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--in spades!

One weird thing happens when a strange man calls upon Doc at his home and invites him to attend, at the local haunted house, 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....

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: "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, which Brown lifted from the pulp version.  It still feels very pulpish.  Otherwise, Brown did a great job of broadening and deepening the novel.  The arc story of Doc hoping to break some big news for once is very well done.  

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!