Not a Nice to Place to Visit--and You Might End up Dying There: Pop 1280 (1964) by Jim Thompson

"Just how big is Pottsville, anyways?"  "Well, sir," I said, "there's a road sign just outside of town that says 'Pop. 1280,' so I guess that's about it.  Twelve hundred and eighty souls."

All my life, I've been just as friendly and polite as a fella could be.  I've always figured that if a fella was polite to everyone, why, they'd be nice to him.  But it don't always work out that way.  

It was a kind of hard fact to face--that I was just a nothing doing nothing.  

But we're a real God-fearin' community, like you've probably gathered.

They were all asking for it!  And like the Good Book says, Ask and ye shall receive.

Just because I put temptation in front of people, it don't mean they got to pick it up.

I'd maybe been in that house a hundred times, that one and a hundred others like it.  But this was the first time I'd seen what they really were.  Not homes, not places for people to live in, not nothin'.  Just pine-board walls locking in the emptiness.

I shuddered, thinking how wonderful was our Creator to create such downright hideous things in the world, so that something like murder didn't seem at all bad by comparison.

Or maybe I'm just kind of sour...

--Pop. 1280 (1964) by Jim Thompson

Nearly sixty years and six months ago, on the night of Father's Day, June 21, 1964, three young, earnest and idealistic civil rights activists--James Earl Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner--were abducted and systematically shot and killed by a mob of vicious Ku Klux Klan thugs in a lonely wood outside Philadelphia, Mississippi, where the trio of activists had been participants in the "Freedom Summer" campaign to register black Mississippians to vote.  (Fewer than 7% of adult black Mississippians had been registered to vote in 1960.)  For this transgressive compassion for their fellow human beings the trio merited merciless execution in the eyes of many white Mississippians.  

After the young men's huddled bodies were discovered buried under fifteen feet of dirt at a dam site about six weeks later, federal authorities brought charges for the killings against eighteen members of Mississippi's supposed "master race," including the county sheriff and his deputy.  It was clear that the racist white segregationist state government empowered by the good white people of Mississippi to keep their fellow black citizens "in their place" was not going to lift a finger to achieve justice for the victims, a native black man and two "outside agitator" Yankee Jews.

Seven of the charged men were eventually convicted, but none of them would serve more than six years in prison.  Many of the people implicated in the case would die peacefully in their beds, their pasts cleanly scrubbed and whitewashed as it were by their families. It was a paltry dish of justice that was served, to be sure, but the FBI was working in the face of implacable opposition from local whites, who still clung to the notion that through "massive resistance"--i.e., intimidation and outright murder--they could prevent black Mississippians from enjoying equal rights as American citizens.  After all, they and their ancestors had successfully resisted reform for nearly a century after the Civil War.  

Just around the time that the bodies of Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner were unearthed from their mean red clay grave, paperback publisher Gold Medal published Jim Thompson's crime novel Pop. 1280.  The novel details the murderous activities of Nick Corey, sheriff in the tiny town of Pottersville (population 1280), the seat of rural Potts County, "the forty-seventh largest county" in an unnamed southern state.  (In fact there are precisely forty-seven counties in the state, get it?)

When the novel opens Nick Corey is facing the tiresome task of having to run for reelection for the office of county sheriff.  This time around there may be trouble in store for him.  He has gotten along for years by being amiable and inoffensive and doing nothing, but now the people seem actually to want him, so he frets, "to do a little something instead of just grinning and joking and looking the other way."  Over the course of the novel Nick comes to the conclusion that the easiest thing for him is just to start killing objectionable people on the sly.  

He starts by shooting the two pimps in charge of the local whorehouse, who had been giving him, along with a rakeoff, a whole lot of lip and insolence.  Whores are essential to the stability of Pottsville or any town, we learn.  "Why," ingenuously observes a deputy sheriff in a neighboring county, "if there wasn't any whores, the decent ladies wouldn't be safe on the streets."  But them saucy pimps had to go and go they did, courtesy of night shots from Nick Corey's gun.  In dispatching them, Nick also takes time to setup for the crime a man he hates (quite rightly so).  

a southern courthouse

Nick soon finds himself plotting murders to get himself out of other difficulties, like the problem of nasty, vicious town drunk Tom Hauck, with whose sultry wife Rose he, Nick, is having an affair.  Nick's own wife, Miriam, despises him and he despises her, she having trapped him into marriage with a rape claim, scotching his plan to marry local beauty Amy Mason.  Nick would dearly love to ditch Miriam and win back ladylike Amy.  

There's also the problem of his opponent in the sheriff's race, who is that rarest of things in Potter County, a genuinely decent man.  In fact, in the whole novel Nick's naively good opponent is about the only decent person one will find, aside from the inoffensive, obsequious old black man Uncle John.  

Much of Pop. 1280 is sardonically amusing, as Nick slaughters and sets up people who are, frankly, quite deserving of the dishonor he does them.  But eventually things take a darker turn, as murder starts to go to Nick's head.  

In this aspect of the novel, Pop. 1280 very much resembles inverted mystery tales like Francis Iles' Malice Aforethought from over three decades earlier, but where it very much differs from and ultimately transcends such earlier books is in its ambitious political satire and its utter, overwhelming nihilism.  Pop. 1280 is one of the darkest meditations on the sacred myth of the American Dream that I have ever read.  

Although Jim Thompson set the novel in the second decade of the twentieth century (most people drive horse and buggies, autos and telephones are comparatively new and there's a reference to silent film actor William S. Hart whose first film dates to 1914), the author clearly wrote it with an eye cocked ahead fifty years later to the then present time of the second Reconstruction, when activists were pressing the federal government into finally fulfilling the broken promises of the first Reconstruction by mandating desegregation and civil rights, including the right to vote.  

Lige Daniels lynching at the courthouse
in Center, Texas,1920
Obviously an exciting day in the dull lives
of the local yokels.

The greatest irony of Pop. 1280 is that the murderous sheriff is probably the most admirable, on-the-ball citizen of the county, with the most developed social conscience (not that there's much competition).  It's his consciousness of the manifest absurdity and injustice of life that finally drives Nick over the edge into sheer, savage nihilism. 

What he's really expected to do as sheriff, Nick comes to realize, is not administer justice, but to keep down the "white trash" and the "damn n-----s," or all those people who can't pay the poll tax or pass the selectively administered literacy tests and thus are denied the franchise and have to be kept in line on behalf of the respectable classes, who lie and cheat and steal and debauch just as much as anyone else but keep it all on the down low while they virtuously attend church on Sunday.  

In this novel there's no real justice in the world, no discernible meaning to life. It's just kill or be killed. Be a master or slave.  

There's a deeply radical critique of society here, obviously, one that sweeps beyond the compelling personal drama of The Grifters to encompass an entire accursed place in time.  In the United States MAGA regimes currently are banning what they call critical race theory and diversity education because they want to present a more positive vision of the the American past, but the sanitized vision which they have cooked up in their kitchens is a saccharine and false one.  Try to imagine growing up a black person in the South under the Jim Crow "separate but equal" regime between 1875, after the demise of Reconstruction, and 1965.  How does a decent country allow that to go on for almost a century?  How does it pat itself smugly on the back for its rare humanity and decency?  

Jim Thompson's father 'Big Jim" was sheriff here for a time
in the first decade of of the 20th century, around the time the novel Pop. 1280 is set

Pop. 1280 gets much closer than sanitized MAGA curricula to what life was like for a lot of people in God's country.  That's partly why the book would be banned from school libraries under MAGA regimes.  

Nick can be quite corruscating in his seemingly naive homespun country philosophy, like when he discusses southern lynching:

I figure sometimes that maybe that's why we don't make as much progress as other parts of the nation.  People lose so much time from their jobs in lynching other people, and they spend do much money on rope and kerosene and getting likkered-up in advance and other essentials, that there ain't an awful lot of money or any hours left for practical purposes.

Or his observations on Henry Clay Fanning, a great believer in the rights of a parent, but not so much in his obligations:

That Henry Clay Fanning was a real case, what we call a cotton-patch lawyer down here.  He knew all the privileges he was entitled to--and maybe three or four million besides--but he didn't have much sense of his obligations.  None of his fourteen kids had ever been to school, because makin' kids go to school was interferin' with a man's constitutional rights.  Four of his seven girls, all of 'em that were old enough to be, were pregnant.  And he wouldn't allow no one to ask 'em how they'd got that way, because that was his legal responsibility, it was a father's job to take care of his children's morals, and he didn't have to tolerate any interference.

Of course, everyone had a pretty good idea who'd gotten those girls pregnant....

I could see HCF on X today, vigorously denouncing both polio vaccination and "men" in women's bathrooms while God knows what goes on at home.  

This is humor at its darkest and as pointed as a sharpened bayonet.  Coming in 1964, as the white South through criminal mayhem and murder was doing its damndest to maintain its regime of white privilege in the face of the increasing dismay and disgust from the rest of the nation, it reads like Jim Thompson's great fuck you letter to his native region.  (The author was born in southeast Oklahoma, the son of a county sheriff, and later grew up in Texas.)

Throughout the Sixties and Seventies in the US critics (Anthony Boucher excepted) largely treated Pop. 1280 as pulp trash, refusing, if they looked at all, to gaze beyond the book's sex and salaciousness to see the social satire.  However, this pulp trash was appreciated, like Jerry Lewis, by the French.  

In "Donald Stanley's Book Corner" in the San Francisco Examiner in 1966, the columnist observed that France's Serie Noire crime fiction imprint, edited by Marcel Duhamel, now numbered 1000 volumes, 300 of which were by American authors.  No. 1000 was Pop. 1280.  Although "wholly ignored in its homeland," Stanley wrote with evident bemusement, in France critics had lauded the novel"as a fine example of black humor."  They compared Jim Thompson to Henry Miller and Erskine Caldwell. I'd say here he's also an R-rated Mark Twain.  The novel frequently is quite funny.  (See the outhouse episode for example.)  

Phillipe Noiret and Isabelle Huppert
as the wily sheriff and his troublesome, fiery mistress in Coup de Torchon

It was the French who in 1981, filmed Pop. 1280, cannily relocated from the American South to French West Africa, as Coup de Torchon. ("Wipe of the Cloth" I think would be a literal translation.)  In France the film, a popular hit, received ten Cesar nominations and it was also nominated for an academy award for best foreign film at the 1982 Oscars.  If only we could see ourselves as other see us.  Especially today.  

Today the book generally is regarded as one of Thompson's finest crime novels and I agree.  The biggest weaknesses are its women characters--Nick's trio of problematic ladies is pretty shrill and onenote--and its indeterminate ending, which was altered in the film.  But for most of the ride the book is masterful indeed, if you have the stomach for some hard home truths about the checkered history of God's country. 

The Art of the Grift: The Grifters (1963), by Jim Thompson

Thus, for the tenth time that day, he had worked the twenties, one of the three standard gimmicks of the short con grift.  The other two are the smack and the tat, usually good for bigger scores but not nearly  so swift nor safe.  Some marks fall for the twenties repeatedly, without ever tipping.  

--The Grifters (1963), by Jim Thompson

Since in the United States a month ago--Has it been a month already?--Americans elected as president, for the second time, an unashamed, unregenerate grifter, a cynical purveyor of Trump guitars and Trump watches and Trump bobbleheads and Trump bullshit, I thought it would be appropriate to pay tribute to the heinous, YMCA-tripping, old bastard--and the legion of marks who elected him--with a review of Jim Thompson's timeless classic crime novel The Grifters.  

If there's a crime writer who knew about rogues and thieves and villains from the poisoned heart of America's heartland, it was old Jim, creator of such classic noir novels about rural psychos and sociopaths as The Killer Inside Me and Pop. 1280.  I freely admit to loathing the first of those two books, finding it completely repulsive, but in a way maybe that's a testament to its power.  I think Jim had his finger on the elevated pulse of America's dark, damaged heart far more surely than more pious writers, not to mention even that other great J-man, Jesus Himself.  

Born in Anadarko, Oklahoma in 1906, Thompson led a wayward life but in his middle age he published a slew of hard-hitting paperback originals in the United States during the Fifties and Sixties that now widely are seen as crime fiction classics.  Essentially this run extends a dozen years beginning with The Killer Inside Me (1952) and ending with Pop. 1280 (1964).  Along the way some of the author's most famous paperback originals were Savage Night, The Nothing Man, A Swell-Looking Babe, A Hell of a Woman, After Dark, My Sweet, The Getaway and The Grifters.

The hard-living Thompson died at age seventy in 1977 with his books out-of-print and seemingly forgotten, though two of them were filmed in the Seventies.  In 1984 Vintage's Black Lizard Crime imprint began reprinting Thompson's novels, in the process catching the jaundiced eye of then influential British crime critic Julian Symons, who adjudged, Jehovah-like, that the America was "no more than an efficient imitator of other writers in the genre, particularly James M. Cain."  

Personally I find Thompson's crime writing much more perverse and viscerally horrifying than Cain's.  Cain after all was in vogue in the Thirties, while Thompson was pushing the envelope even by Fifties standards.  I frequently come across passages in Thompson that I find intensely unsettling--that's not something I can say so much about Hammett or Chandler or even James M. Cain.  

But I think Symons essentially dismissed most of American "tough" crime writing after those three greats as simply sex and sleaze.  He didn't really like Cain all that much either, complaining of the author's "coarseness of feeling allied with a weakness for melodrama."  

No wonder, then, Symons saw Thompson as nothing more than a mere imitator of Cain.  You could level the same charges at Thompson were you so inclined; and Symons was so inclined.  Some critics were never comfortable with the sex and violence in these books, and Symons was one.

I'm not comfortable with them myself frequently, but then every read needn't be a comfort read.  Symons himself dismissed much of British genteel detective fiction as anodyne and he reserved only mockery for cozies.  Certainly cozy is not a word you can apply to Jim Thompson's books.  

The violence--especially against women--in The Killer Inside Me by the murderous anti-hero is something I personally can't stomach, but I have enjoyed other Thompson novels over the years, increasingly so in the last few as my own life has gotten bleaker and the world has turned dark.  If you want to read about sleazes and psychos and dirtbags and louses--which after all is what a good-sized chunk of the world is and always has been composed of--Thompson is the guy for you.  

Still, however, I'm always pleased to find qualities of suspense and puzzlement in a  crime novel and one of my two favorite Thompson novels--the other is Pop. 1280--has just that.  It's The Grifters.  

Thompson published The Grifters in 1963, near the end of his great run as a novel writer.  I couldn't find a single newspaper mention of it until 1984, when it was became one of the Thompson novels Black Lizard republished.  

Six years later The Grifters was released as a film starring Anjelica Huston, John Cusack and Annette Bening.  It was produced by Martin Scorsese and directed by Stephen Frears, an up and coming director who had already helmed the lauded films My Beautiful Laundrette, Prick up Your Ears and Dangerous Liaisons.  (Is the last Renaissance noir?)

Huston, Cusack and Bening were all up-and-comers in a manner of speaking.  Huston, 38 at the time of filming, was the daughter of the great sometime noir director John Huston (The Maltese Falcon, The Asphalt Jungle) and had won a supporting actor Oscar for her role in her father's gangster film Prizzi's Honor four years earlier. 

Cusack, 23, was already a veteran of Eighties teen coming-of-age films and Bening, 31, made her breakthrough in this film.  She received her first Oscar nomination (supporting) for this film, while Huston received her last (lead).  Frears was nominated for best director and the screenwriter, noted crime writer Donald Westlake, was nominated for adapted screenplay.  

Probably the film just missed a best picture nomination.  (They really nominated Godfather Part III over this?)  It still stand as one of the most lauded neo-noirs of its era.  In the original noir era one might have seen, say, Joan Crawford, Tony Curtis and Gloria Grahame in the major roles.  

I haven't seen the film in over thirty years but I certainly still remember some of the scenes.  (Ugh, do I.)  I had never read the book, however.  

It's is about Roy Dillon, a 25-year-old short con grifter (as opposed to the grifter of the more complex long con, like running for President of the United States) who has been on his own since at age seventeen he left the single, "backwoods white trash" mother who negligently raised him.  

At age thirteen Lilly Dillon married a thirty-year-old railroad worker, giving birth just shy of fourteen to Roy.  Her husband died soon after and she eventually ended up in Baltimore as a B-girl and later went in for the bookie rackets.  This has brought her out for a time to LA, coincidently when Roy is gravely ill with internal bleeding after a grift that went wrong resulted in his getting a baseball bat tap to his stomach.  

Though Lilly, who had been a wayward adolescent mother and not much better as an adult, hasn't seen Roy in eight years, she takes him into her new place to recuperate.  Roy also has a girlfriend, Moira Langtry, an attractive divorcee of, I think it was, thirty-one.  Moira and Lilly can't stand each other (they see too much of themselves in each other) and Moira tries to set her son up with the nice young European immigrant day nurse, Carol Roberg, whom she has hired to help care for Roy.  

Lilly, it seems, has developed a bit of a belated conscience about the shitty upbringing she provided for Roy, who has grown into a smart, handsome man, even if his ethics, like hers, are rather on the shady side.  Moira, who has been living off a large sum of cash and occasionally granting other men her favors for a price, is none too scrupulously honest either.  Of course she isn't happy about the prospect of Carol, nor is she pleased with the existence of Lilly.  Nor does Lilly think much of Moira.

I have to stop here, just when the novel really gets interesting, because I don't want to spoil it for those who haven't read the book of seen the film.  The last fifth of this short novel (about 55,000 words) is really headlong paced, with lots of suspense and classic noir twists and turns.  It is indeed very much a noir novel, with copious irony in the just-missed opportunities and fatally spurned forks in the road.  At heart it's a study of the two main characters, the mother and her son, both of them toiling in traps of their own devising.  

Certainly neither one of them is a sympathetic individual, but neither are they entirely hateful either despite despicable things that they do.  Both of them are driven by a desperate will to survive, but which of the two has the stronger will?  

And then there's Moira, who is given some backstory too, though I was not as drawn to her character.  Carol on the other hand is a genuinely "good girl" in the hard-boiled/noir tradition.  Yet she is allowed quietly to fade from the narrative.  (Indeed in the film she is largely eliminated altogether.)  

This is not a sex and sleaze novel, though there is a torture scene of a woman involving a cigarette lighter and a bag of oranges that is particularly repellent (though it's not as bad as The Killer Inside Me).  In many passages I actually found the book quite ruminative.  They don't call Thompson Dimestore Dostoevsky for nothing.  Very near the end the author offers some thoughts on men protecting women whether they like it or not, as you might say, which seem actually feminist, especially in today's environment.  

Although Carol is a lesser character, there are some truly awful revelations concerning her that will stay with you, as will the book's ending.  For a lot of people in the world life indeed is brutal, nasty and short.   Thompson certainly catches that quality of what the poet Blake called endless night, what none other than Agatha Christie wrote about in her bleak mystery of that title concerning the activities of what you could well term a grifter, which she published four years after The Grifters.  

It's what Thompson in the novel calls life on Uneasy Street.  This is true noir in the black-and-white tradition, but just as timely and terrible as life is today:  

For a fearful shadow lies constantly over the residents of Uneasy Street.  It casts itself through the ostensibly friendly handshake, or the gorgeously wrapped package.  It beams out from the baby's carriage, the barber's chair, the beauty parlor.  Every neighbor is suspect, every outsider, everyone period; even one's husband or wife or sweetheart.  There is no ease on Uneasy Street.  The longer one's tenancy, the more untenable it becomes. 

It's true too of even the whitest and loftiest of houses, at least when the grifters have taken up residence.

Killing Kindness: The Lenient Beast (1956) by Fredric Brown

As crime and mystery writers got increasingly interested during the mid-century in the psychology of murderers, fictional slayers became portrayed in increasingly nuanced ways, not just as ingenious chess puzzle plotting murder fiends and slavering shocker maniacs.  Fredric Brown's The Lenient Beast (1956) looks at the seemingly paradoxical concept of the kindly killer and is reminiscent of novels like Helen Nielsen's The Kind Man and Dorothy Salisbury Davis' A  Gentle Murderer, both of which published five years earlier.  

The Lenient Beast received good reviews when it was published, especially from American mystery reviewing dean Anthony Boucher, who deemed the novel "extraordinarily successful."  During the first Brown revival after the author's death it was reprinted in paperback in 1988 for the first time in English in three decades, in tandem with the better-known The Screaming Mimi.  Some readers have found this Beast a bit too tame, however--dare I say that it's a tad too laid-back and gently ruminative for some tastes?  

Beast is set in Tucson, Arizona, where the author and his wife had recently settled.  It concerns the criminal activities of John Medley, a mad "mercy killer" who when the novel opens has made another killing, as it were: this a man so guilt stricken over the deaths of his wife and children in a recent car accident for which he blames himself that he no longer has left within him much of a will to live, just barely going through the daily motions to get by from to day.  

A pair of investigating cops, Fern Cahan and Frank Ramos, first interviews Medley in the matter of this murder.  (Conveniently Medley left the man's dead body in his backyard.)  Only Frank, a smart, Mexican heritage cop who may just be too smart--and too Mexican--for his own good, senses something is rather off about the guy.  

The novel is told through multi-character chapter narratives: those of Ramos, Medley and Cahan, as well as the cops' superior officer, Walter Pettijohn, and Ramos' wife, Alice.  Alice Ramos is Brown's seemingly obligatory alcoholic character, an ugly drunk who has gone off Frank and is having an affair to boot.  

Since this is not a whodunit, the novel's interest lies in the fates of these characters.  Will Ramos' inchoate suspicions focus firmly on Medley?  Will Medley strike again?  Will Alice patch things up with her husband or leave him for good?  Will confirmed ladies' man Cahan settle down with a nice girl?

I thought this was a very engrossing crime novel.  It is of course Brown's take on the police procedural subgenre and it is very good indeed, much more convincing to me than Elizabeth Linington's seemingly endless succession of Dell Shannon police procedurals featuring her highly synthetic and insufferable, ostensibly native Mexican cop Luis Mendoza.  Brown actually deals with the matter of anti-Mexican racism lightly but convincingly.  

Brown underplays the finale in a way that probably disappoints some readers.  Personally I found it rather moving and was pleased that the author avoided a "movies" finish.  Beast is a thoughtful, indeed rather philosophical novel, as suggested by the poem, by Beat poet Lawrence P. Spingarn, which Brown uses as an epigraph as the title of the book.  

The lenient beast is no jabberwock, easily dispatched by the clean snicker-snack of a vorpal blade, but rather something altogether more, well, manxome: the death we actually come to welcome.  When you're done with Night of the Jabberwock, do give Beast the old gyre and gimble.  

When I said that mercy stood

Within the borders of the wood,

I meant the lenient beast with claws

And bloody, swift-dispatching jaws.

Brownie Points A Fredric Brown Review Roundup: Night of the Jabberwock (1950)

I haven't posted in almost a month but have been working on a Fredric Brown article and I did a couple of book intros in that time too.  The Fred Brown article is about 12,500 words and forty pages with lots of new information on the author and will appear shortly.  I hope you will read and enjoy it.  For now I'm posting some shorter reviews of Brown works.

My favorite pb edition of the novel
though I own the early Eighties ed.
by Quill, where series editor
Otto Penzler gives himself a bio
on the front endpaper right below
the author's bio.  Modest, huh?

Night of the Jabberwock (1950)

This one made the rounds of the blogosphere pretty broadly a few years back.  I think the fantastical, Carrian/Queenish plot elements had special appeal for people.  But there's a grounding presence of smalltown realism too at the novel's core.  

Born in 1906, Fred Brown grew up in Cincinnati, Ohio and began his crime writing career while living in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, but his own family background was very much that of smalltown Ohio.  His father Karl was a cog in some highly questionable Cincinnati businesses but his grandfather Waldo was a prominent agriculturist and newspaper farm page editor and his uncle Linn was also a small-town newspaperman.  

The elder Browns all hailed from the little pastoral college town of Oxford, Ohio, about forty miles from Cincinnati, which at the time Fred was growing up had a population in the 2000s.  

Although Brown calls the small town in Night of the Jabberwock "Carmel City" and Bill Pronzini, who has written some perceptive stuff on the author, has stated that it's in Indiana, I suspect Carmel City is really based substantially on Oxford, Ohio.  There is also a Mount Carmel in Ohio, not far from Cincinnati.  A lot of Brown's settings are indeterminately located somewhere in the Midwest.  

Fred's Uncle Linn's modest frame house in Oxford (left)

In any event, Brown in Jabberwock offers a charming small-town portrait--charming, that is, until bizarre and deadly things start to happen.  People have compared the novel, in terms of its surreal aspects, to Joel Townsley Rogers' mystery The Red Right Hand, but you might also be reminded of Ray Bradbury's dark fantasy novel Something Wicked This Way Comes, which in the early Eighties was made into a not very good film with a terrific movie poster and performance by Jonathan Pryce.  There's even a bit of noirist Jim Thompson (predating), with a particularly venal and vicious small-town sheriff.  

Fred Brown expanded the novel from his novelette The Jabberwocky Murders, folding into the middle of the concoction, like Moira and David Rose in Schitt's Creek, the plot of another novelette, The Gibbering Night.  Some people have complained that the two novelettes don't really mesh--"folding in" can be hard (see video below)--but I actually think they fit together in the novel just fine.  They add to the sense of its being "one wild night."

Jabberwock details the crazy adventures one night and early morning of Carmel City Clarion editor Doc Stoeger, who wistfully dreams someday of breaking a big story in his newspaper.  He may soon get his wish--and more!  Be careful what you wish for.  

One weird thing happens when a strange man calls upon Doc at his home that night and invites him to attend, at the local haunted house naturally, a meeting of a Lewis Carroll fan group called the Vorpal Blades.  (Doc is a Carroll fan too, like the author.)  Is this man insane?  There's a report of an escaped maniac loose in the vicinity.  Is his story simply the delusion of a madman?  

From there things just get weirder.  Yet at the book's heart is a genuinely clued mystery plot.  The novel received very good reviews in its day, with critic and pioneering woman journalist Miriam Ottenberg declaring: 

This could be titled Lewis Carroll revisited.  On one side of the looking glass are lunatics, bank robbers and murderers.  Figuring prominently on the other side are Vorpal Blades, Jabberwocks and Bandersnatches.  Sashaying on both sides is a small-town editor, who just wants to out out one exciting issue of the Clarion,  How Mr. Brown manages to juggle this assortment into some faint semblance of credibility is one of the minor miracles of mystery fiction.

Bill Pronzini does not deem the novel one of Brown's very best, adjudging the plot too fantastical for Brown credibly to explain at the end.  Me, I think Fred just manages it, though the killer's motivations get to be a bit of a stretch at times I'll admit.  

For me the only major flaw of the novel  is the melodramatic denouement having to do with how Doc extracts a confession, which Brown lifted from the pulp version.  It still feels rather overpulped to me.  

Otherwise, Brown did a great job of broadening and deepening the novel from its source material.  The arc story of Doc hoping to break some big news for once is very well done indeed, with a nice sense of whimsical irony.  

As I said I've been rereading and first-time reading Fred Brown this month and I think my top three by him so far would be The Screaming Mimi, The Far Cry (both reviewed here) and Jabberwock.  Far Cry is still my favorite--though I'm due to reread it!

Spirit Messages from MAGA World: The Surly Sullen Bell/Lost Lake (1962), by Russell Kirk

Michigan writer and intellectual Russell Kirke (1918-1994) has been called the Forgotten Father of American Conservatism and the greatest twentieth-century conservative man of letters, but, outside of strictly politics, he was also a proponent and practitioner of the classic ghost story most prominently associated with the English academic medievalist scholar M. R. James (1862-1936).  

Detective fiction, as we know here, often has been called an inherently conservative form; and so has been termed supernatural fiction.  One of the most interesting pieces in Kirk's first supernatural short fiction collection, The Surly Sullen Bell (originally published in 1962 and reprinted in 1966 as Lost Lake, arguably a more appropriate title), is its afterword, "A Cautionary Note on the Ghostly Tale," which makes precisely this assertion. It was originally published in The Critic in 1962.

no one who tries to live beside Lost Lake lives very long....

In his Note Kirk argues, as others have, that ghostly fiction derives its frisson from the reader's susceptibility to a belief in the supernatural.  Materialists, so this argument runs, will be far less inclined to feel shivers from the specter of, well, spectres.  Yet even purely materialistic people want to believe in something, a fact reflected in their escape reading.  If one rejects God and His Heavenly Host, one perforce turns to the likes of hard-boiled dicks and little green men.   Saith Kirk:

To most modern men having ceased to recognize their own souls, the spectral tale is out of fashion, especially in America....Perhaps the cardinal error of the Enlightenment was the notion that dissolving old faiths, creeds, and loyalties would lead to a universal sweet rationalism....Credulty springs eternal, merely changing its garments form age to age.  So if one takes away from man a belief in ghosts, it does not follow that thereafter he will concern himself wholly with Bright Reality; more probably, his fancy will seek some new field--possibly a worse realm.  

Thus stories of the supernatural have been supplanted by "science-fiction"....[M]any people today have a faith in "life on other planets" as burning and genuine as belief in a  literal Heaven and literal Hell was among twelfth-century folk, say--but upon authority far inferior....Having demolished, to their own satisfaction. the whole edifice of religious learning, abruptly and unconsciously they experience the need for belief in something not mundane...they take up the cause of Martians and Jovians.  As for Angels and Devils, let alone bogles--why, hell, such notions are superstitious!  

On the covers of Sixties Gothic
paperbacks heroines have always 
lived in castles.  

As for crime fiction, Kirk manages to get off a shot against the hardboiled stuff, which he sees as providing the readers the spiritually banal thrill of "real horrors": 

The august schools of Mr. Dashiell Hammett and Mr. James M. Cain provide for appetites that find phantasms not sufficiently carnal.

I'm not sure what Kirk, a confirmed Anglophile, made of classic, genteel detective fiction of the type associated with the English Crime Queens, which flourished between the wars right along with the sort of classic supernatural fiction which MR James wrote.  I suppose at mid-century it did seem for a time in the field of escape fiction that the carnal ashcan realists and the imaginative sci-fi scribes were carrying the day, but I don't believe that the classic frights and thrills epitomized by writers like MR James and DL Sayers ever really went out of fashion.  

But that's Kirk as the intellectual theorist.  How was he as a practitioner of that dark art which he preached?  The Surly Sullen Bell, or Lost Lake as I shall shall call it henceforward, collects ten pieces, one of which, "Lost Lake," is not fiction (purportedly).  Ironically it's one of the best pieces in the collection. Kirk was a natural essayist.  

Russell Kirk, man of the people

"Lost Lake" is all about Mecosta County, Michigan (where the author lived), as he sees the place.  Mecosta is a county in north central Michigan, about an hour north of Grand Rapids, with a population of about 40,000 people, 93% of that white and 4% black.  (It's about double today what it was back in 1960.)  The largest habitation is the county seat, Big Rapids, with about 8000 people.  

Median income is about $34,000, with 16% of the population living below the poverty line.  Barack Obama came within 137 votes of carrying the county in 2008, but since then it has gone increasingly Republican in every presidential election, with the Nameless One taking about 62% of the vote against Joe Biden in 2020, even with all the Democratic election fraud that MAGA says rampantly occurred all across America, but particularly in swings states like Michigan.  (Guess in that state it all took place in Detroit.)  

Recently, the county has been engulfed in controversy over the planned building of an electric car battery plant with Chinese connections. In August JD Vance showed up in Big Rapids to denounce the plan.  

So opens Kirk's essay about the place:

A fatality clings to some places:  not merely to historic houses or to battlefields, but to obscure corners recorded only in the short and simple annals of the poor.  One such place--almost at the back of my old house in Mecosta, Michigan--is Lost Lake, with the derelict fields and neglected woods around it.  The genius loci is malevolent.

...Mecosta is an impoverished and forgotten village, set in a township that has only two real farms cultivated.  A mile-long stretch of wide street, faced with false-fronted white frame buildings as in a western movie set: that is Mecosta.  There are more gaps than buildings along the streets nowadays, and our biggest store burned recently.  

Mecosta: a village of false fronts and great gaps

This is a terrifically well-written and deeply evocative piece about what the author deems a magnificently creepy region.  If you want to commune with witches and hants come to macabre Mecosta, he could be saying.  But it's also kind of horror porn-ish?  The jury roll includes "the names of indigent persons, as a means of poor relief," Kirk tells us.  But he treats the appallingly ignorant poor of Mecosta as ghostly material for our entertainment.  It feels like the Midwest version of Deliverance.

Kirk at Piety Hill before it burned down in 1975

I wouldn't harp on this except for the fact that as a traditionalist conservative Kirk, I gather, idealized feudal European society, with its fixed hierarchies and social structures.  

Certainly he disliked modern, progressive, "big-government" do-gooders, brimming with ambitious plans to upset the social order and help out, even raise up, the people in "backward" parts of the country.  

Kirk himself had a family home in Mecosta: Piety Hill, built by his mother's grandfather in 1878.  (Another source says 1868.)  To Piety Hill he retreated after he quit his job teaching at Michigan State University, to much newspaper fanfare contemptuously denouncing the college as nothing more than a degraded diploma mill that had reduced its professors to the status of multiple-choice testing "menials."  Kirk did not intend to be a mere cog in an academic machine, even a brightly polished one.  

out of the ashes: Piety Hill II

With the success of his classic book The Conservative Mind (1953) and his thriller Old House of Fear (1961), Kirk was able to establish himself, like a veritable gentleman dilettante, as an independent scholar and public intellectual and practitioner of idiosyncratic aristocratic noblesse oblige.  Piety Hill was referred to as Kirk's "ancestral home," as if he were some sort of European feudal lord, an American seigneur.  

When Piety Hill--which appears originally to have been a modestly Italianate, rambling, if not ramshackle, frame structure--burned to the ground in 1975, Kirk replaced it with a modern building, rather synthetically archaic.  Perhaps he meant it for a Scottish keep out of the romantic tales of Sir Walter Scott, apparently a favorite author of his.  The Kirks of course were of Scottish descent.

That's the thing about Kirk; there's something synthetic to him.  As he freely admitted his maternal great-grandfather was a lumber baron who despoiled the countryside and his maternal grandfather was a banker.  He was born and grew up in Plymouth, Michigan, a suburb of Detroit, where his father was a railroad engineer.  Banks and mills and irons rails--one can't get much more of a capitalist bourgeois background than that.  

Born to be brainy
Russell Kirk was a
bookwormish young man.

Kirk has been called a "northern agrarian" (to distinguish him from the Southern Agrarians), but his own family helped industrialize Gilded Age America and deforest the Michigan countryside.  Kirk may have fancied himself a genteel agrarian, but his privilege was obtained through rapacious modern industrial capitalism.  Only settled on the eve of the Civil War, had Mecosta with its sandy soil ever been a utopia of sturdy, ruggedly independent farmers before the lumber mills came along in the postbellum period?  In any event, what was afterward to be done for the dispossessed people of Mecosta, besides using them as local color in rural fright tales?  Of those earnest men and women from the government who wanted to help, I suppose Kirk would have said that "I'm from the government and I want to help" are some of the most terrifying words in the English language.

In Kirk's stories these impudent government interlopers invariably come to bad ends, and it seems that the author believes this is just what they deserved for their humanistic folly.  Kirk seems to want Mecosta to stay just as he sees it: a dark breeding ground for loathsomely lovely horrors.  

It's really rural horror porn like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, albeit much more tasteful and refined.  And the way Kirk portrays it, the lesser people in Mecosta--the peasant class, if you will--despises the interlopers just as much as Kirk does, if not more.  They may roll around in the ghastly muck but they like that muck just the way it is, thank you.  Progress?  I'm agin' it!

This is most obviously indicated in "Behind the Stumps," where nosy census taker and general human mediocrity and waste of space Mr. Cribben comes to a bad end in the country, and "Ex Tenebris," which is actually set in an ersatz England, but carries the same message.  Then there's "Uncle Isaiah," where the title revenant materializes to rescue his WASP-ish, genteel nephew from the clutches of a nasty, ethnic rackets gangster demanding protection money.  

One of my two favorite stories in the collection, "What Shadows We Pursue," breaks out of this confining ideological framework.  In it the author rides another of his hobbies, this one bibliomania.  What happens when Mrs. Corr and her daughter sell off Dr. Corr's 11,000 volume book collection?  Read and see.  This one is for the bibliophiles out there.  And I do know you're out there.  Book collecting as far as I know has no ideological component.  

library at Piety Hill (Kirk did not watch television)

My favorite story, however, is "Off the Sand Road."  This one supposedly draws on a real-life case of suicide (?), which Kirk mentions in the "Lost Lake" essay.  In the late Forties (I presume) a recently-married World War Two veteran and tenant farmer supposedly hanged himself from a great sycamore tree on the property.  

In the story a Mecosta visitor from Chicago goes out for an afternoon of berry picking with two local boys, sons of his host.  They enter the "House of Death" as it's charmingly known, and therein the visitor finds, as the sun loses its intensity, clippings that shed grim light on the sycamore hanging affair.  This is a beautifully written, subtle and poignant ghost story (if a ghost story at all) that also feels like it could have come out of the pages of a true crime magazine.  Indeed, it could fittingly find a place in crime fiction anthologies.  So it just figures (sigh) that Kirk's biographer, Bradley J. Birzer, gave it scant attention in his biography.  

I was reminded not of MR James for once but rather of New England author Mary Wilkins Freeman, especially her classic story "The Wind in the Rose-Bush" (reviewed by me here).  This is the one tale from the collection that I would place in the pantheon of great ghost stories.  

Kirk has no real ideological axe to grind against modernism here, merely taking some glancing blows at tacky consumerism and evangelical religion, to him indices, seemingly, of shallow minds.  (Like so many conservative intellectuals, he converted to Catholicism, after marrying a Catholic in 1964.)  

Movie magazines, confessions-pulps, evangelical tracts, mail-order novelties--all these sorts of frivolous things distracted the juvenile mind of the vet's new wife, a member of the Followers of God church who has no appreciation or the rural, contemplative life.  The author himself didn't take a wife until he was 46 years old.

Russell Kirk letting his hair down, for him.

Russell Kirk died thirty years ago at the age of 75.  I don't know what he would have made of modern conservatism (if "conservatism" is the proper term for it), with its bizarre blend of apocalyptic evangelicals, billionaire tech bros, old-fashioned snake oil salesmen and grifting internet influencers. Talk about a witch's brew!  They make the Gilded Age tycoons and their tyros gleam like 24 karat gold.  Are tarnished people like Elon Musk, Hulk Hogan, Laura Loomer avatars of the Permanent Things which Kirk so venerated?  

The Kirks didn't even own a television set, so I can't imagine what he would have made of social media.  Yet, setting these quandaries aside, at least Russell Kirk's ghost stories can be enjoyed by the spiritually agnostic, despite what he himself argued, and the politically disengaged, if not downright disgusted.  The best of these tales stand as genuine art in this form.  

Would it make bibliophile Kirl happy that little Mecosta, a village of just a few hundred people, has a bookstore with an inventory of 90,000 volumes?  Knowledge is power and power to the people!  Deliver us from abject ignorance.  Say what you will about Mecosta, I just wish there was a bookstore like this in Memphis where I live.  

located at the former drugstore, behind the false front, a bookstore with 90,000 volumes
just watch out for ghosts jostling you in the aisles

Brown Study: Correcting Some of the Biographical Details on Fredric Brown

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 the view of 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 rather more the thing with genre critics.  Woolrich too, to some extent, though some critics like Julian Symons hated Cornell's work.  Symons didn'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 vastly 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, one geared more toward men than women.  

Instead of poisoned tea and scones at the vicarage, it's sluggings and shootouts in the back alleys; but the latter is, if anything, far more 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?  Fredric 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, nasty 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 femmes fatales.)  

Brown's and Woolrich's men more often seem to be frightened, frazzled losers desperately on the run, at least in my experience.  These authors often identified with victims, Highsmith and Thompson with victimizers.  At least that's the theory running through my head at the moment.  I've read rather more Woolrich than Brown.  

We all know about the tough life, to some extent self-imposed, that Woolrich had, but what about our bud 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 that, as I write this, his 118th birthday is fewer than 24 hours away.  If Brown were alive today, he would be the world's oldest person, beating out current title holder Tomiko Itooka of Japan, a mere lassie 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 Seabrook'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 was born and grew up in Cincinnati.  His mother died in 1920, when he was 14, and his father died the next year.  Brown supposedly resided with a family friend until he graduated from high school in 1922 at the age of 15.  

He also had an uncle in Oxford, Ohio, who helped him out as his guardian and he worked as an office boy in a "machine tool jobbing firm" until 1924.  Supposedly three years later 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 was after his, 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 an alcoholic (I suspect), would essentially be played out by the mid-Sixties.  He lived on until 1972, dying at the age of 65.  He had divorced Helen and 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, leaving Helen to raise their two boys.  

one of Grandpa Waldo's
instructional pamphlets

Much of Brown's early life detail is, however, as I have stated, wrong in detail.  If people relied on written material from the author for this information, he was not, for whatever reason, being truthful.  

One strange thing is an omission of fact: Fredric Brown actually had quite a prominent grandfather, Waldo Franklin Brown, who died at the age of 74 in 1907, the year after Brownie was born.  It seems odd that the author never would have mentioned Waldo.  Had his father and grandfather been alienated from each other?  It's not an unreasonable inference to draw, as we shall see.  

Karl moved from his family's little home town of Oxford, Ohio to Cincinnati, where in 1894 he married Emma Graham, daughter of a mail clerk, when he was 22 and she was 20.  Karl was a correspondence clerk with what seems to have been a rather shady mail-order business (see below). 

Karl and Emma did not have their first and only child, Fredric W. Brown, until 1906, after a dozen years of marriage, while Waldo Brown married twice, in 1859 and 1871 (after the death of his first wife), and sired six children between 1861 and 1874.  His second wife, Laura Alma Cross, by whom he had two sons, Karl and Linn, was a schoolteacher who graduated from Oxford Female Institute.  She died in 1929 at the home of her son Linn in Oxford at the age of 88, outliving not only her husband Waldo but her son Karl and daughter-in-law Emma.  

Oxford Female Institute
Fredric's grandmother Laura Cross Brown
graduated from this school in 1857.

Waldo Brown was actually quite a distinguished man, having been a nationally known progressive agriculturist who edited the farm pages of the Cincinnati Enquirer and Gazette.  He frequently published highly valued farming pamphlets as well as newspaper articles under the name "Johnny Plowboy."  Up until the advent of little Brownie himself, the Great Waldo aka Johnny Plowboy was easily the most famous and distinguished person in the Brown family.  

On his father's side Fredric Brown was descended from New England stock going back to Massachusetts and Vermont, 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 in Scotland if one goes 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 the stern righteousness of Puritanism and Congregationalism attenuated 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 Helen insisted.  Fred stated that he himself was made to attend a Presbyterian Church in Cincinnati between the ages of 9 to 14.  He called these years (1915 to 1920) 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. then 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 Sarah Graham.  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 an adjacent state?  Possibly because Karl landed in hot water in Cincy.  In 1908, when he was a salesman for Gray Manufacturing Company, 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 under false pretences a draft for nearly $420 (about $14,000 today).  

I do not know the outcome of this case, but in 1911 Karl was back in court again in Cincinnati, where he testified in a federal mail fraud case concerning vacuum cleaner makers R. Armstrong and Company, for whom he was bookkeeper.  Both this concern and Gray Manufacturing Company were owned by the same individual.  

I'm sensing these mail order firms were somewhat on the shady side (more on this coming up in future).  From his father I think young Fred must have gotten a lot of the feel in his fiction for urban seediness and petty criminality, which he often transposed to the more bankable burg, for a writer, of Chicago.  

The Brown house in Cincinnati

Yet Karl managed in spite of 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 managing a machine tool company.  But then the roof caved in on the browns, figuratively speaking.  

The chronology of events from Fred's life in the Twenties is, to be blunt, rather screwed-up.  Let's get started on this.  

First, 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 54 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 wrote that Emma's death, after he prayed and prayed to God not to allow her to die, 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, just like most people, 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 that Cornell Woolrich published his straight novel Hotel Room, which similarly drew on details from his own life.  Odd that both men both made bids for mainstream writing success the same year.  

Fred's supportive Oxford, Ohio uncle was Linn Waldo Brown, his father's younger brother, for whom Fred would name his younger son, Linn Lewis Brown, 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, not Karl, who was a newspaperman.  After having retired as a grocer, Linn became Oxford correspondent for the Hamilton Ohio Chronicle.  (Hamilton was a city of over forty thousand people located fifteen miles from Oxford.)  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 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.  One assumes that Fred would have known all of his Brown aunts, who passed away between 1929 and 1944.  Alice taught at Holbrook College, a teachers college at Lebanon, Ohio and took over the family farm after her father's death.  She served on the editorial staff of the farm paper Rural New Yorker, which reached thousands of subscribers throughout the northeastern United States.  Winona was a doctor who moved to New England and married a farmer there.  

For many years Fred's Aunt Florence, who died in 1929 at age 65, was a stenographer who later 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, though Florence had not been stung to death by bees or, presumably, affrighted by supernatural midnight manifestations.  

Brown family friend
LL Langstroth with his hives

Another strange tale concerns Fred's Aunt Berta, who married Oxford farmer and antique dealer Alvin Gaston.  Berta made news back in 1922 for being one of the first women in the county to serve on a jury.  She served with eight other ladies and three men, which struck the local press of the day as a decided novelty; but presumably the ladies managed to pay attention and not lapse into womanly chatter about the latest labor-saving home appliances (vacuum cleaners say) and the best recipes for potato salad.  

After Berta died in 1934 at the age of 68, six months later in 1935 Alvin, 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.  

Not sold in stores!
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 deflect business fraud accusations.  

Clearly, Karl was not an "honest farmer" like his father.  He seems rather more like one those guys you used to see on late night TV ads hawking miracle inventions and get-rich quick schemes (which now are seen on Youtube and in certain high profile, corrupt presidential campaigns).  

Then there's the matter of Fred's first wife, Helen, whom he wed in Cincinnati on April 13th, 1929.  He was 22, working as a stenographer, and she was 21 and staying at the Gibson House hotel.  

Helen and Fred 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 more prestigiously employed first cousin.  On their marriage license the couple had to attest that they had never been previously married and that they were no nearer kin than second cousins, which just barely fit the bill.  The state of Ohio prohibited first cousin marriages on genetics grounds.  

It seems unlikely that Fred and Helen would never have met before they wed.  When they moved to Helen's native city of Milwaukee, Wisconsin after the marriage, they lived for a year or so with Helen's family at their attractive gabled, shingled Queen Anne-Dutch Colonial-Craftsman home.  

Thane Ross Brown, Fred's first cousin once removed, was a structural works civil engineer, as was his son, also named Thane, who worked for the Civilian Conservation Corps during the Depression.  Intriguingly, Fred worked not with a newspaper but rather as a stenographer with a detective agency.  

And here I thought all of the detectives' secretaries back then were good-looking dames in love with their bosses!  Looks like our Brownie was already intrigued with crime.  He may not have been a Pinkerton op, like Dashiell Hammett was (however much Hammett exaggerated his work), but he may have typed up the reports of Pinkerton ops.  

Fred and Helen's little white picket fenced house in Milwaukee

By 1932, he and Helen, who now had two young sons, had moved out of her parents house and into a pretty yet tiny 1100 square foot cottage built in 1923 with two bedrooms and one bathroom.  Fred now worked as an agent for the New York Life Insurance Company.  He also began writing for trade journals.  In five years he would go to work as a proofreader for the Milwaukee Journal and begin publishing the pulp fiction that would change his life.  

Here accounts of his life 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 Fred's name stood for.  Was it just possibly Waldo?  Maybe someone else has already discovered that, but I thought I would ask where's the "Waldo"?