Fredric Brown: "The Ghost Breakers," "Homicide Sanitarium," and "The Gibbering Night"

I was impressed by Fredric Brown's 1947 "Don't Look Behind You", which I read last month, so let's check out three more 1940s crime stories by Brown that are easy to find at the internet archive.  All three of today's stories appeared in detective magazines in 1944, but I am reading them in scans of 1950s magazines in which they were reprinted.  In the 1980s and 1990s Brown's stories from the detective pulps were collected and published in nineteen volumes by Dennis McMillan, and two of those volumes have as title stories tales we are reading today, so maybe they are particularly good, or particularly representative, specimens of Brown's huge body of work in the crime field. 

(For still more MPorcius Fiction Log coverage of Fredric Brown crime fiction, I direct you to posts I did on his novels The Far Cry and The Five-Day Nightmare and a post on four short stories from the period 1943-49.)

"The Ghost Breakers" 

"The Ghost Breakers" debuted as a cover story of the July '44 issue of Thrilling Detective, an issue which also includes a story by our pal Leigh Brackett, another SF author whose crime stories and novels we have sampled.  I am reading "The Ghost Breakers" in the Summer '52 issue of 5 Detective Novels. 

Our narrator George Rice is a private detective.  Rice's friend Jan is a man of means who writes books on the occult for fun.  Jan has hooked George up with the Psychic Research Society, a dozen rich men who want to debunk charlatans and bogus supernatural phenomena.  As our story begins, Georgie boy is spending the night in an abandoned house near the train tracks that some people claim is haunted.  George hears a noise, and with his flashlight (this dump naturally has no electricity) he sees a hobo has fallen down the stairs--he checks and it seems this wretch has died.  George goes to call the cops, but when he gets back to the house the cops are already there and tell him there is no body to be found!  Presumably the bum wasn't dead after all, just knocked out and woke up after our hero left, but George is positive the body he found was dead.  Is something strange and sinister going on?

There follows page after page of George searching the house and its environs, including the nearby railway, and talking to bums and police officers and Jan and members of the Psychic Research Society.  This stuff is kind of boring, as Brown doesn't give us any reason to care what happens to any of these characters, and nothing potentially funny or exciting happens in any event.  One of the members of the PRS is a guy who is an expert magician and has taken to employing his skills to demonstrate how supernatural stuff is all a load of crap.  He demonstrates to George how his experience of witnessing a hobo fall down the stairs to his death could have been faked with special effects like a dummy and a phonograph.  Then he puts on a séance for the benefit of PRS members and George and Jan, to demonstrate how séances are bogus.  Seances, as you know, are conducted in the dark, and when the lights come back on, the magician is dead, strangled by one of the PRS members under cover of darkness!

George and Jan figure one member of the PRS is trying to trick another member out of money in a convoluted and confusing way that is too boring for me to describe here and involves a character who never appears on screen.  They set up a trap for their suspect that involves everybody trooping over to the haunted house and yet another episode in which a hobo appears to fall down the stairs; the appearance of yet another tramp falls to his doom shocks the murderer into confessing.

"The Ghost Breakers" is lame filler with no human feeling or tension; neither the villains nor the victims have any personality and they almost never appear on the stage so we don't care what happens to them.  I guess this sort of story is supposed to engross you in the mechanisms of the plot--the plans of the crooks, how the detectives figure out whodunit and how they trap the perps--but it wasn't really clear to me how the villains' scheme was supposed to work or how George and Jan figured out who the villains were.  Gotta give this one a thumbs down.  I like the skeleton archer on the '40s mag and the blonde on the cover of the '50s one, though.     

"Homicide Sanitarium"

"Homicide Sanitarium," from the first page, is far more compelling and entertaining than "The Ghost Breakers," which was a relief.  The characters are fun and their dialogue is pleasantly witty, and the plot sets high stakes and grabs your attention and, though kind of wild, is both comprehensible and sensical.

Our narrator is Eddie Anderson (!), private detective and newlywed.  A rich murderer, Paul Verne, is on the loose, and has been for three years, and there is a huge reward for catching him, a reward Eddie would certainly like to have.  He thinks Verne is hiding in a newly opened sanitarium for the idle rich as one of the patients, so Eddie contrives to get a job there.  The position he fills is an unusual one, but one that suits his needs perfectly.  The director of the sanitarium, you see, is the kind of head shrinker who thinks outside the box, and he hires Eddie to pretend to be a patient so he can observe and report back to him how the real patients behave when there are no doctors around.  

Brown's story moves at a quick pace and is full of fun surprises.  I liked how the plot was resolved, which inhabitant of the funny farm turned out to be the killer Verne in disguise, and I also thought the twist ending was fun.  So, thumbs up for "Homicide Sanitarium."  Brown has a high reputation for his mystery writing and, unlike "The Ghost Breakers," this story makes that reputation seem deserved.

Like "The Ghost Breakers," "Homicide Sanitarium" appeared first in Thrilling Detective in 1944 and was reprinted in 5 Detective Novels in the early Fifties, which is where I read it.  The cover of said ish of Thrilling Detective continues today's theme from "The Ghost Breakers" of magicians in peril.

"The Gibbering Night" 

The word "gibbering" always brings to mind those days when 1st edition AD&D was at the center of my life and I would spend hours reading those beautiful hardcover rulebooks; the Gibberlings from the Fiend Folio and the Gibbering Mouther from Monster Manual II were among my favorite entries to read again and again, and both had quite memorable illustrations.

Anyway, "The Gibbering Night" first appeared in July '44's Detective Tales and was reprinted in several publications, among them the 1952 issue of New Detective, where I am reading it, and a 1960 British magazine which also reprinted Ray Bradbury's famous "The Small Assassin."   

"The Gibbering Night" is a pleasant entertainment about how journalists suppress stories their readers would probably like to read at the behest of the government or to protect their friends.  It is also about how small town people look out for each other and how we all have a duty to serve in the war against crime!

Our narrator Pops is in his late forties and runs the weekly newspaper in Charlotteville, a little burg of 3000 souls.  As the story begins it is Thursday evening and he is complaining that the paper they will print tonight to ship tomorrow has no real news in it because nothing ever happens in Charlotteville.  But then he spends the night participating in adventures that would make awesome stories for the paper!

A man is found laying in a pool of his own blood, presumably dead!  Pops spots someone breaking into the bank and knocks the intruder out cold with a makeshift club!  Somebody escapes from the insane asylum and a party searches the countryside for the fugitive!  Pops spots a wanted gangster driving through town--this mobster kidnaps Pops and Pops' right-hand man at the paper and plans to kill the journalists on a lonely mountain road, but they escape and then, using the knowledge of the countryside they gained from hunting these hills, they ambush and slay the crooks!  

All these adventures would make thrilling copy, but Pops can't print any of them as stories!  The guy found in a pool of blood was just unconscious from an accident and asks Pops not to publicize the accident, as it might upset his relatives!  The alleged bank robber was the banker's son, secretly withdrawing money he had deposited in Dad's bank so he could run away from home to join the army--the banker asks Pops not to publicize the incident, as it is embarrassing.  The person who escaped from the asylum was a nice old lady, totally harmless--could Pops keep this out of the paper so as not to upset her relatives?  The Feds ask Pops not to print the story about the death of the mobster, because on his corpse was found a clue that will lead to the capture of other criminal masterminds, and if the death of the gangster becomes public knowledge the big fish up in Chi-town will go to ground and the G-men won't be able to spring their trap.

Sort of trifling, but a competently put together diversion.  I guess you might call "The Gibbering Night" a joke story, and I am generally allergic to joke stories, but the humor here is based on a plot that makes sense and not on absurdist nonsense, broad satire or lame puns, so it is inoffensive.

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Two out of three isn't bad.  No doubt we'll read more stories from Fredric Brown in the future.  But first, a 1960 novel billed as a work about relations between the sexes and between planets!