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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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."
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| The Brown house in Newport, Kentucky |
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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."
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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"?
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