Knock Three-One-Two by Fredric Brown

Did he dare?  Why not?  He'd taken chances before, although never quite in this way, but then he'd never been in this bad a fix before either.

A limited edition 2017 printing from Centipede Press

In our last episode we read a 1987 novel about a serial rapist and murderer and today we read a 1959 novel that has the same kind of devilry at its center--at least according to the cover of the 1960 Bantam paperback edition.  Knock Three-One-Two by Fredric Brown seems to be well-regarded, and was even adapted for television, serving as the basis for an episode of the 1960-62 series Boris Karloff's Thriller.  Let's see what is going on behind all those covers of women in their underwear via the internet archive, where are available two British editions of the book, a 1959 hardcover in the American Bloodhound Mystery series and a 1983 omnibus that collects four Brown novels.  (If you are some kind of library history junkie definitely check out the '59 volume at the internet archive, as it is plastered with all kinds of fun warning stamps ("PLEASE DO NOT SOIL, MARK, OR OTHERWISE INJURE THIS BOOK") and administrative notations ("ACCESSIONED: 23,843"; "CLASSIFIED: F") from the Blackpool Public Libraries system.)

I complained that 1987's Slob had a weak plot and characters that were childish about whom author Rex Miller spent a lot of time informing us, sometimes tediously.  Brown's Knock Three-One-Two, in stark contrast, has a plot in which all the scenes and characters are tightly integrated, everything following logically from what came before and from the characters' personalities and goals.  Instead of being what I called "superlatives" or "archetypes" about which we can't possibly care, like Miller's, Brown's principal characters are totally believable, and we shake our heads when they do wrong and feel for them when they are in trouble.  (Of course, it is probably not fair to compare Slob and Knock Three-Two-One, as they have different objectives, Miller's book's raison d'etre being to provide scenes of ugliness, perversity and gore that shock and disgust the reader.  There is sex and violence here in Knock Three-One-Two but it is not explicit and is there to build atmosphere and generate suspense, not as an end to itself.)   

Ray Fleck is a city-dwelling liquor salesman with an attractive tall blonde wife, Ruth.  And an addict--he loves to gamble!  As the story opens, Ray's addiction has landed him in some real trouble.  Ray owes his bookie Joe Amico almost 500 dollars, and Joe is getting a little anxious about his money!  Ray had better pay up soon--or else!  Ruth has some insurance and could cash it in to help Ray out, but she doesn't want to--this insurance is important to her, so important she took a part time job as a waitress at a Greek diner to meet the monthly premiums when Ray balked at doing so.  So Ray spends the evening out as he often does, hobnobbing with his many friends and Dolly Mason, one of the sluts with whom he cheats on Ruth, but, in addition to selling booze and indulging in a little bit of the old extramarital in-out, he tries to borrow enough money to get in on a hot poker game and make enough bread to pay off Joe.  Joe wants to meet him tonight, so Ray had better raise that cash fast!  But getting his hands on the necessary moolah is even more challenging than he feared, and as the evening proceeds Ray gets increasingly desperate and sheds more and more of his scruples until he takes the ultimate monstrous step.  

The saga of the Flecks takes place against a background of a city in fear--a serial rapist and murderer whom the public calls "the psycho" is haunting the town, putting everybody on edge.  So far the killer's victims have been housewives who have let him into their homes while their husbands were away, but the villain might change his tactics now that everybody in town is installing chain bolts and peepholes.   

Brown generates legitimate suspense and surprise as we follow Fleck's progress throughout the town and wonder what Ray, Ruth and the psycho, who is hungry to rape and kill again, will do, and what will ultimately happen to each of them.  Amoral Fleck is a gambler and everything he does is a gamble, a calculated risk, and maybe he ain't too good at that there calculatin' and as we watch he dances on the brink of disaster and commits graver and graver sins in his struggle to climb out of the hole into which he has dug himself.  Brown does a great job with Ray and Dolly, and a good job with many of the other characters--the psycho, Joe, and one of Dolly's many other boyfriends--her "steady," a private investigator--and an acceptable job with Ruth, Ruth's boss--the owner of the Greek diner, and a low IQ news agent who has some kind of complex that leads him to confesses to crimes he hasn't committed.  As we see in so much genre fiction, the evil and depraved characters are far more interesting than the goodies and the victims (how did honest and industrious Ruth get mixed up with Ray, anyway?)

There is a lot of psychology in this book.  The "show me" psychology Brown includes--offering Ray's and Dolly's thoughts as an explanation for why they behave the way they do--is good and totally rings true.  But there is also "tell me" psychology, Psych 101 goop and the kind of pop psychology you learn from popular fiction.  The Greek diner owner is a college graduate and he has maintained an interest in psychology and we get his theories on why the psycho is committing his crimes in the form of letters he types to an old college buddy.  And there is a long section about how the imbecilic news agent's religious father afflicted him with a guilt complex.  This material is the weakest element of the book and these passages are the least tightly integrated with the plot and he story' desperate atmosphere, but they don't sink the novel by any means and I suppose this sort of thing appeals to some readers.

(One of my general complaints about mystery fiction, including (maybe especially) the giallo movies I enjoy, is about the absurd and convoluted Rube Goldberg explanations writers come up with in an effort to make plausible the dramatic but counterintuitive behavior of their characters.  I feel like too often thriller writers come up with a bizarre behavior they think is scary and then work backwards, trying to come up with some reason for a character to act in such a strange way.  I much prefer drama with characters whose personalities and behavior one can relate to--it is easy to identify with Ray Fleck's addictive behavior and his panic over having gotten in over his head, and with the promiscuous Dolly's lust; their actions and problems are like those of an average person's--like the reader's or like people he knows--but more intense.  But who can identify with or recognize a guy who is developmentally disabled and afflicted with a mental illness that stems from his religious upbringing and leads to him confessing to crimes he didn't commit but who still somehow operates a small business at a profit for years?  This doesn't feel real, but like something the author was at pains to concoct to serve as a means of taking a swipe at religious people and providing an explanation for behavior that is not credible but which is required by the plot, and it takes the reader out of the story and softens the emotional impact of the story on him.)

I found the ending of Knock Three-One-Two a little abrupt and anti-climactic--maybe the psycho killer could have done more, and maybe the final scenes in which Ray and the killer meet their ultimate fates could have been more elaborate and more satisfying.  The ending isn't bad, but it doesn't meet the level of what came before, which is so good.

I have some gripes, but the portrait of Ray in extremis and of Dolly, Joe, and the psycho are entertaining enough that I am giving a thumbs up to Knock Three-One-Two, a real page-turner.

After two thrillers only peripherally connected to the world of SF, in our next episode we'll return to this blog's bread and butter, short stories promoted as science fiction and fantasy.  See you next time.