She Woke to Darkness (1954) by Brett Halliday

She Woke to Darkness (1954) is the 25th novel in the Michael Shayne series by "Brett Halliday," a pseudonym of Davis Dresser, who celebrated this milestone by taking his hardboiled private eye series into meta-fictional territory – making himself the central character. The book opens with an "Author's Foreword" explaining the previous twenty-four novels were secondhand, fictionalized accounts of Shayne's real-life cases, but this case is a firsthand account ("this story happened to me, Brett Halliday").That story begins with Halliday attending the 1953 Edgar Allan Poe Awards Dinner, hosted by the Mystery Writers of America, where he chats and drinks with the likes of Robert Arthur, Fred Dannay and Clayton Rawson ("...I don't know what happened to John Dickson Carr”). Halliday is looking forward to meeting Dorothy Cecil, a fictitious mystery writer, but she drifts away in the crowd and Halliday is introduced to a young woman. Elsie Murray is a big fan of the Michael Shayne novels and…