Four 1940s crime tales by Fredric Brown

Recently on twitter Joachim Boaz reminded us of Fredric Brown, the respected SF and mystery writer.  I found Rogue in Space, Brown's 1957 fix-up novel, and his bizarre mystery story "The Spherical Ghoul" memorable, and decided it was time to read some more Brown.  There are plenty of stories by Brown at the internet archive from Galaxy and Astounding, but I decided to step out of the respectable SF mainstream and beat the bushes in search of something a little outre and read Brown stories from four 1940s issues of Dime Mystery Magazine.  The contents pages of the magazines announce that it is "The Magazine of Weird Mystery!" and according to wikipedia, Dime Mystery Magazine was the first of the "weird menace" or "shudder" pulps, which featured "sadistic villains" and "graphic scenes of torture and brutality."  Let's walk on the wild side! 

"Whispering Death" (1943)

"Whispering Death" is stuffed full of plot, a convoluted mystery story full of clues that has running concurrently along side it a love story.  Our narrator, Slim, is a sports reporter who next week will be leaving town for basic training.  He wants to marry his girlfriend before he leaves, but she wants to wait until the war is over.  Slim sees a dog get run over by a car--it was the dog of an old friend of his, Packy, a retired fighter with cauliflower ears and a crooked nose--scars of his career in the squared circle--whom he hasn't seen in ages.  He decides to look up Packy and let him have the bad news.

Slim meets and talks with numerous characters trying to find where Packy is currently living, including a pretty girl at a diner with whom he has a lot more in common than he does with his wedding-shy girlfriend--this waitress is friends with Packy and she loves the fights!  The waitress is worried about Packy--a contrast to Slim's girl, who is annoyed that her boyfriend associates with such low class characters as has-been boxers. 

Packy, Slim learns, is living in a crummy boarding house, in a top floor flat, spending all his time and money getting drunk and considering suicide!  He drinks, he says, because it drowns out the voice that keeps telling him to jump off a bridge!  While Slim and the waitress are visiting him, Packy complains that he can hear the bats up in the attic--Slim and the waitress cannot hear the bats.

Compiling all the clues, Slim figures out the astonishing truth: Packy can hear higher frequency sounds than us healthy people because of the peculiar way in which his inner ear was damaged in the boxing ring.  That is how he can hear the bats.  (It is nice to see bats, which have been getting so much bad press lately, getting some good PR here by pitching in and providing a valuable clue.)  Packy's dog must have left because there was a disturbing high-pitched sound in Packy's apartment.  That high pitched sound is a record played in the next apartment by a lackey of Packy's old manager--a special high-frequency recording of a guy saying "Jump off a bridge...jump off a bridge...jump off a bridge" that can only be heard by Packy and dogs and bats.  Packy's old manager is pursuing this elaborate murder scheme because he has a life insurance policy out on Packy and will collect if the fighter kills himself. 

Slim beats up the lackey, blackmails the manager, gets the insurance signed over to Packy; Packy cashes in on the policy so he has enough money to live a better life.  Slim dumps his girl and marries the waitress. 

"Whispering Death" was the title story of a 1989 collection of Fredric Brown stories, the fifteenth (!) title in the Fredric Brown in the Detective Pulps series.

"The Devil's Woodwinds" (1944)

The narrator of "The Devil's Woodwinds" is Toby Something, the head of a dance band in New York City.  As the story begins he is just wrapping up a late night gig when his friend police lieutenant Shane Pierson walks in.  Shane tells Toby that a guy was just found dead, victim of a hit and run driver, and he had Toby's address was written on a note in his pocket.  Shane takes Toby to the morgue to see the body--it's Peter Wazemes, who just sold Toby a clarinet for $500.  Wazemes recently escaped German-occupied Europe, bringing with him three top-of-the-line musical instruments, and just sold them each to individual musicians.  Toby knows the other two buyers, and he and Shane go around to their places, to find that they have been killed and their new instruments stolen.  Back at Toby's place Shane saves the band leader's life when he notices Toby's decanter of whiskey has been poisoned!

Shane (and I) assumed there was some crazy spy angle to these killings, with the plans to a new radar set inscribed in the flutes and clarinets or something, but Toby stumbles on some clues and realizes that the spy stuff is just a red herring, a camouflage.  Wazemes's death was just a normal New York traffic accident.  A musician in Toby's band who covets Toby's job and also covets Toby's girlfriend (the band's torch singer) figured if he killed Toby he would be likely to inherit both; by killing the other two musicians as well as Toby, it would look like German spies were responsible.  (It is actually more complicated than that, but that's the gist.)  Toby hints to the killer that the jig is up, and the text hints to us that the killer is going to commit suicide.

In 1988 "The Devil's Woodwinds" would be reprinted in the twelfth volume of the Fredric Brown in the Detective Pulps series, Who Was That Blonde I Saw You Kill Last Night?

"The Night the World Ended" (1945)

The man they call Johnny Gin is a war veteran and a drunk who hangs around Nick's bar, because Nick gives him booze in return for sweeping up.  A lot of journalists frequent Nick's joint; one of them, the night-side city editor of a local paper, Halloran, is a cruel practical joker.  He gets the idea of mocking up an issue of the paper with the front page headline "WORLD WILL END AT 1:45 TONIGHT" to see how Johnny Gin reacts to this alarming bit of fake news.  When shown the paper, Johnny, drunk as usual, gets the bright idea of "borrowing" Nick's .45 automatic (Johnny is intimately familiar with the weapon from his military service) to shoot off as the world ends, to sort of add to the fireworks.  Well, as you can imagine, when Nick catches the inebriated Johnny doing his little borrowing, and then the police get involved, a series of tragedies ensues.  When Johnny sobers up he proceeds to seek revenge on Halloran.

It seems like "The Night the World Ended" is one of the most successful (in terms of exposure and remuneration) of Brown's mystery stories.  Not only was it reprinted in the 1953 collection Mostly Murder and the 1985 collection Carnival of Crime: The Best Mystery Stories of Fredric Brown, but it was made into an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents in 1957.

"Each Night He Died..." (1949)

The first three tales we have read, "Whispering Death," "The Devil's Woodwinds," and "The Night the World Ended," are competent, and I can't give them a thumbs down, but I am not crazy about them.  The stories are mechanical; the many elements of their complicated plots work smoothly, they make internal sense and Brown leaves no glaring plot holes, but the tales lack emotional impact and Brown offers no ethic or ideology or point.  (I didn't think that of Rogue in Space, which seemed to be saying something controversial about American culture and which had a striking and morally ambiguous character at its core.)  So these three pieces disappointed me, maybe because I am not really the audience for mystery stories that are about clues and schemes--if I am reading a mystery story at all I want it to be about lust and hate and fear and blood.

Fortunately, today's final story, "Each Night He Died..." has the emotional oomph I like to see.  Dana Kiessling is in bed in his cell, sweating and screaming as he thinks about the electric chair--Dana, a loser who spent all his money at the track and on girls, has been convicted of murdering his successful and sophisticated brother George in hopes of inheriting forty or fifty thousand bucks.  Dana also thinks back on his life, and Brown does as good a job of constructing a believable and compelling relationship between the brothers and describing the failure of Dana's murder plot as he does of conveying Dana's frantic, pathological, fear of death.  Instead of focusing his energies on the apparatus of a Rube Goldberg plot, here Brown concentrates on human feeling and human interactions, and the allocation of effort pays off.

The twist ending of the story, foreshadowed by the title, is that while Dana thinks he is going to be executed tomorrow, and is shrieking and sobbing in anticipation of being "fried" in the electric chair, he is, not, in fact, in a prison but an insane asylum!  Every night, for six years, he has gone through these paroxysms of horror thanks to his delusion, and will presumably suffer this torture for the rest of his life!

Thumbs up!

"Each Night He Died..." was reprinted in Mostly Murder and Carnival of Crime, under the less spoily title of "Cain."   

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I guess Dime Mystery Magazine had cleaned up its act by 1942, because these stories have very little sadism and torture and just a taste of brutality.  I guess if we are looking for the hard stuff we should hit up some of the 1930s issues of Dime Mystery Magazine available at the internet archive.  (We got a taste of the hard stuff when, inspired by Fred Pohl, we read five 1940 horror stories by Ray Cummings a couple of years ago.)

I am not quite ready to go back to my readings in the weird or science fiction realms, and so will try one of Fredric Brown's full-length noir novels; hopefully in that longer form I can expect him to deliver both a solid plot and the emotional and intellectual stimulation I crave.