Fredric Brown

• Born: October 29, 1906
• Birthplace: Cincinnati, Ohio
• Died: March 11, 1972
• Place of death: Tucson, Arizona

Types of Plot: Private investigator; hard-boiled

Principal Series: Ed and Am Hunter, 1947-1963

Contribution

Fredric Brown’s contribution to the detective novel lies in his inventive plots and his realistic portrayals of life at the bottom. In The Screaming Mimi (1949), he draws a grim picture, at the novel’s beginning, of an alcoholic reporter on a binge—a veritable slice of life. A specialist in the trick ending and the clever title, Brown was not much of a stylist and showed in many ways his early training in the pulp-magazine field. He liked the hard-boiled style but preferred to avoid strict adherence to its conventions. In the mid-1950’s and later, when he tailored his fiction to the new men’s magazines such as Playboy and Dude, Brown’s style became more polished and sophisticated.

Brown’s detective and mystery fiction was professional and clever. His characters borrowed much from the Black Mask school of writing (he contributed one story to the magazine). Unfortunately, few of his characters are memorable; most are one-dimensional. His main contribution to the field lies in his original plots and ingenious endings.

Biography

Fredric Brown (all of his life he fought against being called “Frederick”) was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, on October 29, 1906. As a teenager, he lost his parents in consecutive years, 1920 and 1921, and was forced to work at odd jobs to support himself. During the 1920’s, he attended Hanover College in Hanover, Indiana, as well as Cincinnati University. He married in 1929 and moved to Milwaukee, where he worked as a proofreader for several publishers until he finally settled down at the Milwaukee Journal. There he remained until 1947, when he moved to New York, having been offered a position as an editor for a chain of pulp magazines.

It was in 1938 that Brown sold his first story, “The Moon for a Nickel,” which appeared in Street and Smith’s Detective Story Magazine. From that time on, Brown sold regularly to the pulps, writing in a variety of genres, from Dime Mystery to Planet Stories to Weird Tales. He built a considerable following among pulp readers.

Brown’s first popular success came with the publication of his first novel, The Fabulous Clipjoint (1947), which introduced the nephew-and-uncle team of Ed and Am Hunter. The novel won the Edgar Allan Poe Award of the Mystery Writers of America in 1948. Brown’s literary fortunes improved, and he moved to New York to take up a major editorial position; moreover, he divorced his first wife, Helen.

A succession of popular crime novels followed, beginning with The Dead Ringer in 1948 and The Screaming Mimi in 1949. In that latter year Brown met Elizabeth Charlier, married her, and moved to Taos, New Mexico. The chain of pulps had folded, but Brown, fortuitously, had found a new career as a popular crime novelist. As television became a greater power in the entertainment field, Brown also found many of his stories being purchased for adaptation to television.

Brown’s health had never been good, and it was not helped by his sporadic heavy drinking. Respiratory problems also developed, and in 1954 Brown and his wife, Elizabeth, moved to Tucson, Arizona, for his health. Although he had been writing for such high-paying magazines as Playboy and Dude, Brown was no longer able to keep up the pace. His last novel, Mrs. Murphy’s Underpants, published in 1963, was not up to his usual mark. A few more stories appeared under his name, but his full-time writing days were past. He died of emphysema in Tucson on March 11, 1972, at the age of sixty-five.

Analysis

Fredric Brown’s early writing for the pulps was formative for his style, which was never very polished. Accustomed to tailoring his stories to the standard pulp stereotypes, he was able to distinguish himself mainly by devising unusual plot twists or endings. His story titles also show an inventive air: “A Little White Lye,” “Murder While You Wait,” “The Dancing Sandwiches.” Once, in need of a clever title, he bought one from a fellow writer for ten dollars: “I Love You Cruelly.” Although his prose was never outstanding, Brown did attract a large following who appreciated the tough-guy type of story and the realism of Brown’s settings (often in Chicago).

The Fabulous Clipjoint

Many of his early stories are forgettable, but with The Fabulous Clipjoint Brown managed to create a fascinatingly complex plot, amid the background of a sleazy carnival. His detective team, Ed and Am Hunter, is different and appealing. Oddly enough, though, the best of Brown’s crime novels do not belong to this series: The Screaming Mimi and The Far Cry (1951). Both novels have unusual characters and focus on a rather seamy milieu. The milieu is well drawn, but modern readers who are not accustomed to the clichés of pulp style may find the one-dimensional nature of many of the characters unappealing. The tough talk is there, but the soul is missing.

Brown himself did not engage in discussions of the theoretical basis of his work or of the detective novel in general; he was a professional author and considered writing a job one did for money. Nevertheless, he did follow the standard pulp guidelines: a catchy opener, unusual characters, a new twist in the plot, and above all, a smash finish. This conventionality probably crippled his development as a stylist—but it did make him attractive to editors. Brown’s ingenious twists of plot were just what editors sought to enliven the routine nature of much pulp fiction.

The Screaming Mimi

In The Screaming Mimi, one of Brown’s best-known crime novels, all of his assets and his debits are visible. It was the only Brown novel to be made into a film (with the same title, in 1958, starring Anita Ekberg and Philip Carey). The setting of the novel is Chicago of the 1940’s. The hero is a newspaper reporter who is inclined to go on occasional binges, and the novel opens as the reporter, Sweeney, is just coming out of his latest bender. “Sweeney sat on a park bench, that summer night, next to God. Sweeney rather liked God, although not many people did.” Here is a characteristic Brown touch—the clever play with words. “God” happens to be another bum, named Godfrey.

Brown lavishes much care on his descriptions of the Chicago night scene: Bughouse Square, Clark Street, and North State Street. His accurate portrayal of down-and-outers is a credit to his thorough knowledge of the settings of his novels and his interest in low-life characters.

The mystery centers on a mysterious “Ripper” who has been attacking young women of unsound reputation. Sweeney stumbles onto the scene of an attack; the victim is a nightclub dancer, Yolanda Lang. She manages to survive the assault. Sweeney, stunned by her beauty, decides to swear off drinking for the time being to get to know her and find the Ripper.

There are elements of the novel that remind one of the standard 1940’s Hollywood crime film of the order now known as film noir. However, there also are original touches. The hero, Sweeney, is an unsavory character who has just crawled out of the gutter. Another interesting character is Doc Greene, the owner of a nightclub named El Madhouse, where Yolanda does her dancing. Greene pretends to be literary, but makes mistakes when dropping the names of authors and books. In describing Greene’s eyes, Brown writes: “Somehow, too, they managed to look both vacant and deadly. They looked like reptile’s eyes, magnified a hundredfold, and you expected a nictitating membrane to close upon them.” Brown’s is a style that mingles old clichés with a turn of the verbal screw.

More sophisticated readers may find this kind of description shopworn. The following could have come from Dime Detective:

Stopped in mid-sentence, she stared at him. She asked, “You aren’t another shamus, are you? This place was lousy with ’em. . . .”

Sweeney stuck out a paw and the detective took it, but not enthusiastically.

It wasn’t quite believable somehow.

The core of this novel, as with so many novels of the hard-boiled variety, is the wanderings of the hero, the low-life characters, the strange settings, the brushes with the law. In this regard, Brown followed the standard formula, but in choosing as his protagonist an alcoholic newspaper reporter, he applied the twist that makes the story different.

At the end of the story, the murderer proves to be the very Yolanda with whom the hero is in love and who inspired him to come out of his binge and try to solve the mystery of the Ripper. In the last few paragraphs of the novel, Sweeney, having solved the murder and lost his love, is seen back on the street, sharing a fifth of booze (or two) with Godfrey. “Sweeney shuddered. He pulled two flat pint bottles out of the side pockets of his coat and handed one of them to God. . . .”

This, one might say, is the clever twist. There is no happy ending. Brown was a writer who hated happy endings, even though he was forced on many occasions to write them. In his novels, Brown had enough control over his material that he was able to write the endings he wanted.

There are many admirers of Brown who claim that he wrote his best prose not in the crime-fiction field but in the area of science fiction. He did have a steadfast following in this genre, and many of his science-fiction stories avoid the clichés of pulp fiction. Nevertheless, there are many Brown mystery fans who believe, with critic Bill Pronzini, that “the largest number [of his mystery stories] are tales of merit and high craftsmanship.”

Independent judgment, however, must find that Fredric Brown did not blaze many trails as a crime writer, although he certainly provided much entertainment for readers. His talents did not approach the level of a Georges Simenon, a Nicolas Freeling, or a P. D. James. Brown was a competent professional in the realm of pulp fiction, but he is clearly not a candidate for university seminar discussions on the detective novel.

Principal Series Characters:

• Ed and
• Ambrose “Am” Hunter are nephew and uncle, private detectives based in Chicago. Ed is the young nephew, very idealistic; Am is a retired circus performer, a more mature, seasoned individual. Thus, the two men combine naïveté and idealism with experience and sobriety, making a balanced team when dealing with sordid street life.

Bibliography

Baird, Newton. A Key to Fredric Brown’s Wonderland. Georgetown, Calif.: Talisman Literary Research, 1981. Contains both a critical study and an annotated bibliography of Brown’s work.

Baird, Newton. “Paradox and Plot: The Fiction of Fredric Brown.” The Armchair Detective 9-11 (June, 1976-January, 1978). Serialized study of the narrative structure of Brown’s fiction.

Haining, Peter. The Classic Era of American Pulp Magazines. Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2000. Discusses Brown’s work in the pulps and the role of pulp fiction in American culture.

Horsley, Lee. The Noir Thriller. New York: Palgrave, 2001. Scholarly, theoretically informed study of the thriller genre. Examine’s Brown’s The Fabulous Clipjoint, The Screaming Mimi, and The Lenient Beast.

Seabrook, Jack. Martians and Misplaced Clues: The Life and Work of Fredric Brown. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1993. Detailed critical biography discussing the relationship between Brown’s personal experiences and his fiction.