"It isn't a nice story. It's got murder in it, and women and liquor and gambling and even prevarication."
--The Screaming Mimi
Eleven years ago I blogged a short review of my favorite Fredric Brown crime novel The Far Cry. It remains such to me (and, indeed, one of my favorite crime novels generally), but, as some commenters at the time pointed out, other "Brownies" have their own favorites. A lot of people plunk for The Screaming Mimi (1949), Brown's fifth crime novel, which followed by a couple of years his Edgar-award winning debut The Fabulous Clipjoint. Part of its prominence in the Brown canon may be due to its having been filmed twice, in 1958 in the United States as Screaming Mimi and a dozen year later in Italy as the classic early giallo flick Lucello dalle piume di cristallo, aka The Bird with the Crystal Plumage.
Relatively few of Brown's crime novels have been filmed, it seems, Knock Three-One-Two and His Name Was Death being the others, both French films. (Knock also appeared as an hour long episode of the American television anthology series Thriller.) So Mimi stands out in that respect.
I think it also helps that The Bird with the Crystal Plumage is a really fine horror-thriller film, although it actually doesn't credit Brown in any way, a most unjust omission because if you have watched the film and read the book, the debt to Brown is obvious. But more on this later, let's get the book, which is certainly an impressive piece of work in its own right.
The book was clearly a big hit at the mid-century; I've seen ad copy claiming that it sold two million copies and was the "best-selling shock novel of all time," with five million readers. It's easy to see why it would have been popular.
It's "hard-boiled, but not offensively so," as Dorothy B. Hughes put it, with definitely salacious elements, but it's very nicely plotted so as to appeal to the puzzle fans. Like so many of Brown's books it is narrated by an alcoholic: Bill Sweeney, an ace Chicago newspaper reporter and royal flush drunk, or a "down and out lush" as the back cover of my Carroll and Graf edition of the novel calls him.
To be fair the book tells us insistently "Sweeney wasn't an alcoholic," that he just needs to have binges every so often. Likely referencing Charles T. Jackson's bestselling novel The Lost Weekend (1944) and the Oscar-winning film made from it in 1945, the book assures us defensively: "There's that type of drinker [the periodic binger], too, although of late the alcoholics have been getting most of the ink."
Well, maybe so. Nevertheless, I always feel like, when it comes to Brown's characters--and perhaps Brown himself--that this is just prevarication. If, like Sweeney, you're waking up on a park bench, after a blackout binge, utterly broke and disgustingly disheveled and talking to God (actually another drunk named Godfrey), you're in pretty damn bad shape.
Don't listen to me, listen to the Guardian, Gen Z! If I have Gen Z readers.
Sweeney even contemplates rolling a harmless passing fairy on the sidewalk for the cash in his wallet. (Actually I'd better be careful with my slang here because while I mean robbing the word now can refer to, um, f---ing as well, and Sweeney most certainly does not want to dally sexually with a fairy princess of the queerer sort.)
Here's Sweeney's thought process on this matter:
Someone was coming toward him on the sidewalk. A pretty boy in a bright checked sport jacket. Sweeney's fists clenched. What would be his chances if he slugged the fairy, grabbed his wallet and ran into the alley? But he hadn't ever done that before and his reactions were too slow. Much too slow. The fairy, edging to the outside of the sidewalk, was past him before Sweeney could make up his mind.
How often in hard-boiled novels does the "hero" contemplate assaulting and robbing hovering fairies, something admittedly that happened all too often in real life? I don't even think the pretty boy in the loud plaid jacket actually was on the sexual make. Our hero has really hit the skids morally.
Judging by what Sweeney looks and must smell like after his binge, I don't believe any self-respecting queer--or maybe even a self-loathing one--would willingly get amorously close to this guy.
This is an extended aside, but queer references in Brown's books are interesting and even suggestive, at least to me. I'll leave aside the sentence, "Sweeney dragged deeply at the fag," cause it's referring, at least literally, to a cigarette, but a few pages later Sweeney is hitting up (threateningly) Goetz, a buddy (straight), for money. He strips to take a badly needed bath at his bud's place and, naked, tells him: "Don't call copper, now, Goetz. With me dressed this way, they might get the wrong idea." Just a couple of congregating fairies!
Then there's an important point, later in the novel, when Sweeney is told about Raoul, owner of Raoul's Gift Shop. Apropos of nothing, a man bluntly informs Sweeney: "This Raoul is a faggot." A taxi driver taking him to Raoul's tells Sweeney: "I know the joint. The guy tried to make me once. He's a queer." Stop the presses! QUEER MAN NAMED RAOUL OWNS GIFT SHOP!!!
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| Beware of "freaks" bearing gifts? |
Observing the gift shop Sweeney comments cattily: "Two customers, both women, were within. With Raoul, the proprietor, that made the feminine complement of the shop one hundred percent. No one would ever have to wonder about Raoul." YET Sweeney doesn't feel the urge to beat up Raoul and in the shop in fact is quite civil to the swish, in words and thoughts. He even accompanies Raoul back to his apartment to get a glimpse of the man's statuary. (Seriously.) Outside Sweeney uneventfully passes Raoul's dinner guest for the evening: "A plump, beautiful young man with blonde curly hair."
In short (on this matter), this is a book with quite a bit of incidental gay subject matter, or lavender color, shall we say. In their language about gay males, avowedly straight men are pretty dismissive of them to other avowedly straight men as fairies, faggots, pansies, etc., yet on the other hand they are rather casual in their recognition and even acceptance of their existence, with Sweeney even adjuding some of them as pretty and beautiful even. The attitude is actually better than what you would get from Elizabeth Linington's fictional cops in the Sixties and Seventies into the Eighties, God help us.
I came across Brown's senior pic in his Cincinnati high school annual in 1925, when he would have been eighteen, and was struck to find that he was, yes, a pretty young man with blond hair. Not plump; he stood 5'5 and 1/2" and weighed only 120 pounds. I wonder whether he ever got hit on by other men?
"Brownie" as he was inevitably known, gave his motto as "a poet is a musician of words" and he was stated to be one of the high school's "littérateurs." Precociously, he had already "received notice" for his poems and stories. He was also a "musician of note." (He played the flute, not traditionally deemed the most masculine of instruments.) The annual concluded with a reference to his diminutive stature, writing: "It seems that his ability is inversely proportional to his size, for he one of the smallest members of out class." Yes, annual, small men can be talented at other things besides jockeying.
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| the youthful author, age 18, small of stature, but of great promise |
It was a surprising find for me, because if you see his author photo from the jacket of The Fabulous Clipjoint, which presumably was taken when he was about forty years old, Brown is not pretty at all and, indeed, he looks prematurely aged, even wizened. He could pass for someone in his fifties.
The fresh-faced, angelic-looking kid of two decades earlier is long gone. He married young in 1929, a few years out of high school, to Helen Brown, a second cousin, then worked as a newspaper proofreader for the Post in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, home of his wife's family, publishing his first pulp fiction a decade later, opening a floodgate of writing in the Forties.
I would not have recognized the man from his later photo, which just goes to show that all those detective novels hinging on someone's looks having drastically changed over twenty years may not be so unlikely after all. The malevolent miracles that booze and tobacco could do!
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| Fredric Brown around age forty. Sweeney's description from the book, except for height and weight, seems to fit the author to a T: five feet eleven inches tall...a hundred and sixty-three pounds. He had sandy hair that was receding at the front and getting a little thin on the top, but was mostly still there. He had a long thin face, vaguely horse-like, but not, on the whole, unpleasing to the uncritical eye. He looked to be about forty-three, which is not stange, because that is how old he really was. He wore glasses with light- colored shell rims for reading and working. |
I suspect a lot of the drinking in Brown's books was biographical. I don't believe any man can write that much about boozing without having partaken a great deal from the baneful bottle himself. If you look at Sweeney's description in the book (see right), the author seems to be describing himself, barring height and weight, to which he adds inches and pounds.
In a column from 1982 the late Ed Gorman wrote that Brown a decade earlier had "chain-smoked himself into a horrible death at age 65." Me, I'm guessing that alcohol assisted in the push-off. I think this was a man bedeviled by a lot of demons.*
*(There is a Brown biography by Jack Saybrook, but sadly I have it stuck in a box in storage somewhere.)
But the fact that Brown wrote what he knew--stenographer at a detective agency, a newspaper proofreader and a writer for newspapers and pulps--gives his books a solid realistic base, even when he soars, as he often does, into flights of fantasy. (He was a noted sci-fi writer as well and even his crime fiction has strong elements of the surreal and fantastic.)
In Mimi, Sweeney loves classical music and hates swing. A whole page is devoted to Sweeney listening to Mozart's 40th Symphony, his favorite piece of music. More biography, I am guessing.
Now, let's get--finally--into the plot of Mimi.
Wandering the streets of Chicago at night, thinking how to get some money after blowing his wad, Sweeney stumbles onto a most memorable crime scene indeed!
Beyond a six-foot wide double doorway, in the lighted hall of an apartment building, is a beautiful, bleeding, blonde (female this time) lying prone on the carpet, a great dog over her, growling at onlookers. Was she attacked by the dog? No, it turns out that this is Yolanda Lang, Chicago stripper, and she uses the dog in her act. (He unzips her dress, I kid you not.) It seems she's the latest victim of the Ripper slayer who is going around stabbing beautiful blondes in Chicago, though fortunately she, unlike the other poor women, survived the attack.
Sweeney is quite smitten with the lovely lady (especially after she ends up stark naked in the hallway) and he resolves to get back on the wagon again so her can get onto to Yolanda's. This necessitates that he get his reporting job back, so he files a great eyewitness account of this latest Ripper attack. His editor actually was using Sweeney's vacation days to cover his binge, so Sweeney still has some time left to investigate the Ripper killings on his own. What he finds on his own bat is pretty astounding.
Central to the grim mystery is an ebony statuette of a beautiful female body positioned in a stance of utter, abject fear, nicknamed "Screaming Mimi." (This is where Raoul's Gift Shop comes in.)
It seems that our deranged serial killer is dangerously obsessed with the mass-produced Mimi statuette. Raoul happens to have another at this place and it's not a come-on from the gift shop owner. ("Would you care to see the statuette?...I assure you I have no ulterior motive Mr. Sweeney.")
Now Sweeney has a copy....
I think that will suffice as a plot description. I'll just add that the plot is clever indeed, probably an original spin on the serial killer plot. I was not as emotionally engaged with The Screaming Mimi as I was with The Far Cry, I have to admit. Mimi is more of a classic detective novel, with cops and quite a bit of discussion of alibis and timetables and the like, where Far Cry to me seems more like the intricately plotted, page-turning suspense novels of writers like Margaret Millar and Ruth Rendell.
However, Mimi is very clever indeed and I am not surprised that it made it onto the big screen, though with the first go-round that probably had something to do with the fact that a stunning stripper is one of the main characters. Although it changed a lot of things, the second film version is actually more faithful to the book. I'll have more to say about both film versions of the novel soon.
Finally, I want to include one little bit of writing from the book that actually made me smile. Fredric Brown can be a very funny writer. The first thing I ever read by him, over forty years ago, was a reprint of his comic Fifties sci-fi novel Martians Go Home, which, admittedly, I hated at the time, but would probably better appreciate now. Discussing the prior Ripper killings with a press colleague, Sweeney learns that one worked in Raoul's Gift Shop (yup, Raoul again), one was a B-girl (a pretty woman hired by a bar to get patrons to drink more) and one a private secretary. This prompts Sweeney to ask sardonically:
"How private? Kind that has to watch her periods as well as her commas?"
Kudos to Brown the proofreader for slipping that line in the book! It's almost as good as Hammett's gunsel.
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