Bodies Are Where You Find Them is a 1941 novel by Brett Halliday, the pen name for Davis Dreser.
It is the fifth novel in what turned into a 37-year series featuring Halliday's protagonist, hardboiled Miami detective Michael Shayne. Shayne is about to take a train to New York, where he's vacationing with his wife Phyllis, when he gets a phone call. Miami is having a mayoral election in two days, and Shayne, who has gained a certain notoriety in the press with his exploits as a private detective, is backing one Jim Marsh. Marsh calls in a blind panic, telling Shayne that the opposition, the Burt Stallings campaign, has some sort of secret information. In fact, an informant is on her way to Shayne's office.
No sooner has Shayne hung up than Burt Stallings' stepdaughter Helen shows up at Shayne's office. Helen is drugged to the gills, and passes out in Shayne's arms. He puts her to bed (the "office" is Shayne's old bachelor pad before he got married to Phyllis), and, hoping to avoid embarrassment, hustles Phyllis onto the train before she notices the unconscious girl. Shayne doubles back to his apartment and, to his horror, discovers that Helen has been strangled to death....
Some plot elements from this book were adapted into the feature film Kiss Kiss Bang Bang.
Tropes:
- Coincidental Broadcast; Shayne turns up the radio just in time to hear the words "...body of an unidentified young woman," found in the bay. Eventually it's revealed that the body in the bay is Fake Helen, the impostor who was killed in Shayne's apartment.
- "Could Have Avoided This!" Plot: As it turns out, Helen Stallings was secretly married. By the terms of her biological father's will, since she married before she turned 21, her trust fund reverted to her mother, and consequently also to her mother's second husband, Burt Stallings. So the crimes for which Burt Stallings and Arch Bugler are going to prison—embezzlement, kidnapping, fraud, and in Bugler's case two murders—were completely unnecessary.
- Crime After Crime: Arch Bugler killed Fake Helen Stallings to stop her from spilling the beans to Shayne, which required him to double back to the insane asylum and kill the real Helen.
- Drunken Master: Throughout the Michael Shayne series Shayne comes across as The Alcoholic but a Functional Addict, toting bottles of cognac around and drinking while he's detecting, drinking while interviewing suspects, drinking in the morning. After escaping the cops and making his way to Tim Rourke's apartment he finds a full bottle of whiskey there, and drinks all of it. When Rourke comes back and is shocked to find Shayne drunk, Shayne says "I’ve stayed too sober on this case. That’s what’s wrong. You know my brain cells don’t circulate without stimulation." Sure enough, right after this Shayne figures out the final piece of the puzzle: the bad guys didn't kill Real Helen a month ago, they held her alive as a prisoner in the asylum and killed her right after killing Fake Helen.
- Extremely Short Timespan: As per formula in the Michael Shayne series. The plot takes place over 24 hours or so, from Shayne getting a telephone call just as he's about to go on vacation, to Shayne unmasking the killer the next day.
- Framing the Guilty Party: Shayne wants to make sure that Burt Stallings and Bugler go down for the murders. So just to make things more convincing, he re-smashes the fender of Stallings's limo that had been repaired, and he passes off the Institutional Apparel asylum jumpsuit that he took off an asylum inmate as Helen's jumpsuit.
- Going Commando: A plot point. When the authorities find the body of Helen Stallings, she was wearing a dress and nothing underneath. Shayne eventually figures out that she was a prisoner at Dr. Patterson's insane asylum—a high-class girl like Helen would hardly be likely to go out without wearing underwear, but the patients at Patterson's Bedlam House aren't allowed underwear and only wear their jump suits.
- Girls with Moustaches: Mrs. Briggs, the large, intimidating housekeeper (head maid) at the Stallings residence, has an "upper lip fuzzed with black hair."
- I Need a Freaking Drink:
- Shayne comes back to his apartment, pours himself a cognac, and goes back into the bedroom to find Helen—only to discover that she's been murdered. He hurriedly downs the cognac in his hand.
- Tim Rourke for his part hurriedly downs a glass of cognac after finding out from Shayne that there's a dead girl in the bedroom.
- Inheritance Murder: The ultimate motive, in that Helen was killed because she was about to turn 21 and would take control of her trust fund, but her death means the money goes to her stepfather. However, a horrified Burt Stallings tells Shayne that he was looking for some other way to get the money, so he stashed Helen in an insane asylum, and it was his partner Arch Bugler who acted on his own initiative to kill Helen.
- Intrepid Reporter: Tim Rourke, the newspaper reporter who Shayne tells about the body in the bedroom. Rourke, Shayne's buddy, agrees to all sorts of bizarre acts, including transporting a corpse around, in hopes that he will get the big scoop when Shayne cracks the case. (He gets the scoop.)
- Napoleon Delusion: At Dr. Patterson's mental hospital, Shayne meets a man who thinks he's Sherlock Holmes. Mr. Holmes winds up indirectly helping Shayne solve the mystery.
- Narrative Profanity Filter: Tim Rourke "shuddered and swore explosively" after Shayne reveals that Rourke helped him in concealing and moving the body.
- Overly-Nervous Flop Sweat: "Sweat was running on his forehead and trickling down his flat features" as Joe the bookie tries to fend off Shayne's demand to place a $5000 bet on the mayoral election, without actually placing any money down. Because Shayne is good at intimidating people, Joe takes the bet.
- Sexy Sax Man: It turns out that Helen was secretly married to Whit Marlow, a sax player in a band. Shayne muses how the "sensual, melodic strains from that wailing instrument" might have made Whit more attractive, then thinks about people he knew in the past who used their ability to play saxophone to pick up women.
- Slipping a Mickey: Why Helen Stallings was so incoherent on getting to Shayne's office, and why she passed out after she got in. Shayne eventually discovers that the bartender at the club slipped Helen a mickey, but only to shut her up after she was shooting her mouth off about her stepfather and her boyfriend Arch Bugler.
- Summation Gathering:
- Subverted when Shayne gathers together most of the characters—Chief Painter, Arch Bugler, Burt Stallings, and Whit Marlow—expounds his solution that the woman murdered in his apartment was an impostor and not the real Helen Stallings, and then is shocked when Marlow makes a positive ID of the corpse as his wife. He has to jump out of a window to avoid arrest.
- Played straight at the end when Shayne gathers all of the above, plus Dr. Patterson and Jim Marsh, to lay out the real solution, that the woman killed in his apartment was in fact an impostor but Bugler also killed the real Helen Stallings and then switched bodies.
- Throwing the Fight: Shayne is pretty upset to discover that Jim Marsh, the mayoral candidate he's backing, has bet $50,000 on Stallings to win and is planning to drop out. Eventually Marsh confesses that he's been getting death threats and decided to drop out of the race, and figured that if he was going to drop out he might as well make some cash.
- Title Drop; Tim Rourke and Shayne are both shocked when they figure out that the killer stole Helen's body from Shayne's apartment. When Rourke wonders where the heck the corpse is now, Shayne cheerfully answers, "Bodies are where you find them!"
- Uncle Tomfoolery: A pretty horribly racist scene has Shayne encounter a "Negro fisherman" who says stuff like "White folks messes up dey fishin' wid too much fancy trappin's." It comes across as even more racist because Shayne addresses the fisherman in the same manner, starting with "I reckon you-all're goin' fishin'."
- The Unreveal: The ending reveals that Burt Stallings and Bugler found a woman to impersonate Helen while the real Helen was confined in an insane asylum. But who the woman is, why she agreed to such a scheme, even her name, none are revealed.
