackout to find a dead man in her hotel room. Curious, Brett calls Elsie's hotel room—and a policeman answers. Elsie has been murdered!
Brett realizes that he, as the last man to see Elsie alive, will be a prime suspect. He turns back to Elsie's manuscript, believing that the key to her murder must be somewhere in the pages. In the meantime, Brett calls the one man he trusts to get him out of this mess: the hero of his series of true crime detective thrillers, Michael Shayne.
Tropes:
- The Alcoholic:
- In the story-within-a-story, Aline Ferris wakes up from an alcoholic blackout, and finds a murder victim in the bathroom of her apartment. It turns out that this is not the first time she's gone out drinking, gotten extremely slutty, and then had a blackout.
- Then there's Michael Shayne, who as usual in the series is obviously an alcoholic but never lets it slow him down. When Shayne meets the cops in Brett Halliday's hotel room, he tries to drink Brett's liquor. Then he goes to breakfast—breakfast—and bribes a waiter to bring him cooking sherry in a coffe cup.
- Author Avatar: Brett Halliday writes a novel in which "Brett Halliday" gets in a jam in New York and asks Michael Shayne to help him out.
- "Burly Detective" Syndrome: The later, hackier Shayne novels written by ghostwriters are the Trope Namer. Shane is never called "the burly detective" in this book but, as with much of the Shayne series, he's repeatedly called the "redheaded detective" or just a "redhead."
- The Cameo: At the party, Brett chats with Fred Dannay, one-half of the Real Life duo who collectively wrote mysteries as Ellery Queen.
- Continuity Nod: Elsie tells Brett that she got the whole Michael Shayne series from first novel Dividend on Death to One Night With Nora, because she was tired of sometimes getting books where Shayne was married to Phyllis (Phyllis Shayne was killed off after book 8) and sometimes getting books where Shayne was flirting with his Sexy Secretary Lucy (Shayne's Love Interest after book #10).
- Extremely Short Timespan: As usual with Michael Shayne books. 24 hours or so, from Brett Halliday meeting Elsie at the Edgar Awards reception, to Shayne catching the morning flight from Miami and spending several busy hours detecting.
- Fictional Document: Elsie Murray's unfinished manuscript, She Woke to Darkness. Elsie's comment to Brett about how it's something that really happened to her, and the fact that she was murdered within a couple of hours after giving him a copy, lead Brett to conclude that she was killed by someone who didn't want that book published.
- He Knows Too Much: Brett becomes convinced that Elsie was murdered to stop her from giving her manuscript, which was inspired by a Real Life murder, to him.
- Moment Killer: Brett and Elsie are getting increasingly horizontal on her couch when the phone rings. After getting off the phone Elsie ushers Brett out. Brett assumes that the caller was a boyfriend, but, after Elsie is murdered, figures that the caller must have been the killer.
- Oddball in the Series:
- This is the only Michael Shayne novel that uses first-person narration, in this case in all the chapters told from Brett Halliday's POV.
- The story takes place in New York, rather than Shayne's usual base of operations in Miami, or his secondary locale of New Orleans.
- While most stories in the series follow Shayne from the beginning, or join him soon after the first crime is committed, in this one he doesn't appear until halfway through.
- Most unusually, Brett Halliday himself appears in the narrative, which establishes that the Shayne series is actually a series of true crime books.
- Officer O'Hara: Shayne has encountered Estelle Stevens in a bar and is trying to get her to tell what she knows about Elsie Murray and the murder of Elbert Green. He grabs her arm to stop her from leaving the bar, but "a husky Irish brogue" belonging to a beat cop interrupts the conversation. Estelle leaves, but Shayne is able to talk "Officer Grady" into letting him follow.
- Self-Deprecation:
- Brett hears other guests at the MWA party call him an "out-dated old timer" and a hack.
- Elsie sniffs disapproval of the Philo Vance series, talking about how the characters "never change." It was of course the Michael Shayne series which had a strict formula in which the characters never changed; ironically this joke comes in a book where Halliday messes with the formula.
- Lew Recker, who fancies himself a more sophisticated author, says Halliday "writes those lousy books about a dumb private eye in Miami."
- Sex Sells: Discussed Trope. A rival author, Avery Birk, tells Brett that Brett's lagging sales are because he doesn't put enough sex in his books, and that Birk just got a $15,000 advance on his next novel in return for a guarantee of "at least five hot sex scenes." Brett, who regards Avery as a complete scumbag, ignores this advice.
- Show Within a Show: She Woke to Darkness, Elsie Murray's unfinished novel in which a woman named Aline wakes up from an alcohol blackout to find a dead guy in her hotel room. Large chunks of this novel are actually presented as parts of the book-within-a-book, as Brett reads the story of how "Aline" tried to pierce together what happened, after she woke up with a murder victim.
- Slip into Something More Comfortable: In the story-within-a-story, Aline's quasi-boyfriend Ralph, who is a creep, uses these exact words to suggest that Aline put on something sexy while he goes out to make inquiries. He's disappointed to return and find that she hasn't changed.
- Smithical Marriage: When Elsie Murray and Elbert Green registered for a hotel room on the fatal night three months earlier, they did it as Mr. and Mrs. Pell.
- Summation Gathering: As often happened in the Michael Shayne series, Shayne gathers everyone together to reveal who the killer is.
- Switching P.O.V.: The first half of the book is from Brett Halliday,s POV. Michael Shayne becomes the POV character after he arrives in New York. Avery Birk, mystery writer and also gross pervert, is briefly the POV character before Shayne shows up and starts slapping him around.
- A True Story in My Universe: It turns out that the Michael Shayne series isn't fiction at all! It's a series of true crime books in which Brett Halliday writes about the exploits of his buddy, the flamboyant private detective Michael Shayne.
- Two-Act Structure: The first part follows Brett Halliday as he gets in trouble and then reads Elsie's manuscript. He disappears from the second half of the novel completely, as Michael Shayne shows up and takes the case.
- What Did I Do Last Night?:
- The premise behind Elsie Murray's unfinished novel, She Woke in Darkness. Her heroine, Aline Ferris, wakes up to find a man lying on her bathroom floor with his throat cut. Aline, who got blackout drunk at a party, sneaks out of the building by the back stairs, and then goes around trying to piece together what happened and who the dead man is.
- Aline then contacts Dirk, the man she was kissing at the party before she blacked out, but he's of little help because he also blacked out!
