"Nightmare in Darkness" by Fredric Brown (Dennis McMillan, 1987)

Few writers could make the bizarre seem like the natural order of the world like Fredric Brown. The strangest things make the most sense, and anything ordinary should be observed with a suspicious, untrusting eye. Volume 11 in Dennis McMillan’s Fredric Brown in the Detective Pulps series, Nightmare in Darkness (1987) is another excellent collection of the author’s matchless imagination and creative panache. Comprising vintage pulp stories along with previously unpublished pieces, as well as a remembrance by one of Brown’s children (his son Linn), Nightmare in Darkness is both entertaining and enlightening.

Linn Brown’s introduction portrays his father as aloof and enigmatic, even to his own family. Apparently Fredric would spend only two hours every morning writing – no more, no less. He speculates that Fredric could have written more (which would have provided more income for the family), but that at first he just didn’t want to. Later, Fredric was too sickly to have the strength to write. Between allergies and emphysema, he was never the image of health.

One of Brown’s specialties was the “short short,” and Nightmare in Darkness has three exceptional specimens. “Why, Benny, Why?” shows the darker side of Brown’s humor, and the cruel irony and cosmic injustice that often rules his fictional worlds. In this disturbing twist on wish fulfillment, a young woman walks home alone and discovers that sometimes your worst fears can come true. In “Mirror,” which was never published in Brown’s lifetime, the titular object manifests a man’s guilty conscience. And in the previously unpublished title story, “Nightmare in Darkness,” Brown makes one of his definitive statements on the horror of our everyday reality. That it is believed to be the last story Brown ever wrote only makes the final revelation all the more powerful.

Brown also had a knack for imaginative titles, and “The Cheese on Stilts” surely rates among his best. The story is the first of three involving Carter Monk, a reporter whose nose for a good story usually winds him up in the most unusual predicaments. This one finds Monk at the scene of a murder, the investigation of which leads to – yup, you guessed it – “the cheese on stilts.” I won’t spoil the surprise of what it actually is. Also, Brown manages to work in a Schopenhauer reference, probably one of the rare times that the philosopher’s name was invoked in a pulp magazine. The other Carter Monk stories included are “Footprints on the Ceiling,” which is about a theater troupe that is shocked by what appears to be a murderer that walks on walls, and “The Monkey Angle,” which finds Monk investigating what a runaway monkey has to do with a kidnapping case.

Other pieces of note are the original ending to The Screaming Mimi (a wonderfully outlandish flight of fancy that takes an unexpected twist); “Get Out of Town,” which blends Brown’s love for music and bars with a fun gangster story; “The House of Fear,” about a housewife whose night classes in “Logic” prove life saving; and “Trouble Comes Double,” a cautionary tale about why one should never pass up a lobster dinner for a backstage invitation from a shapely dancer.

To close, two of my favorite quotes from the collection:

“And that gosh-awful melody went on, and each note seemed to hang in the air like a dead body hanging by its neck from one of a row of gibbets.” –“Get Out of Town”

“One by one the other lights were coming on now, and I could see my lobster again. But, instead of eating it, I watched the girl. She was even better looking than the lobster.” –“Trouble Comes Double”

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Cover Art by Joe Servello

"Before She Kills" by Fredric Brown (Dennis McMillan, 1984)

If there’s anything better than one Fredric Brown story, it’s several stories, and it doesn’t get any better than the Dennis McMillan collections. Before She Kills was the second volume of McMillan’s “Fredric Brown in the Detective Pulps” series. The first hardcover edition appeared in 1984, and the paperback (one of the few that McMillan issued for the series) appeared in 1986. William F. Nolan, noted scholar and author, was also a friend of Brown’s and wrote the introduction. “I found him to be a warm, quiet man with a wacky, pun-loving sense of humor,” remembers Nolan, “a sideways thinker who did all his rough-draft writing in his head.”

Nolan’s portrait of Brown should strike a chord with many writers. Before his first novel sold, he held down a day job to support the family and devoted the night to writing. Brown was, for years, a proofreader, and his intimacy with the English language shows through in his stories’ playful literacy.

The stories in Before She Kills span the gamut of Brown’s career, from 1940s pulps to 1960s digests, and they’re as madcap as they are magnificent. The consistent high-caliber of his stories is damned impressive, and it’s a blessing for fans of his work that he was so prolific.

The title story, “Before She Kills,” is one of two stories in the collection to feature Brown’s series private investigators, the uncle and nephew team of Ed and Am Hunter. In this yarn, a husband desperate for a divorce hires Ed and Am to make sure that his wife tries to kill him. Their job? Make sure she doesn’t succeed. It’s a terrific story that is characteristic of Brown’s sly ability to twist an archetype into something totally bizarre and original. Ed and Am’s other appearance is in “The Missing Actor,” about a thespian with a fondness for gambling who takes a powder with his father’s money.

My favorite story in the collection is “A Cat Walks,” originally published in the April 1942 issue of Detective Story Magazine. How’s this for an opener? “It all started with one cat, one small gray cat. It ended with nine of them. Gray cats all – because at night all cats are gray – and some of them were alive and others dead. And there was a man without a face, but the cat’s didn’t do that.” Brown is firing on all cylinders on this tale – a detective story with nightmarish illogic, a hint of surreal horror, and topped with a wily sense of humor.

In “A Date to Die,” a mystic (one of Brown’s favorite subjects) calls the police to report a murder that he commits while on the telephone. “A Mad Dog!” is about an alcoholic playwright who visits a doctor who specializes in experimental treatments for alcoholics, and winds up chasing an escaped homicidal lunatic through the night. And in “Handbook for Homicide,” Brown delivers a splendid twist on a variety of mystery archetypes. Take an old dark house, fill it with a bunch of astronomers, toss in some poisonous snakes, add a locked room murder, and top it off with a torrential rainstorm. With Brown behind the scenes, the possibilities are limitless with this one. It’s another short story classic from Fredric Brown.

Here’s a funny quip from “A Handbook for Homicide” that I’d like to close with: “I’ve been wet before and it hasn’t hurt me. I’ve been sober, and it has.”

This is among the more affordable McMillan volumes, and it is well worth tracking down.

"Thirty Corpses Every Thursday" by Fredric Brown (Dennis McMillan Publications, 1986)

The last time I wrote about Fredric Brown, Gordon Harries pointed out that it wasn’t a kick that I was on – it was a bender. Here I am again, a couple months later, writing about another collection of Brown’s short stories. This one is Thirty Corpses Every Thursday: Fredric Brown in the Detective Pulps Vol. 6, published by Dennis McMillan in 1986. It collects eight of Brown’s inimitable tales, all written between 1940 and 1943.

What makes this edition so special – apart from Brown’s inimitable, wonderful, and offbeat stories (he was not only prolific, but also consistent with the high quality of his stories, which is very good news for fans of his) – is that William Campbell Gault wrote the introduction. Himself a pulp maestro, he was both a colleague and friend of Brown’s. Gault eschews the typical laudatory introduction and instead contextualizes what it meant to be a burgeoning/struggling writer for the pulps at that time, like writing for fly-by-night sex magazines when nothing else was available. “I think the dirtiest word we used was ‘curvaceous.’ They bought longer stories than the syndicates and paid the exorbitant price of one third of a cent a word for them.”

Gault also describes a writer’s community in which they all looked out for each other. They helped get agents, or to get manuscripts in people’s hands; they gave rides when someone needed them; and they played golf for small stakes when they weren’t writing – which wasn’t often, as they were always pounding the keys. “It was a better time, those days, depression and war notwithstanding. We wrote and they bought. We wrote fast; they bought cheaply. But they bought. They didn’t assume it would make them rich; all they asked for was reasonable returns and reader interest.”

Ending on note at once somber and optimistic, Gault comments on the changing reception to pulp literature over the years. “It would be comfortable to think that the garbage that leads the best seller lists is a new trend in America. It isn’t. Check your old World Almanacs to confirm that. The best sellers of those years are no longer being reprinted; many pulp writers are. Do we have to die to be appreciated? It doesn’t matter. We are doing what we want to do and getting paid for it. There is no higher reward than that.”

As sincere as I think Gault is, there’s something hidden in that last remark, a secret anxiety that plagues all writers. The fear of being forgotten, or not being read – or not being able to be read. There’s a dual responsibility between readers and publishers to help keep literature alive. Readers must remember, and they must recommend – which is why Patti Abbott’s “Friday's Forgotten Books” initiative is so crucial. But, the work must be kept in circulation, and that’s not always the case. This edition of Brown’s short stories, as with all of his volumes in the McMillan line, has been out of print for about twenty years. Luckily, this volume was released in paperback, and for around thirty bucks you can still pick up used copies. Other volumes appeared only in hardcover, and those are far more expensive, and much harder to come by. Some are available through interlibrary loan – otherwise, we are left to pass along our copies to friends, to share what we have collected and what we love. Ultimately, this is one of the responsibilities of readers, writers, fans, critics – no one is exempt. You read the book, and you like it, then share why it is you value it. The more you share, the more you ensure that the book’s life will be sustained.

On that note, here’s a listing of the stories included in the collection, their original bibliographic information, and a quote and brief synopsis for each. The best story, in my opinion, is not the title story, but “A Matter of Death.” It shows Brown’s experimental side, as he alternates seamlessly between the point of view of the murderer, the victim, and the oblivious patrol officer on duty that night. As a literary device it not only heightens the suspense for the reader, but also forces us to connect to all three characters in different ways. Our experience with the story is not only much richer, but also darker (our sympathy is not so simple or straightforward) and funnier (as omnipotent readers, we see all the confusion that the characters aren’t fully aware of).

On with the quotes!

“Murder Draws a Crowd” (Detective Fiction Weekly, July 27, 1940)
“In the heart of the crowd across the street, a woman screamed. It was a scream of sheer horror.”
A series of mysterious ads draws large crowds to the Herald-News Building, and in the midst of the hubbub a murder is committed. Yet no witnesses can be found.

“I’ll See You at Midnight” (Clues, November 1942)
“I took a drink of the coffee, dark, black, and unsweetened. It burned like hell going down. But there were other things inside me that burned worse.”
Larry Bonnert lost his job, his wife, and his self-respect when he failed to put the gangster Dixie Wilman behind bars. Now he has a chance to get it all back, but the price is steep: risking his own life to put a bullet in Dixie right in front of his gang.

“Death’s Dark Angel” (Thrilling Detective, May 1943)
“Maybe it was just as well that didn’t know what he was headed for, that evening.”
Walter Hanson shows up to his bookie to collect on a one dollar bet and winds up with a couple of gangsters thinking he committed murder and stole their ten-thousand dollars.

“Thirty Corpses Every Thursday” (Detective Tales, December 1941)
“I started to thinking back and I felt lower than a mole’s instep.”
Two of the last three busses to Phoenix have gone off-road, killing all thirty passengers. Bill knows it can’t be coincidence but can’t prove otherwise, so reluctantly he gets behind the wheel for the midnight road, ready for anything…

“A Matter of Death” (Thrilling Detective, November 1944)
“He surprised me by falling out of the closet with a thud that seemed to shake the whole hotel. He was dead as a salted mackerel, and he hadn’t got into that closet and died of heart failure waiting for me.”
Getting off the bus in Cincinnati for a quick beer turns out to be a bad idea for Jack, because soon there’s a corpse in his hotel room, and a warrant out for his arrest.

“A Fine Night For Murder” (Detective Tales, November 1942)
“To hell with the kid, let him die. Mary’s and Delaney’s kid, and the hell with it.”
A bored police officer patrols the seemingly boring streets while unbeknownst to him a deadly reunion is shaping up when an ex-boyfriend just out of jail comes to town looking for revenge.

“Satan’s Search Warrant” (10-Story Detective, September 1942)
"Big Ben Hayden woke up, not screaming, but wanting to scream. Two ghouls, each taller than a house, had been fighting each other to decide which of them would eat Ben for an hors d’oeurve…”
Police officer Ben Hayden resents being woken up to go back to work. Even more he resents having to walk through the rain to investigate an accidental death. And then he realizes it’s murder, and that he’s at the wrong end of several guns. Now he really wishes he didn’t pick up that phone.

“Death Insurance Payment” (Ten Detective Aces, October 1943)
“And if the man on the floor of the closet was Larkin, it was quite obvious why he had not straightened the kitchen or fixed the furnace. He was dead, quite dead.”
Henry Smith shows up to a house to sell life insurance and winds up with two dead bodies on his hands – and three new customers. Too bad they’re also the only suspects.

[Brown, Fredric. Thirty Corpses Every Thursday: Fredric Brown in the Detective Pulps Vol. 6. Cover by William L. McMillan. Miami Beach, FL: Dennis McMillan Publications, 1986.]

"Homicide Sanitarium" by Fredric Brown (Dennis McMillan, 1984)

I’ve already written about Fredric Brown several times on this blog before, so before I launch into my own enthusiastic review, let me begin by quoting some names you might recognize. Donald Westlake said, “Fredric Brown had one of the eeriest and most fascinating minds of his time…he consistently saw new visions of strangeness and fear, or new ways of seeing the old. Every day was the day of the Jabberwock in that fertile imagination,” while Bill Pronzini simply stated, “Fredric Brown was one of the best storyteller of his time.”

It’s hard for me to top this praise, except to say that I am continually delighted to be reminded of the boundlessness of Brown’s creativity. “Twist endings” are, on their own, an expected cliché – but Brown’s twists are as twisted as his deviant characters, and as otherworldly as the purple monsters that stalk his sci-fi masterpiece What Mad Universe. But whether writing sci-fi or, in this case, mystery fiction, Brown's fiendish humor is unparalleled.

Homicide Sanitarium, the first volume in Dennis McMillan’s The Fredric Brown Pulp Detective Series, was originally published in 1984, with a second printing in 1987. Now out-of-print (though used copies can be found online at a reasonable price, though subsequent McMillan’s compilations can be quite pricey), Homicide Sanitarium collects seven short stories that are all excellent examples of the author’s style and capability.

Here’s a brief rundown of the stories included, as well as their original publication information and a favorite quote from each.

“Red-Hot and Hunted” (Detective Tales, November 1948)
“Is this a bad joke, Adrian, or is he…crazy?”
How far would an actor go to get a part? What are you to say when one calls you up to audition for a role and calmly confesses to murdering his wife?

“The Spherical Ghoul” (Thrilling Mystery, January 1943)
“I had no premonition of horror to come. When I reported to work that evening I had not the faintest inkling that I faced anything more startling than another quiet night on a snap job.”
A student working the night shift at the coroner’s receives an unpleasant shock when he discovers someone has mangled the unidentified corpse beyond recognition. But the door was locked, there was no sign of forced entry, and no one entered the building all night…

“Homicide Sanitarium” (Thrilling Detective, May 1941)
“Why, I wondered, in the name of sanity or insanity, had someone put that loaded tommy gun in my room?”
A detective takes an undercover job in an asylum to locate a missing killer.

“The Moon for a Nickel” (Street & Smith’s Detective Story Magazine, March 1938)
“Brakes screeched. A gun barked and a bullet buzzed past his left ear like an angry hornet.”
Brown’s first published story is a clever and charming tale of a stargazer whose telescope witnesses something it wasn’t supposed to.

“Suite for Flute and Tommy-gun” (Street & Smith’s Detective Story Magazine, June 1942)
“The flute, in the middle of a high note, seeming to give an almost humanly discordant gasp before it went silent.”
One of Brown’s unique gifts is to take an impossible-seeming title and make it possible. A flute-playing bank manager gets gunned down in the middle of rehearsal.

“The Cat from Siam” (Popular Detective, September 1949)
“And the cat, backing away from him, was shrinking to her real size, getting smaller, her claws still scraping the cement as she backed away.”
The stand-out story of the collection is a tense thriller about a university student, his professor, the professor’s daughter he is in love with, and a crazed lab technician on the loose with a gun. Brown’s prowess for psychological horror is on full display.

“Listen to the Mocking Bird” (G-Man Detective, November 1941)
“It’s a mocking bird. And it crochets.”
A performer’s unmatched ability for birdcalls gets him in trouble when witnesses hear his characteristic vocal abilities coming from the dead man’s room.