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!