Bodies Are Where You Find Them by Brett Halliday (Davis Dresser), © Dell 1941 mass market paperback – mystery – Mike Shayne # 5
1941 edition cover by Robert Stanley
Shayne and his wife are about to leave on a trip to New York when the phone rings. You know already it will be bad news, and it is. A woman is on her way to Shayne’s office with important information about a crooked candidate for Mayor, and the election is only two days away.
The woman arrives, but she’s been doped and Shayne leaves her in his office while he takes his wife to the train station and see’s her off to New York (thus allowing the author to clear her out of the story).
When Shayne returns to his office, the woman is there, but she’s been strangled. Thus begins a frame-up that keeps on getting worse, as Mike Shayne fights crooked politicians, gangsters, his nemesis Chief of Detectives Peter Painter and the clock.
1966 edition cover by Robert McGinnis
He must find the murderer, clear his own name and all before the voters go to the polls, or the crooked politician will win the election and Shayne will go to prison for murder one.
With the tight time frame, cast of characters, some of whom Shayne readers have seen in previous books, and the serious threat to Shayne’s freedom, he needs all the help he can get, and finds it in the person of his reporter friend Timothy Rourke. The iron’s in the fire in this one, and when things begin to overheat, it’s all Shayne can do to solve the case.
Good one.
Tip the Wink 
I read all those early Mike Shayne paperbacks when I was a kid. Loved the relentless action! Of course, we know today that Shayne getting conked on the head in nearly every book should have led to “Concussion Protocols.”
George, you read everything when you were eleven. No protocol for Sahyne, he’s not a football player..
If there was ever a guy who needed Concussion Protocols it was Shayne!
I love all the early Shayne novels, including this one.
I picked up a few Mike Shayne books at the book sale last month… about 10 of them, all with Robert McGinnis covers, which was mainly what I was after. Then I read more about the books and I look forward to reading them.
Read a few when I was a teenager. I would put them in the same category as books by Richard Prather, Donald Hamilton and Carter Brown. Time killers but nothing you remembered much about a week later.
I prefer them to Prather’s Shell Scott, and very much prefer them to Hamilton and Brown. I always thought the best thing about the Brown books were the covers.
Richard, I have always wanted to read Brett Halliday’s Mike Shayne novels, which I have never spotted in used bookshops or at book exhibition. His work reminds me of Mickey Spillane’s crime novels though I’m not sure if that’s a fair assessment.