Anything you want. Didn't God have something there: anything you want if you want it badly enough to concentrate on getting it. Any little thing like a million dollars or any big thing like spending a night with--what was her name?--Yolonda Lang.
*The Bird with the Crystal Plumage is a great movie if you judge films by how beautiful are the photography and set design, how exciting the action scenes, and how fascinating the actors' faces. If you go to the cinema looking for a believable story and characters you care about, well, maybe not.
**Worse, this Bruin Books printing is rife with printing errors that I suspect are artifacts of the electronic scanning of an old text: missing words, missing punctuation, periods in the middle of sentences, words with most letters in one font and one letter in another font, etc.; at times I consulted earlier editions of the novel available for free at the internet archive.
No matter how ridiculous and perverse the idea of a dog trained to disrobe a woman might be, I thought this a good first chapter, and it piqued my interest, because it telegraphed that the plot was going to be driven by a man's single-minded dedication to a selfish goal, the kind of plot I like.
The identity of the Ripper, and how Sweeney discovers the truth, are broadly similar to what we see in Argento's film. Sweeney uses a connection in the police department to secure an opportunity to talk to an imprisoned convict who was associated with the first of the Ripper's victims, and this guy directs our hero to the small shop where she briefly worked where he talks to the owner, a promiscuous homosexual. (As in Brown's Rogue in Space, gay men are regarded as disgusting in The Screaming Mimi, with the characters employing terms like "faggot" and "fairy" in reference to them; when drunk and in need of money in Chapter 1, Sweeney even considers mugging a gay man he sees.) Sweeney learns that the Ripper's first victim was murdered just after, in the "queer's" absence, selling to an unknown customer a nude statuette in black material of a terrified woman, a bit of merch colloquially known in the trade as a "Screaming Mimi." (In The Bird with the Crystal Plumage the significant art object is a painting.) Sweeney tracks down to his rural shack the starving artist who sculpted the prototype of this mass-produced figure in clay; this guy based the statue on his sister, whom he saw being assaulted by an escaped mental patient. The sculptor saved his sister by killing the maniac, but sis ended up in the nut house herself--he was told she died there.
Even if a dog undressing a girl and a man paralyzing a woman for hours by reciting snatches of poetry at her are a little unbelievable (the latter scene is like an illustration of an idea I've seen bandied about on right-wing twitter, that women don't react to the words men say so much as respond to the tone in which the man says them, you know, like a dog), The Screaming Mimi is convincing as a whole because all of Brown's moving parts fit together and operate smoothly, and payoffs for all the foreshadowing and the little twists (like the radical shift in how we feel about Doc Greene) are all satisfying. Obviously, by today's standards, The Screaming Mimi is sexist and homophobic and maybe even racist (all the talk of Irish people being like this or that) but it is a well-crafted and entertaining detective story and I can especially recommend it to fans of The Bird with the Crystal Plumage because it is fun to see what Argento took from the novel and what he left out or added.
Bill Sweeney of Chicago is an Irish-American who loves serious music and fine literature. He has a long successful career as a newspaper reporter behind him, but recently lost his job and is now a homeless drunk who sleeps in a park. His pal and fellow bum Godfrey ("God" for short) tells him that a man can get anything he wants if he wants it badly enough, including money, including a woman. Tonight Sweeney is taking a walk when he comes upon a crowd standing before the glass double doors of an apartment building. Just inside the door lies a prone woman, a striking beauty, inert, guarded by a huge dog, a behemoth more like a wolf than the typical domestic doggie. Everyone watches amazed as the woman comes to her feet with difficulty, revealing a bloody abdominal wound, and then the dog somehow pulls her dress off, revealing her naked body to the onlookers. Then she collapses again. The police incapacitate the dog and then tend to the gorgeous nude woman. Sweeney returns to the park determined to "get" the injured woman, the most beautiful woman he has ever seen, expressing his desire as wanting to "spend the night with her."
Galvanized by his desire for that woman, Sweeney sobers up and gets his job back. He quickly finds out the name of the woman--Yolanda Lang--and taking advantage of his position as a journalist gets to work building up a relationship with her and hunting down her attacker, the homicidal maniac the press have dubbed "the Ripper" and credited with slaying three women before his dog-foiled attack on Lang.
The Screaming Mimi has nineteen chapters, and Sweeney spends 17 or 18 of them doing the stuff guys always do in detective stories--travelling here and there throughout the town--and beyond--looking at documents and talking to people--generally over drinks--in his quest for clues. He goes to bars, he calls in favors, he goes to a nightclub, he blackmails a creep, he rides a train, he commits a burglary, he suffers a burglary, he gets beat up. Brown writes in a chatty jocular style, as if he and you are hanging out together and he is telling you a story. There are lots of little ironic, sarcastic, cynical jokes:
A streetcar went by on Clark Street and it didn't sound any louder than an earthquake or the crack of doom. Not much louder, anyway.
He crossed Wacker Drive, hoping that a car would hit him, but none did....Brown doesn't go out of his way to paint images or inspire an emotional reaction in the reader; the text is very plot-focused, but there is a brisk pace and a strong sense of tension that is leavened but not undermined by the pervasive bitter jokes and the many references to classical music, the fine arts, and literature. The many little elements that make up the plot--the large roster of characters and all the individual clues--are like the tesserae of a mosaic; each has a strong individual personality conveyed efficiently in short clear strokes, each of individual interest, so you don't feel like you are inundated with trivial details, but instead enjoy each little piece of the jigsaw puzzle as it turns up, whether or not you know yet where it fits.
Lang ("Yo" to her friends) is a dancer who performs at nightclubs with her monstrous canine, Devil; their act is called "The Famous Beauty and the Beast Dance" and climaxes with the dog removing her dress. Yo's booking agent, Doc Greene, a retired head shrinker who is in love with the sexalicious Yo, immediately realizes that Sweeney is a rival, and the two men instinctively hate each other with a passion and each half-suspects the other of being the Ripper. Greene does, however, help Sweeney in his pursuit of the Ripper, saying that he doesn't want the murderer to get another chance at Yo, and has hopes that Sweeney will be the serial killer's next victim.
Back in Chicago, Sweeney takes the steps that reveal to him the astonishing truth and put his and others' lives in desperate danger. "Yolanda Lang" is a pseudonym--Yo is that artist's sister, who went insane when she saw the statue memorializing the worst moment of her life and became the murderous Ripper! Doc Greene, whom we have been conditioned to think is blackly evil and probably the Ripper himself, sacrifices his reputation and his life trying to protect Yo from herself and the cops. Sweeney barely survives, in the penultimate scene using his erudition to basically hypnotize the naked and insane knife-wielding Yo, turning her into a sort of statue so she won't slash him or sic her monstrous dog on him. The three figures, man, woman and beast, spend an entire night in a stalemate, fulfilling in ironic fashion Sweeney's euphemistic ambition to "spend the night" with the most beautiful woman he has ever seen.
So, another thumbs up for Fredric Brown. Maybe we'll read another novel by him soon.
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