It is very important to detect and evaluate the surface or subsurface flaws because of their influences on mechanical properties of materials. Rayleigh wave and creeping wave are commonly used for the detection of surface and subsurface flaws. These techniques, however, have following problems. Each amplitudes are remarkably affected by the surface condition and evaluation of echo pattern is usually difficult because shear wave mode propagate in the material at the same time. On the other hand, surface SH-wave which is horizontally polarized shear wave traveling along near surface layer is an attractive technique for the surface or subsurface material characterization and this technique is useful to solve the problems mentioned above. In this paper, The stability and transmission coefficient of SH waves through a viscous fluid layer is theoretically studied and simulated. Its results agreed well with the theoretical expectation for the experimental verification. These experimental results show that viscosity of couplants, thickness of couplant and surface roughness are closely related to transfer efficiency in surface SH angle beam method.