A prolific author, Davis Dresser wrote more than seventy romance, western, and mystery novels and dozens of short stories under his own name as well as under the pseudonyms Brett Halliday, Anthony Scott, Kathryn Culver, Asa Baker, Don Davis, Matthew Blood, Peter Shelley, Sylvia Carson, Anderson Wayne, Peter Field, Eliot Storm, Jerome Shard, Christopher Shayne, and Hal Debrett (a joint pseudonym with his first wife, Kathleen Rollins). Under his best-known pen name, Brett Halliday, Dresser wrote nearly fifty novels and created Mike Shayne, one of the most popular fictional dectectives, who debuted in the 1939 novel Dividend on Death. Although Dresser stopped writing Mike Shayne mysteries in the 1960s, stories and novels continued to be written by other authors using the Halliday name. The rough and likable Shayne is Dresser's most important contribution to hard-boiled fiction.

Davis Dresser was born in Chicago on 31 July 1904 to William Justus Dresser, an...