Fredric Brown: "Death is a Noise," "Handbook for Homicide" and "The Freak Show Murders"

Let's read three more stories from 2012's Miss Darkness, a collection of crime stories by Fredric Brown.  Our last batch of three tales from Miss Darkness included two stories from the early 1960s as well as a 1942 piece, but all three of today's stories first appeared in magazines in 1943.  All three of today's stories are scheduled to be included in the forthcoming third volume of Haffner Press's Fredric Brown Mystery Library, Market for Murder.  

"Death is a Noise"

This story is founded on two plot elements which really aren't connected to each other, but it is still entertaining because of its action/suspense elements.

As "Death is a Noise" begins, the war is on and a 35-year-old guy who was rejected by the Army, our narrator, is travelling hobo-style--sneaking onto a freight train--to get to a town where he can get a job driving trucks full of explosives bound for the front lines.  While running beside a moving train he hits his head on a pole and knocks himself out; fortunately he wakes up in time to hop the train.  In a boxcar he meets a beautiful 25-year-old hobo woman.  

The narrator picks up on clues that suggest to him that the train and/or the railway are the target of saboteurs; our hero recognizes that the perfect place to detonate a bomb would be inside a tunnel through which the railway passes. The train and our narrator make it to his destination, and he gets a gig driving a truck full of nitro that very night.  Two thugs hijack the truck and these agents of the Axis powers try to put it in a tunnel where a train will hit it and cause a big kaboom but the narrator outfights them; after saving the truck and the train our hero falls unconscious.  When he wakes up, he is in the hospital and we get the twist ending--the narrator has amnesia and that gorgeous 25-year-old he was wishing he could marry is actually his wife already!  They met like two weeks ago and were married very quickly, and when the narrator hit his head the memory of those two weeks was lost.  

The sabotage plot and the amnesia plot feel unconnected from each other, which weakens the story, but most of the individual scenes are good and I like the style, the way Brown focuses on the narrator's fear and anxiety, so this story merits an OK rating.  

"Death is a Noise" debuted in Popular Detective, was reprinted a few months later in a Canadian edition of Popular Detective, and eleven years later in an issue of Triple Detective.

"Handbook for Homicide"

Diversity boosters may be excited to hear that "Handbook for Homicide" features a woman and a Native American who are smarter and better educated than the male Caucasian narrator, though their ardor may cool when they realize these representatives of marginalized communities revert to stereotypical behavior pretty quickly.  

In the opening scene of this longish (over 35 pages here in Miss Darkness) story, narrator Bill Wunderly is driving on treacherous mountain roads in a fierce rainstorm, headed to a remote astronomical observatory where his girlfriend, math whiz and assistant astronomer Annabel Burke, has secured him an office job.  The dangerous driving conditions lead to Bill killing the donkey of Charlie Lightfoot, an Indian whose rich father (oil money) sent Charlie to Oxford; Charlie is an alcoholic and Dad stopped sending him money after his son's third arrest, and now, to make money to buy booze, Charlie catches rattlesnakes by the dozen and sells them.  Now that the donkey that was carrying them is dead, the boxes of snakes are put in Bill's car.      

At the observatory we meet the rest of the victims and suspects, over a dozen people who live in and around the observatory: the scientists, the menials who serve them, and Charlie, who is an architect or engineer or something.  Almost immediately, Elsie the pretty maid--and love interest of assistant astronomer Paul Bailey--is found dead, her skull bashed in; after hearing her collapse in Bailey's room, the cast has to bash open the door to get to her, the door being locked; here we have one of those gimmicky locked room mysteries--who could have tolchocked her and then left the room when it was locked from the inside?

The cops can't be called because the rain has put the bridge and the phonelines out of commission, so Elsie is put into a makeshift fridge the scientists rig up.  Elsie soon has company as some of Charlie Lightfoot's snakes escape from the garage, presumably freed by the murderer, and kill Otto the janitor.  Now people are afraid to enter or leave the observatory because the high grass that surrounds it is presumably full of killer serpents.  

Bill talks a lot with Charlie and with the scientists, in particular an obese astronomer named Darius Hill.  Hill is obsessed with death and murder, to the point that he has penned an as yet unpublished study of murder and has pressured all his colleagues into reading the manuscript; Bill is the latest person to be badgered into the reading the suddenly apropos document.

As we expect in these kinds of stories, Bill gathers clues and at one point gets hit from behind and knocked out.  When word comes that a scientist who was not in the observatory, but at home a short distance away, has been murdered, Bill cracks the case!  He figures that the killer must be wearing protective gear under his clothes if he braved the rattler-infested countryside to kill that guy. and so they can find out who the killer is by demanding all the suspects lift up their trousers.  Selflessly, Bill shares his analysis with Darius Hill this and lets him take credit for figuring out who the killer is--this is to buoy Hill's spirits and salvage his reputation, as it does kind of seem like the killer has been getting ideas from his manuscript.  If you have met any Ph.D.s in real life, as I have, you won't surprised that Hill jumps at the chance to take credit and realize profit from some other guy's insight.

The killer, one of the astronomers, commits suicide when his identity is uncovered; luckily he has a long confession letter in his pocket that explains why and how he killed all those people; most significantly, this letter ups the story's grue quotient by exposing the bizarre macabre element of "Handbook for Homicide"'s locked room component.

MPorcius Fiction Log veterans may recall the 1942 Brown locked room mystery with a macabre element that we read in 2014, "The Spherical Ghoul," the outlandish and disgusting feature of which was a face-eating armadillo.  (Amusingly, one of the components of the collage illustration on the back cover of Miss Darkness is an armadillo.  I'll spare you my petulant theory that the prevalence of such collage illustrations is a sign our culture is in a period of decadence and rarely produces anything new of value and instead consists largely of recycling the worthwhile products of more fertile ages in the form of pathetic imitation and envious parody.)  The bizarre twist to the locked room puzzle in "Handbook for Homicide" is that the killer used a "deWar flask" full of "liquified air" to freeze the dead Elise's joints so she could be leaned against a wall like a rigid hunk of wood; the sound of her falling over when her dead joints thawed would make people who heard it think she had died later than she truly had, at a time for which the killer would have an alibi.

I question the strategy of putting the grotesque twist after the climax (the revelation and suicide of the villain) and before a happy ending; shouldn't the most remarkable thing in a story be part of the climax, or, if it is meant to be shocking, be the last line?  Oh, well.

"Handbook for Homicide" ends with a little half-page epilogue or denouement in which we learn Annabel and Bill get married and Darius Hill becomes director of the observatory.  Congrats to everybody!  Too bad about the maid and the janitor!

I don't care for the types of mysteries that revolve around having an army of suspects and a pile of clues, many of which are red herrings.  I can tolerate such dross if it merely serves as a vehicle for human drama--relationships between compelling characters or thrilling or fear-inducing sex and violence--like in those Italian giallo movies, the main attraction of which is not their convoluted and unbelievable plots but the nudity and death, the 1960s-70s fashion, interior decor, automobiles and music, the European scenery and the charming actors like Edwige Fenech, Luigi Pistilli, Ida Galli, George Hilton, Anita Strindberg, et al.  But "Handbook for Homicide" consists almost entirely of the clues and suspects, with almost no blood and guts or tension or human relationships, and its two big gimmicks--the fat astronomer's book about murder and the killer astronomer's use of "liquified air" to construct himself an alibi--are not particularly interesting.  Gotta give "Handbook for Homicide" one a thumbs down.

"Handbook for Homicide" appeared in American and Canadian editions of Detective Tales that have very similar but distinct cover illustrations.  Why did they do this?  Are magazines published in Canada required to have a set percentage of content by Canadian artists?  If you search around online a little, you'll find that an Italian designer and art director in 2010 composed a draft of a graphic novel based on "Handbook for Homicide;" check it out at the links.

"The Freak Show Murders"

Here we have a cover story from Street and Smith's Mystery Magazine that in 1985 was the title story of a Brown collection, the fifth in a series of nineteen books put out by Dennis McMillan Publications, Fredric Brown in the Detective Pulps.  "The Freak Show Murders"'s text is preceded by a three-page glossary of carney slang, thirty-eight terms that include words I think are nowadays in common usage like "mark" and "spiel" as well as words that have evolved in meaning since the 1940s like "geek" and some which I haven't encountered before, like "mad ball" (synonym for "crystal ball.")  

This is a long (like 70 pages here in Miss Darkness) boring story full of victims, suspects and clues.  Unlike with "Handbook for Homicide," however, the setting, a travelling carnival, adds some  interest.  Brown builds up a sad, oppressive, somewhat disgusting, atmosphere with talk of how the carney people constitute a separate world with its own lingo and mores that is in conflict with the rest of the world as well as constant reminders that the carnival is in financial trouble and that a current series of rainstorms is driving away customers, forcing everybody to walk through mud all the time, and even threatening to blow over the tents.  Brown pushes these themes with scenes in the carnival's wax museum--its dummies are reproductions of famous acts of murder, and we are told that it is people's "subconscious desire to see a man die" that brings then to the carnival to see these blood-drenched dummies, the creepy snakes and the life-risking stunts, and that the carneys are a reflection of the larger society to which they must appeal to secure their livelihood:

It was because the marks were what they were that the carneys had to be that way.  It was larceny in their hearts that made them mob the gambling concessions, trying to get something for nothing; lust that led them into the girl shows; morbid curiosity that made them like to see a man stick pins into his skin....

When I read this kind of social commentary in genre fiction whose appeal rests in part on depictions of sex and violence (and we've seen this sort of commentary in the work of Robert Bloch and Ray Cummings) I always suspect it reflects a level of unease or shame on the part of the writer--he wants to write for a living, and what sells is sex and violence, so that is what he writes, when perhaps he would like to write something more "elevated."  The narrator of "The Freak Show Murders," in discussing the waxworks, suggests the waxwork's talented sculptor would "starve" if he constructed not a "Chamber of Horrors" but a hall of heroes like Galileo with his telescope and Lincoln solving math problems on the back of his shovel. 

Our narrator, Pete Gaynor, is the barker whose job is to attract people into the freak show tent.  He has a crush on one of the performers, snake handler Stella Alleman, but she isn't sure they should hook up.  A carney--a laborer ("canvasman")--turns up dead, his head bashed in.  The guy who discovered the body, the pin cushion (a performer whose act is to pass needles through his skin), gets murdered not long after.  Stella's favorite snake disappears and it is also found dead.  Between discoveries of dead bodies both human and ophidian, Brown describes boring little incidents like interviews with the police and conversations that consist of speculations on who might be killing the carnival employees and why.  Members of the freak show staff get spooked and start quitting after some of them receive threatening "messages": a toy snake left in the bed roll of a guy renowned for his pathological fear of snakes, for example.  The narrator, who is a hemophiliac, finds a blade in his bedroll.

(One of the problems with the story is the character of the narrator; on the one hand he has a real temper and is quick to get violently angry--he actually punches a cop in the face for accusing him of being the killer--but on the other hand he is a hemophiliac who has to be careful because even "a slight scratch can be dangerous" to him.  Would a guy for whom a "slight scratch" is life-threatening really have such a short fuse that he would punch police officers in the face?)

In the final third of the story a new character appears, a blonde with a good body but whose face, behind its thick layer of cosmetics, is hard; she claims to be the wife of the first murder victim, and her mysterious actions offer Pete the clues he needs to figure out the whole mystery of who committed the murders and is trying to scare off the freaks and why.

"The Freak Show Murders" is pretty boring to read because the characters are lacking personality and their relationships are totally uninteresting, and because there is no action or suspense to speak of.  However, when you finish it, you can see that the plot works well on a mechanical level--how the various criminals and victims behave makes sense (even if how the narrator acts perhaps doesn't.)  Also, Brown's effort to portray a world within a world that is in conflict with that larger world but is also a reflection of its vices, is successful; he even portrays people from the outside world struggling to join (or at least infiltrate) the clannish world of the carneys, and our narrator's realization that it is possible to build salutary relationships between his own society and the larger society.  We'll call this one acceptable.

**********

I've been pretty critical of these stories, and we'll finish with some more criticism, though not of Brown.  "The Freak Show Murders" as it appears in my 2012 copy of Miss Darkness is full of irritating and distracting typos, most of them concerning punctuation.  I'm guessing these are scanning errors, based on my own experiences of scanning print outs snail-mailed to me by college professors who refused to give me electronic files of the impenetrable pseudo-scholarly articles which would be printed under their names in publications published under my boss's name.  I applaud the work of small publishers who print decades-old material by genre writers, but at the same time must report with sadness that these publications are often plagued by errors.  Maybe scanning has gotten better since I was doing it over ten years ago; making sure sentences have periods at their ends and not in their middles sounds like something AI could do.