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Fredric Brown (1906-1972) | |
One of the most ingenious American crime and mystery writers, who published science fiction to overcome - as he said - the too real aspect of detective fiction. Brown also wrote television plays for Alfred Hitchcock series. Brown's plots were inventive, he used often humour and paradoxes, and his sex scenes were gleefully provocative. 'Once I said to him I needed a model for an antagonist in one of my stories and was trying to think of someone I really hated. "Wrong," he [Fredric Brown] said. "Base your villain on someone you like. That'll give him some sympathetic traits and make him much more believable."' (from 'My Friend Fredric Brown' by Walt Sheldon in The Big Book of Noir, ed. by Ed Gorman et al., 1998) Fredric William Brown was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, the son of Karl Lewis Brown and Emma Amelia (Graham) Brown. He was educated at University of Cincinnati night school, and Hanover College, Indiana, where he studied one year. From 1924 to 1936 he was an office worker, and then a proofreader for the Milwaukee Journal. He also became a member of Milwaukee's Fictioneers Club, along with Robert Bloch, who edited in 1977 a collection of his stories. From 1929 to 1947 Brown was married to Helen Ruth; they had two sons. After divorce he married in 1948 Elizabeth Charlier. Brown lived in the late 1940s in Taos, New Mexico. He usually spent afternoons in a local bar with his friends and wrote at night, producing some of his best works. "Fred was a genius of sorts, I suppose. He was a compulsive storyteller; and made up stories or bits of stories in his every waking moment. Wherever he went he would look at something or somebody - a bus driver, a woman with a baby carriage, a boy on a bicycle - and say to himself, "What if?" And the he'd be off on a fine fugue of ideas, chortling as each fell neatly into place." (Walt Sheldon in The Big Book of Noir) Brown died on March 11, 1972. Beginning in the mid-1980s, publisher Dennis McMillan issued several volumes containing Brown's previously uncollected short stories. In 2002 Stewart Masters Publishing brought out two Ed and Am Huster novels. Like so many of his contemporaries, Brown started his literary career by producing stories for the pulps in the 1930s and '40s. In 1936 he published humorous stories in technical trade press, some years later he moved to the detective pulps, and in 1941 he began to gain fame with science fiction and fantasy stories in Unknown and Weird Tales. The best of these early fantasies were collected in ANGELS AND SPACESHIPS (1954). The more than 100 stories that Brown published in Detective Tales, Dime Mystery, and other periodicals, were stepping stones to the production of crime novels. After a long apprenticeship of some 300 stories, Brown published his first full-length mystery, THE FABULOUS CLIPJOINT (1947), which won an Edgar for the best first novel from the Mystery Writers of America. It launched Brown's only series detectives, Ed and Am Huster, an amateur team based in Chicago; they appeared then in half a dozen books. After 1947 Brown became a full-time writer. Brown's best known works include THE SCREAMING MIMI (1949). This revision of the beauty and beast allegory was adapted into screen in 1958, and directed by Gerd Oswald. The story follows a reporter's search for a 'ripper' killer. A statue of a screaming woman, revealed as a storekeepers mnemonic for catalogue item SM1, links the murders of several women and a doctor at an insane asylum. Other non-series thrillers include KNOCK THREE-ONE-TWO (1959). The protagonist is a liquor salesman with a gambling habit. He happens to observe a killer who terrorizes an entire city, and the reader is kept guessing as to the identity of the killer. THE LENIENT BEAST (1956) has five first person points-of-view. Through the narration of a tormented man, who has a secret, we learn that he is the target of a police investigation and the killer. NIGHT OF THE JABBERWOCK (1950), Brown's excursion into the world of Lewis Carrol, blended realism with mystery. The protagonist is Doc Stoeger, the editor of a small local newspaper who plays chess, drinks whisky, and can recite all the poems from Alice's Adventures from memory. He gets first involved with gangsters and then he becomes a victim in a series of strange events, straight from the looking-class world. Brown's science fiction is noted for its humour and for a polished slickness. Several of his works played with the theme of mind and reality - what is real and what is production of our imagination. 'Arena' (1944), which was selected by the Science Fiction Writers of America for inclusion in Science Fiction Hall of Fame, tells of the settling of an interstellar war through single combat between a human and an alien. SPACE ON MY HANDS (1953), a collection of Brown's short stories and vignettes, includes his famous very very short story: "The last man on earth sat alone in a room. There was a knock on the door ..." The novel WHAT MAD UNIVERSE (1946), his first full-length science fiction novel, uses the alternate worlds theme, but in a highly original way: now the various science fiction conventions turn out to be true history. MARTIANS, GO HOME (1955) describes the situation on Earth, when irritating little green men appear everywhere and drive people nearly crazy - they like to peep from windows and are very interested in sex. Finally the writer who has created them by his imagination, imagines them gone again - or is he only a fragment of a larger consciousness? In THE MIND THING (1961) a stranded alien attempts to get back home using its ability to enter human minds, but the experience is fatal for those possessed. For further reading: A Key to Fredric Brown's Wonderland by Newton Baird (1981); Twentieth Century Mystery and Crime Writers, ed. by James M. Reilly (1985); Martians and Misplaced Clues: The Life and Work of Fredric Brown by Jack Searbrook (1992); Encyclopedia Mysteriosa by William L. De Andrea (1997); The Big Book of Noir, ed. by Lee Server, Ed Gorman, and Martin H. Greenberg (1998) - Note: The Italian film Bird with the Chrystal Plumage (1969), dir. by Dario Argento, was loosely based on Brown's storyline. - For further information: Stewart Masters Publishing Selected books:
© 2002 |