I looked into the biographical information on Fredric Brown over the weekend and found a lot of it is wrong. So I thought I would go over some of the issues here. It strikes me that "Brownie," to use his high school nickname (though in spite of his surname he was blond), was one of the most important mid-century noirists or hard-boiled writers. Much of his work is back in print again, but he still seems not to get quite the credit that he should in my view (and those in his coterie of devotees, one of whom is Lawrence Block).
The hard-boiled triumvirate of Hammett-Chandler-Macdonald seems, after having been set for a half-century or more, something inviolable, while in noir Highsmith, Goodis and Thompson have been more the thing with genre critics. Woolrich too, though some critics like Julian Symons hated Cornell's work. Symons doesn't even deign to mention Brown in his idiosyncratic but once very influential survey Bloody Murder, even in the last edition, from 1992, after some of Brown's books had been reprinted.
Fredric Brown may be too plot-driven for critics to take seriously and perhaps he has too many alcoholic loser protagonists for mass appeal. Raymond Chandler thought the hard-boiled fiction which he himself wrote was more "realistic" than the genteel English and American variety, but the truth is hard-boiled fiction is like a lot of genre wish-fulfillment fiction; it's just promulgating a different sort of fantasy. Instead of poisoned tea and scones at the vicarage, it's slugs and shootouts in the back alleys; but the latter is, if anything, more far removed from the lives of a lot of average middle-class mystery readers. Certainly it is from mine. I've sipped tea in polite company, though not with vicars, but the only hoodlum I ever "met," to my knowledge, was once when I was serving jury duty.
Just another nice middle-class kid? Brown's Senior Class photo (Class of '25) |
I think people--more often men--who read hard-boiled fiction identify with the tough-guy protagonists. Brown and for that matter Woolrich bros are a little too neurotic for mass appeal. Even a lot of the noir anti-heroes are often tough guys. They may be twisted murderers, sure, but they impose their will on others, at least for a time. (Often they meet their fatal matches in those mystic dames known as femme fatales.)
Brown's and Woolrich's men more often seem to be scared losers desperately on the run, at least in my experience. These authors identified with victims, Highsmith and Thompson with victimizers. At least that's the theory running through my head at the moment.
We all know about the tough life, to some extent self-imposed, that Woolrich had, but what about our Brownie? Like Woolrich, who was less than three years his elder, Brown was an only child of a marriage from around the turn of the century. He was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, two days before Halloween in 1906, meaning tha,t as I write this, his 118th birthday is fewer than 24 hours away. If he were alive today, he would be the world's oldest person, beating out Tomiko Itooka of Japan, a mere child of 116.
A conveniently located biographical page for Brown at the Ohio Center for the Book--his wikipedia page is rather inadequate--obviously draws on Jack Saybrook's interesting thirty-year-old critical study of the author, but a lot of the biographical information in it from 1993 simply is wrong.
According to this bio Brown's parents were Karl Lewis Brown, a newspaperman, and Emma Amelia Graham; and he grew up in Cincinnati. His mother died in 1920, when he was 14, and his father died the next year when he was 15. Brown supposedly resided with a family friend until he graduated from high school in 1922 at the age of 15.
He had an uncle in Oxford, Ohio who helped him out as his guardian and he worked until 1924 as an office boy in a "machine tool jobbing firm" until 1924. Supposedly in 1927 he attended single semesters at Hanover College in Indiana and the University of Cincinnati.
In 1929 he married Helen Ruth Brown, a woman to whom he may have been distantly related. This ostensibly after, lonelyhearts like, only ever having corresponded with her and seen her likeness in a photo.
In 1930 the newlywed couple moved to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where Brown worked as a proofreader and typesetter for the Milwaukee Journal. It would be close to the end of the decade before he started placing stories in the pulps, leading to an explosion of productivity in the Forties and Fifties, though Brown, in poor health and alcoholic, would essentially be played out by the mid-Sixties. He lived on until 1972, dying at the age of 65. He had divorced married again, in the Forties after the war, and for his health went to live with his second wife in the Southwest, in New Mexico and later Arizona.
Much of the early life detail is, however, as I have stated, wrong in detail. If people relied on written material from Brown for this information, he was not, for whatever reason, being truthful.
One strange thing is an omission. Fredric Brown actually had quite a prominent grandfather, Waldo Franklin Brown, who died at the age of 75 in 1906, the year after Brownie was born. It seems odd that he never would have mentioned Waldo. Like his grandson, Waldo was even a newspaper man, a nationally known progressive agriculturist who edited the farm pages of the Cincinnati Enquirer and Gazette and frequently published advisory articles under the name "Johnny Plowboy." Up to Brownie's himself Waldo was easily the most famous and distinguished person in the Brown family.
On his father's side Frederic Brown was descended from New England stock going back to Massachusetts into the 1700s, while on his mother's side he was descended from the Grahams: Presbyterians, surely Scots-Irish, going back to Pennsylvania.
His mother Emma's grandfather was Reverend Jacob Graham, minister of the gospel at Graham's Chapel in Lodi, a tiny village in rural Ohio. No relation to the late Reverend Billy Graham of North Carolina as fas I know, though the lines probably intersect somewhere back in Scotland if you go back far enough.
Great-Grandfather Graham |
Fred (let's go to his nick as an adult) apparently later claimed his father was an atheist, as he was himself. His mother's Graham ancestors would not have been happy with that, nor so would his father's Brown ancestors.
Grandpa Waldo was a Presbyterian Church elder and Sunday-school superintendent for two decades. One of Waldo's brothers was a Presbyterian minister. (I'm guessing the Browns were originally English Puritans who made the switch as Puritanism and Congregationalism attenuated in its stern righteousness in the 18th century.)
Fred's two sons with his first wife would be baptized within the Presbyterian Church, despite their father's atheism. Maybe his wife insisted. Fred stated that he himself was made to attend church in Cincinnati between the ages of 9 to 14 (1915 to 1920). He called those years the "most mixed-up period of my life."
The Brown house in Newport, Kentucky |
This was probably Brownie's bedroom. The furnishings seems strangely appropriate. |
For a few years years the Browns lived across the Ohio River in the small city of Newport, Kentucky (pop. about 30,000) in a narrow two story brick row house on Linden Avenue. They were living there when the census was taken in 1910, when Fred was a small child, along with Emma's widowed mother. Fred's father Karl's occupation was listed as "correspondence clerk." He was not a newspaperman.
Why did the family move from Cincinnati across the river to Newport in adjacent state? Well, possibly because Karl landed in hot water in Cincy. In 1908, when he was a salesman for Gray & Co., a maker of an electroplating apparatus, he was arrested on a warrant sworn by visiting Mexican businessman Benjamin Arboleda, who charged him with obtaining from him a draft for nearly $420 (about $14,000 today) on false pretenses.
I do not know the outcome of this case, but in 1911 Karl was back in Cincinnati and in court again where he testified in a fraud case concerning vacuum cleaner makers R. Armstrong and Company, for whom he worked as bookkeeper. I'm sensing these firms were somewhat on the shady side.
The Brown house in Cincinnati |
Yet Karl seemed to manage despite his brushes with the law, for in 1920 the Browns were still living in Cincinnati, residing in an old but attractive Italianate brick house on Chase street. Karl was now the manager of the R. Armstrong Manufacturing Company, which now was selling machine tools.
The chronology of events from Fred's life in the Twenties is, to be blunt, screwed-up. Let's get started on this.
Fred's mother Emma did not die in 1920, she died in 1923 (apparently from cancer), while his father did not die in 1921, but five years later in 1926. These are still untimely deaths, to be sure, at ages 50 and 53 respectively, but why did Fred move the dates up, if that is what he did, to make himself an orphan at age 15? He actually became an orphan at nearly 20 (still terrible). His mother died when he was 17. He says her death caused him to lose his faith in God for good.
Graham's Chapel |
It was Fred's Grandmother Graham who died in 1920, at age 72. Granted, to lose his whole immediate family--his grandmother, mother and father--at such a young age in the space of six years would have been devastating to most people.
The dates of Fred's graduation from high school are also wrong. He did not graduate from high school at the age of 15 in 1922, he graduated three years later, like a normal person, when he was 18. Nor was he an orphan when he graduated, as his father did not pass away until the next year. Again, did Fred lie about this, and if so why, to make himself seem like a prodigy? Or has this just been an error by researchers?
The "machine tool jobbing firm" with which Fred was employed as an office boy would have been the business his father managed in the Twenties, R. Armstrong Manufacturing Company. He later wrote a novel drawing on these work experiences: The Office, published in 1958, the same year Cornell Woolrich published his straight novel Hotel Room, which drew on his own life.
The supportive Oxford, Ohio uncle was Linn Waldo Brown, his father's slightly younger brother, for whom Fred would name his younger son in 1932. (His elder son was named James Ross Brown, Ross being the middle name of his father-in-law; see below.)
It was Linn who was a newspaperman. After having retired as a grocer, he became Oxford correspondent for the Hamilton Ohio Chronicle. Linn was also Oxford's public health officer. He too would die an untimely death, from a sudden heart attack at age 62 in 1937.
Oxford was then a small town of some 2000 people about thirty miles north of Cincinnati. It was where Fred's Grandfather Waldo died and was buried and where his father Karl was buried, even though Karl's wife Emma was interred, along with her mother, in Cincinnati. The Browns were lauded as one of "Oxford's oldest pioneer families."
Langstroth Cottage, where Fred's Aunt Florence was discovered bolt upright in her chair, dead |
Karl and Linn had four older half-sisters: Alice, Winona, Florence and Berta. Fred would have known all his Brown aunts, who passed away between 1929 and 1944. His Aunt Florence, who died in 1929 at age 65. For many years she had charge of Langstroth Cottage at the Western College for Women in Oxford, a national historical landmark where famed beekeeper L. L. Langstroth, a friend of the Browns, lived for three decades. Her lifeless body was discovered bolt upright in a chair in her bedroom by a history professor who had gone to check on her. There's a good macabre story for the Fredric Brown reader.
Another concerns another one of Karl's and Linn's half-sisters, Berta, who married Oxford antique dealer Alvin Gaston. After she died in 1934 at the age of 68, Alvin, six months later in 1935, said to be deeply despondent over the loss of his wife, committed suicide by slashing his own wrists and throat. Or so the county coroner concluded. (You can't read mysteries without being suspicious of this succession of deaths.)
It really is something out of a Fredric Brown novel, with some notable parallels to The Screaming Mimi, recently reviewed here (antiques, razor death). Interestingly, Alvin was said to have owned "one of the largest and finest collections of antiques in the state," much of which was sold at auction, the Gastons having had no children. Alvin's hoard of more than 1000 Native American relics, including arrowheads and axes, went to his nephew Victor J. Smith, a prominent geologist at Sul Ross Normal College at Alpine, Texas.
One of the Armstrong Manufacturing Company's amazing products, a home vacuum cleaner for only $6 ($199.99 today) |
Was their incompatibility and conflict between Fredric Brown's parents? There does seem to be a dichotomy between the pious Presbyterian backgrounds of the Browns and Grahams and Karl's trips to court to deal with business fraud accusations. Clearly, Karl was not an "honest farmer" like his father. He seems more like one those guys you used to see on late night TV ads hawking miracle inventions and get-rich quick schemes (now seen on Youtube and in certain presidential campaigns).
Then there's the matter of Fred's first wife, Helen. They weren't what I would call distantly related. Rather they were, Poeish-like, second cousins. Helen's father Thane Ross Brown was Karl Lewis Brown's first cousin.
It seems inconceivable that the couple had never met before their marriage. When they moved to Milwaukee after the marriage, they lived in 1930 with Helen's family at their attractive gabled, shingled Victorian home. Thane was a structural works civil engineer, as was his son, Helen's brother, who worked for the Civilian Conservation corps during the Depression.
Once accounts get into the 1930s things seem to get on surer ground. But I thought I'd do my bit to straighten out the earlier years. One thing I haven't found, what the "W" in his name stood for. Was it just possibly Waldo? Maybe someone else already discovered that.