The Blonde Cried Murder is a 1956 detective thriller by Brett Halliday (actually the pen name of a writer named Davis Dresser).
The operator at a Miami hotel gets a frantic phone call from a woman, who claims that she has found her brother, murdered in one of the rooms. The hotel detective investigates, but no corpse is found—and the woman is gone as well. The woman is gone because she fled in terror from a man with a scar on his face, who chased her out of the hotel. She dives into a taxi that is already occupied by another woman and asks the taxi driver who she can go to for help.
Enter Michael Shayne, a hardboiled private detective who at that moment is canoodling with his sexy secretary Lucy in Lucy's apartment. The distress call put through to Lucy's phone leads Shayne to meet the blonde, who tells him her story of finding her brother with his throat cut and running from the scar-faced man. Then the man shows up, and claims that his name is Bert Paulson, the frightened woman is his sister Nellie, and Nellie is mentally unstable. Before Shayne can check with the woman who may be Nellie Paulson, he finds that she has run away again. Shayne then spends the next 2 1/2 hours investigating a bizarre mystery that includes a pair of con artists, multiple cases of mistaken identity, and eventually, another murder.
The character of Michael Shayne is almost completely forgotten today, but in the 1940s and '50s was a franchise, with books and short stories, a B-Movie film series, a radio show, and a short-lived TV show. This was one of the last Michael Shayne books that Dresser, who created the character in 1939, wrote before he handed the "Brett Halliday" name off to ghost writers.
Tropes:
- Big-Breast Pride: The anonymous, busty hat check girl, who is wearing a low-cut dress that accentuates her breasts. She giggles when Shayne stares at her cleavage, giggles with pride and shakes her breasts at him when he calls her a "well-stacked gal", and giggles again when he "accidentally" brushes an arm against her rack as he turns to leave.
- Blind Without 'Em: It turns out that the scar-faced man, Bert Paulson, has recently broken his glasses and is quite nearsighted without them. So in the confrontation in the poorly-lit hotel hallway, he mistakes the terrified young blonde who ran from him, Mary Barnes, for his sister Nellie Paulson. This causes a lot of confusion when Shayne and the cops try and figure out what happened.
- "Burly Detective" Syndrome: The Michael Shayne series is the Trope Namer and was notorious for this. In fact, this book never once refers to Shayne this way, but there are a lot of references to Shayne's red hair, like when a cabbie suggests he's a Fiery Redhead, or when Lucy thinks of him as "her red-headed employer", or Bert thinks of the man he just met as "the red-headed private detective" and then "that damned redhead" on the very next page, or the narration just calls him "the redhead" as he approaches a bar to talk to the bartender.
- Buxom Beauty Standard: Several times, in the usual pulp fiction style. The mysterious woman who shows up in the lobby of Shayne's hotel wanting to hire him (who turns out to be the real Nellie Paulson, and the killer) is "extremely well filled-out." A cop on the beat thinks happily of the "lush breasts" of his girlfriend, before his reverie is interrupted by finding a corpse. Towards the end Shayne meets a hat check girl, who doesn't even get a name but is described as "a big-breasted girl wearing an evening gown that had been carefully cut to accentuate her bigness."
- Chekhov's Gunman: The other woman in the cab, who seems to enjoy the frightened woman's tale of having found a body in a hotel room and cheerfully agrees to let the cab driver take the frightened woman wherever she wants. She is the real Nellie Paulson, and she is the killer, having slit the throat of the man that the frightened woman found in the room.
- Cigarette of Anxiety: Rather than just call the cops about the terrified blonde crying murder, Shayne sent her off to Lucy's while he investigated. Unfortunately she never made it, as the murderer found her on the way and killed her too. Shayne is called to the crime scene, and the awful realization hits home as he looks at Mary Barnes' body. He pulls out a cigarette.He got out a cigarette and lighted it, controlling the shaking of the match so that it was hardly noticeable.
- Dame with a Case: A good-looking and absolutely terrified young woman tracks down Michael Shayne, begging for his help after she found her brother murdered.
- Dies Wide Open: Both the unfortunate Charlie Barnes and his sister Mary are described that way when their bodies are found, both killed by having their throats cut and their eyes staring sightlessly.
- Extremely Short Timespan: The entire story takes place over 2 1/2 hours, with chapters titled by what time they take place. The book begins with the call about a murder at 9:32 pm, and ends with Shayne catching Nellie Paulson in Lucy's apartment at midnight.
- The Ghost: Nellie Paulson's partner-in-crime Lanny, who was the other half of their "badger game" con but wasn't there when she murdered Charles Barnes. He never appears on the page, but at the very end Lucy gets a phone call from him and is listening while Lanny is arrested on the other end of the line.
- Hardboiled Detective: Michael Shayne. Checks many of the boxes—tough guy, carries a gun, is unafraid to punch someone out, cynical. Subverted to an extent as he does have some emotions, and is contemplating marriage to his lovely Sexy Secretary.
- Honey Pot: Nellie Paulson and her unseen partner Lanny were playing the "badger game", a con in which a woman lures a man into a compromising situation and her partner, pretending to be either an angry husband or brother, barges in and gets the sucker to pay out some money. But something went wrong, and she wound up slitting the throat of her target, Charles Barnes, and throwing the body out the window.
- Hypocritical Humor: Evelyn, the operator on the telephone exchange at the hotel, is annoyed that Miss Payne and Mr. Drood are "circumspect" in their phone conversation. She's offended that they are acting like they think someone is listening in, when that's exactly what Evelyn was doing, listening in.
- It Was Here, I Swear!: The terrified woman telling Shayne her story says that she saw her brother dead, jumped into an open room to call the front desk, then went back to find he had disappeared. It turns out the killer threw the body out the window, and since the hotel was poised directly over the ocean at high tide, the body was washed out to sea.
- Male Gaze: Much attention is given to the physical charms of the various female characters.
- Moment Killer: Shayne follows Lucy up to her room and she fixes him a drink, with sex clearly about to follow. It's an oddly emotional moment and, all of a sudden, he finds himself about to ask her to marry him—and then the phone call comes about the frightened blonde begging for help. Lucy is pissed when Shayne leaves.
- Never One Murder: The unfortunate eponymous blonde, who is eventually revealed to be Mary Barnes, is met by the killer and gets her throat slit on a park bench.
- Orphaned Punch Line: Shayne enters a room only to hear Rourke the reporter telling a joke."And so the ginknote says, 'What cow are you talking about?'" concluded Rourke, and began laughing uproariously.
- Perfumigation: A woman tries to get Shayne to go out on a job immediately, using an obvious sexual come-on as motivation. Shayne is only annoyed, put off in part by her "too blatant perfume."
- Sexy Secretary: Lucy Hamilton, Michael Shayne's "prim and proper secretary" during working hours and his lover after dark. Shayne wonders why she never makes a pass at him in the office.
