Fredric Brown: "Boner," "The Monkey Angle," "Double Murder" and "See No Murder"

One of the stops on my recent road trip through the Upper MidWest, southern Canada and New England was Unnamable Books in Turners Falls, Mass, where I found many very cool Fredric Brown detective paperbacks.  These were all too expensive for me to actually buy, but today we get a consolation prize: four stories by Brown I found in scans of old pulp magazines at the internet archive.

"Boner" (1942)

This brief item appears in an issue of Popular Detective with a memorable Yellow Peril/Woman in Bondage cover.  The next year it appeared in a Canadian issue of Thrilling Detective.  

"Boner" is a patriotic and somewhat silly twist ending story.  An assimilated German-American, Heofener, who was born in Deutschland but has lived in the US for decades, is nightwatchman at a factory where they are building anti-tank guns.  That's the patriotic part, that this ethnic German born in Germany has embraced the American way of life.  He has been approached by a Nazi agent who wants Heofener to let him in to the factory.  Heofener has a cousin back in Germany, and the spy says that if Heofener will not cooperate, his cousin will die in a concentration camp.  The loyal American calls the FBI anyway and helps them capture the spy.  The spy says that his failure to report back to Germany will signal his colleagues to seize Heofener's cousin; the twist ending is that the immigrant's cousin is Heinrich Himmler--that's the silly part.  The spy knows that Heofener has a cousin back in the old country but doesn't know this cousin is a famous politician and one of Hitler's close associates?

Forgettable filler.    

"The Monkey Angle" (1942)

My mother-in-law watches that TV show Monk again and again and, when we are with her, should any one of us do something clever or is trying to figure something out or act in a way that might conceivably be considered neurotic, one of us will cry out "You're like Monk!"  I bring this up because "The Monkey Angle" stars "ace reporter Carter Monk," who I guess is a recurring character of Brown's.   

We've got more Nazis trying to infiltrate America's industrial establishment in this one.  Walter Harlow is a "well-known manufacturer" who has a beautiful little three-year-old boy, and the kid is kidnapped by Axis agents who demand plans of whatever new weapon Harlow's plant is producing in return for the kid.  The FBI is handling the case, using the local cops only for mundane guard duty.  But one middle-aged cop whose son was killed fighting in the Pacific wishes he could get right up in the faces of those Nazi bastards!  And then there's reporter Carter Monk, who has solved cases for the cops in the past.  Monk would like to stay out of the way of the FBI, but his gorgeous secretary has a crush on him and thinks he is a genius and perhaps the only guy who can crack the case, and so manipulates Monk into investigating the kidnapping himself!

I've just told you the entire set up, but Brown keeps lots of the info I just gave you a mystery until the middle or end of the ten-page story, so the revelation of this data comes across as plot twists.  The detecting part of the plot involves a fat Italian animal trainer who has a little farm and a monkey.  The action part of the plot occurs after Carter Monk figures out that the Italian's current monkey is no monkey at all but the three-year-old hostage sewed into a monkey suit!  Monk and that middle-aged Nazi-hating cop don't take the time to alert the Feds where the Harlow tyke is because time is of the essence--the FBI has given the Axis agents fake plans in hopes of getting the kid back without exposing America's war secrets, and the cop fears the enemy agents will realize the plans are bogus and murder the kid in their fascist rage!  So Monk and the copper bust into the Italian's little farm house and everybody concerned (excepting the Harlow kid but including Monk and the cop) gets shot full of holes and/or knocked unconscious.  Carter Monk earns a week-long hospital stay but it looks like all the other combatants end up six feet under--at least the Harlow kid and the Harlow war secrets are safe.

An entertaining little trifle.  I'll note here that back in 2014 we read another story by Brown with a pretty strange animal angle, "The Spherical Ghoul," and his influential novel The Screaming Mimi also features an odd animal.  I am also wondering if "The Monkey Angle" influenced one of Robert Bloch's best stories, "The Animal Fair."    

"Double Murder" (1942)

"Double Murder" debuted in the same issue of Thrilling Detective as "The Monkey Angle," but under a pseudonym.  "The Monkey Angle" and "Double Murder" were both reprinted in the February 1943 issue of the Canadian edition of Thrilling Detective, with "Double Murder" as the cover story.  "Double Murder" resurfaced in 1999 in a French Brown collection.  Where I am reading it, in the US Thrilling Detective, "Double Murder" is like 25 pages of text.

I was excited by "Double Murder" when I started it because it looked like its narrative was going to be driven by a passionate character propelled by his obsessive personality to pursue his insane goals come hell or high water.  Carl Lambert is a homicidal maniac with a pathological love for knives--and for carving up people with them!  He has escaped from the asylum, and is wearing ill-fitting clothes, stalking the city streets, hoping for an opportunity to obtain a knife!

I was hoping we'd follow this psycho as he attacked people and tried to escape justice, but he pretty quickly vanishes from the narrative and we get a story whose plot is driven by coincidences and misapprehensions and a complex web of deceit, leading to a twist ending that I found a little hard to accept.

Detective Mortimer Tracy has three days off and has gotten drunk; on the street he is accosted by a beggar--the beggar is Lambert, but Tracy doesn't recognize the murder fiend until after he has invited him to a bar and bought him a drink and the bartender has invited the stranger into the back for something to eat.  When the detective realizes his mistake the killer has vanished and there are two dead men in the alley behind the bar with fresh knife wounds.  While trying to catch the killer the inebriated Tracy slips and breaks his nose and is rendered unconscious.

His blunders earn him the ire of his superiors and it looks like Tracy will have nothing to do with the Lambert case but then, somewhat like what happens to Carter Monk in "The Monkey Angle," an attractive woman manipulates him into trying to solve the case all by himself.  Tracy travels here and there around the town, interacting with journalists, the woman who first discovered the two knifed bodies in the alley, and the gangsters who run the town's black market in booze.  Tracy pursues various lines of inquiry, making limited progress, and then the bad guy who really killed the two men and has been trying to pin the crime on Lambert commits blunders of his own and falls into Tracy's lap, so that Tracy gets back in his superiors' good graces.

I have to admit, having the course of the plot be determined by people's mistakes is a little disappointing after it looked like the plot was going to be driven by some serial killer's perverse psychology.  Brown did a good job depicting that inhuman monster's thought process in the first few pages of the story and I would have enjoyed an entire story in that vein.  

"See No Murder" AKA "Witness in the Dark" (1953)

My original scheme was to read this in a 1956 issue of Terror, where it takes up like 21 pages, even though "See No Murder" first saw print in New Detective in 1953.  But then halfway through I realized a page was missing from the scan of Terror, and I could discover no scan of the appropriate issue of New Detective.  Luckily, under the title "Witness in the Dark," this story has been reprinted in one of those Alfred Hitchcock anthologies and in the Brown collection Carnival of Crime, both of which can be found at the internet archive.  

I feel like a lot of thrillers feature a blind character (I recently saw Dario Argento's Cat o' Nine Tails and Lamberto Bava's Macabre, so maybe that is why I think that) and "See No Murder" features just such a character, a guy who is temporarily blind due to an industrial accident involving acid.  Our narrator, police detective George Hearn, on the penultimate day of his vacation, reads the story in the paper about how this blind guy, Max Easter, was hanging around at home with his friend Armin Robinson (their wives were out at the cinema) when some guy sneaked into the house, shot Robinson dead with Easter's revolver, dropped the gun--giving the blind Easter a chance to grab it and shot wildly at the killer--and then escaped.  Of course, after reading "Double Murder" (in which an apparently innocuous character turns out to be the real killer) and "The Monkey Angle" (in which what is apparently a monkey turns out to be a human toddler), I was wondering if the guy was really blind at all or in cahoots with the alleged murderer and other crazy theories.  And I'm not alone--George's wife Marge also voices some wild theories. 

Hearn figures out which minor character murdered Robinson by talking to various other minor characters.  Like so many Brown stories, it seems, an animal figures in the story--due to a bizarre series of circumstances a kitten is brought by the murderer to the Easter household and the feline is killed in the haphazard exchange of gunfire.  These strange circumstances seem to have been engineered by Brown to make Marge's off-the-wall theories entertainingly coincide with the truth.

"See No Murder" is probably the best of today's four stories because it depicts in a more or less convincing and perhaps even moving fashion contrasting sexual relationships--we witness George and Marge's pleasant sort of relationship, but then learn the horrible truth about poor pathetic Max Easter's relationship with his attractive but treacherously evil wife who is carrying on an affair with his work colleague, a thief who is willing to murder poor pathetic Robinson in order to conceal his crimes.

One of the 37 chilling exercises in Alfred Hitchcock Presents:
Stories to Be Read with the Lights On is Barry Malzberg's "Agony
Column" which we read back in 2022

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None of these stories is bad, but they are not really for me.  I'm not terribly interested in plots that consist of a long series of coincidences nor am I very interested in the mechanical aspects of committing or solving some elaborate or outlandish crime.  (When I watch those Italian crime movies I pay almost no attention to the plot--I watch them for the beautiful women, fancy photography, exotic settings, engaging music, etc.)  I am interested in human feeling--in suspense and fear and hate and lust and so forth--and ideally, to my taste, a story like "See No Murder" should be told from the point of view not of the police detective, a rather disinterested third party, but from the point of view of the victim--Max Easter, who is betrayed and tortured and fears for his life and takes desperate measures with horrible consequences--or one of the monstrous villains--Mrs. Easter or her lover, people driven by lust and greed to defy the social order and commit atrocities.

That's enough detective jazz for a little while--back to science fiction and fantasy in our next episode.