Not sure where to start with this post … I’m concentrating on the Hugh Beaumont era from 1946 and there are some very interesting tidbits … for example, the secretary/gf was his own wife in the third of five episodes.
This is a review of the first:
… and this is the one I maybe like best, mainly because his “Phyllis”, to my mind, was the best gal of the three to play her, there seems chemistry here, plus it’s a weird plot, plus the title is a mystery in itself …
“Hugh Beaumont as Mike Shayne is about to take a vacation with Cheryl Walker. His plans are interrupted when the corpse of a woman turns up in his office and her stepfather hires him to investigate; when the police try to confirm it, he denies it.
I didn’t expect much from this PRC production, certainly not when the screenwriter is named Raymond L. Schrock — which I read off the screen as “Raymond Schlock” — but it’s a nice, twisty little mystery that winds up in a drying-out farm for diposmaniacs; Beaumont is pretty good as the glib Shayne.
Shayne’s creator was Brett Halliday, nee Davis Dresser, and he came up with Shayne as a marketing scheme. There were stories, novels, movies, radio shows, and even a long-running mystery magazine that paid royalties for using the Mike Shayne name. Halliday died in 1977, aged 72.”
Personally, I really like the Beaumont Shayne … there were only five episodes 1946/7, then everybody went his/her separate ways, a tale in itself.