Hugh Beaumont is Mike Shayne in this well-written B mystery. After detective Ralph Dunn denounces him on the radio as someone with underworld connections, Helene Heigh contacts him. She's been getting threatening letters, and her husband and stepchildren hate her. As Beaumont leaves, her husband, Pierre Watkin, asks him to arrange for a faked robbery at his home. Beaumont turns him down angrily. Then Miss Heigh and a burglar turn up dead, and Beaumont is being framed for accessory.
Brett Halliday's detective had been used in a series of Fox B movies starring Lloyd Nolan. That series had been inactive for several years, and its reactivation at PRC had some changes, including a more violent, occasionally film noir attitude., following Dick Powell's jump-start role in MURDER, MY SWEET. Beaumont doesn't talk like the low-rent 'tec that Nolan was, and he gets hit a lot more -- and has a glass jaw. The mystery is nicely complicated, with a lot of threads to be teased out.
Beaumont spent many years in Hollywood, doing a lot of narrating work, and appearing in more than 80 movies, most of them in uncredited bits. He went straight from one of them to his career-defining role as Ward Cleaver in LEAVE IT TO BEAVER. He gave up acting to be a minister in the mid-1960s, and died in 1982, aged 73.
