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.
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