Fredric Brown: "Cry Silence," "I'll Cut Your Throat Again, Kathleen," "A Little White Lye," & "The Joke"

In our last blog post I invoked the names of Beaver Creek Antiques and Fredric Brown, and I do so again today.  On a recent trip to the BCA, I purchased a 725-page paperback collection edited by Jonathan Eeds, Miss Darkness: The Great Short Crime Fiction of Fredric Brown.  I bought it because I thought I might not be able to find the stories easily on line, and it didn't hurt that on the publication page we find thanks to our hero Barry N. Malzberg (as well as to Stephen Haffner.)

There are 31 stories in Miss Darkness, separated into titled sections.  Let's read four 1940s stories from the "Tinglers" section, on the basis of my theory that "tinglers" are stories that are scary or creepy or yucky.  All four of today's stories would be reprinted in the 1985 Brown collection Carnival of Crime, which, in fact, is at the internet archive, so if you want to read old crime stories heartily recommended by the Sage of Teaneck, they are just a click away.

"Cry Silence" (1948)

Here we have a story that first appeared in Black Mask and would be reprinted in multiple magazines, among them the British Suspense, and multiple anthologies, including The Black Lizard Big Book of Black Mask stories.  

This is a good story, quick and legitimately creepy.  The narrator is waiting at the train station next to a big strong guy who ignores him, apparently because he is deaf.  Meanwhile, a railroad employee and another guy are having the tired old argument about whether a tree falling unwitnessed in a forest makes a sound.  When the narrator chimes in on the argument, he hears a tale of murder, trickery, and suicide!  

The big strong guy is a farmer who, not long ago, was diagnosed as deaf.  Recently, he padlocked the only exit to a building on his farm--while his wife and her alleged lover were inside!  The farmer reported them as missing, but they died of thirst before anybody found them.  The farmer has escaped any sort of punishment; after all, if he is deaf, how could he hear their cries for help?  The railroad employee is certain the farmer is faking his hearing loss and is a murderer, and whenever the farmer is at the train station he talks to whoever might be around about the alleged killings, obliquely or just directly like today, endeavoring to, by reminding the farmer of his crime, to drive him to suicide.

Good.

"I'll Cut Your Throat Again, Kathleen" (1948)   

This one debuted in an issue of Mystery Book featuring on its cover a sweater girl, a skeleton and a boxer (something for everybody!) and would be reprinted nine years later in Mystery Digest.

Too long, not particularly disturbing, and with a plot that is convoluted and not quite convincing, "I'll Cut Your Throat Again, Kathleen" is inferior to "Cry Silence," though acceptable.

Our narrator, a successful musician, wakes up in a mad house with scars on his wrists and very little memory of how he ended up in this unhappy condition.  He doesn't even remember what the men in his orchestra, or even his wife, look like.  He is told that he went bonkers and tried to slash his wife's throat and then tried to kill himself, but wifey, who had only suffered a flesh wound, staunched the flow of blood from his wrists and saved his life. 

One of the few things the narrator can remember is the joy of creating music, and he is miserable over the fact that, his tendons being permanently damaged, he will never play saxophone or clarinet again.  Brown spends a lot of time describing the musician's life and career and he lays on us some of those florid descriptions of the powerful effect good music has on a sensitive sophisticated listener that we periodically have to endure from writers who love music, though Brown's efforts in this genre are not as extravagant as Harlan Ellison's.

When the narrator gets out of the loony bin and meets his wife there are clues and other things that jog his memory and he figures out what really happened the night his wife's neck and his own wrists got cut and he then exacts a terrible revenge on the party responsible.

The stuff in this story that is compelling--a nagging controlling manipulative woman and the norm-defying men of low morals who suffer under her reign and then snap and take radical steps to achieve their freedom or at least vengeance--takes up too little space and the stuff that is kind of boring--a guy really loves music and is a critically-acclaimed musician--too much, and the mechanisms of the woman's diabolical scheme and those behind the principal characters' physical and psychological injuries are too complicated to be really believable.

Merely acceptable.

"A Little White Lye" (1942)    

"A Little White Lye" is a competent suspense thriller story, more smoothly told than "I'll Cut Your Throat Again, Kathleen," but less transgressive and surprising.  It may make the skin of feminists crawl, however, as its female lead sees as the focus of her life being a good housewife and when she doubts her husband she is making a big blunder.

Ginny and Dirk met just a month ago and are already married!  Shortly after the honeymoon, Dirk finds them a nice house at a bargain basement price!  Why is it so cheap?  Because the last residents were a married couple, a young man and an older widow with a lot of money, whose marriage ended abruptly when the man murdered the woman and tried to dissolve her body in the bath tub with lye.  The killer has yet to be captured, and the whole neighborhood is wondering if he found the money the widow is said to have hidden someplace within the house, and, if he didn't, when he'll be back to look for it!  Much of the suspense of the story revolves around the suspicions of Ginny and we readers that Dirk is the killer in disguise--after all, we hear that the killer was an actor and we all know those actors are adept at using make up.

"A Little White Lye" debuted in Ten Detective Aces. 

"The Joke" (1948)

"The Joke" first saw print as a cover story of Detective Tales under the title "If Looks Could Kill!" and seems to have been a big hit, reprinted many times in at least six languages, mostly in collections of Brown SF stories.

Like "I'll Cut Your Throat Again, Kathleen," this one is satisfyingly gruesome but is undermined by an overly long set up that describes its protagonist and a plot that is a sort of Rube Goldberg contraption that relies on a series of unlikely coincidences.  Just OK.

Jim Greeley is a travelling salesman.  A big practical joker, he works for a manufacturer of practical jokes and his sample case is full to bursting with fake bugs, hand buzzers, and other gags, and Brown expends a lot of ink describing the different tricks and getting across the idea that Jim is a total jerk who loves to put things over on people.  Jim has a wife and kids back home, but he also has girlfriends in the various towns in his territory.  He calls up one of these girlfriends, a beautiful and faithless married woman, on the phone to make a date; in this convo we learn that the woman has a bad heart and any sudden shock could kill her.  (Are people this frail really the sort who cheat on their spouses on the regular?)  

Jim goes to a barber to get a shave before his date with the married woman.  He tells the barber all about the practical joke he is going to play on his date--when he picks her up he plans to be wearing a new form of super-realistic mask; he shows the barber how convincing the mask is (I guess the mask is the SF component of the story).  Jim is a real blabbermouth, and tells the barber the woman's full name and her job (she is the landlady of a boarding house--her husband works outside the home, doing what, Jim doesn't know.)  The barber gives Jim a facial massage and Jim falls asleep.  When he wakes up the barber tells him he has done him a favor by affixing the mask on him--Jim's joke is going to work like a charm!

When the faithless wife opens the door she doesn't recognize her date; the philanderer takes off the mask and she drops dead of shock.  Jim goes back to the barber shop, and in the reflection of the store window sees that the barber (who we learned earlier participates in amateur theatricals) has made up Jim's face so he looks like a corpse!  Through the window Jim can see the barber has hanged himself, and he also notices the sign in the window giving the barber's name--this guy, of course, is Jim's lover's husband.

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Three OK stories and one good one; not a bad record.  We'll read more Fredric Brown "tinglers" from Miss Darkness soon.