Fredric
Brown was an American pulp writer who "crossed genres like a
demon, plotted like a madman" and "continually stretched
the boundaries of any given genre," such as in the
phantasmagorical Night
of the Jobberwock (1951) and the tongue-in-cheek Martians,
Go Home (1955), which are mostly standalone works. However, Brown
also created a popular pair of private-detectives, Ed
and Am Hunter, who are an uncle-and-nephew team appearing in
seven novels and two short stories.
Ambrose "Am" Hunter
is a former carnival barker turned private-eye, working for the
Starlock Detective Agency, who became a mentor to his young,
inexperienced nephew, Ed Hunter, when his father was murdered on his
way home from work – which is a story Brown told in the often
praised The
Fabulous Clipjoint (1947). So that's quite an origin story
for a detective-character!
I've only read two Am and
Ed Hunter novels, The
Dead Ringer (1948) and Death
Has Many Doors (1951), but they were good enough to keep the
remaining titles on the big pile. Not to the mention the delightfully
bizarre short impossible crime story "The
Spherical Ghoul" (collected in Death Locked In: An Anthology
of Locked Room Stories, 1987).
The Bloody Moonlight
(1949) is their third outing and John Norris, of Pretty Sinister
Books, recommended
it as "an innovative blending of science-fiction, horror and
detective novel plot devices" with a "subtle twist."
I agree!
The story begins when a
wealthy client of Ben Starlock, Justine Haberman, engages his agency
to figure out whether or not "a new gadget" is worth a
five-thousand dollar investment and he puts the Hunters on the case –
telling them to keep expenses at a tidy twenty-five bucks. But this
assignment has a peculiar angle from the start that rapidly begin to
multiply involving "strange signals" and werewolves!
Stephen Amory is Justine
Haberman's half uncle and an inventor with a steady income from
things he has invented and patented. Lately, he has been tinkering
with a new device that can receive signals, which has been picking
inexplicable clicks. A repeated series of four clicks. So could these
signals be coming from the fourth planet, Mars? Amory has said the
signals probably aren't coming from one of our neighboring planets,
but then why has he been trying to buy a star globe and borrowing
books from the library on astronomy?
I know of two mystery
writers who used a radio to make their characters believe they were
listening to voices from beyond the grave (i.e. EVP). John Rhode's
The
House on Tollard Ridge (1929) and Agatha Christie's short
story "Wireless"
(collected in The Hound of Death and Other Stories, 1933), but
an "interplanetary radio" receiving possible signals from
Mars is a new one to me, which is why I loved it when they come down
from the stars to visit the detective story – because they often
bring something unusual or innovative to the table. Isaac Asimov's
The
Caves of Steel (1954) is a classic example of this.
Anyway, Am and Ed Hunter
travel down to the small town of Tremont, where Amory lives, but Am
immediately recedes into the background of the story as Ed takes the
lead. You can say that The Bloody Moonlight is a hardboiled
coming-of-age, or a baptism by fire, for the twenty-one year old
detective who has been on the job for less than three days. And,
before too long, he's finds himself neck deep in a murder case.
On his way to Amory's
home, Ed is stopped dead in his tracks by the growl of an animal, "a
bestial, vicious, murderous sound," which came from the edge of
a thick underbush to his right and caught a glimpse of a white, oval
face – standing man-high and growling like an animal. Something
that "straight out of a horror program on the radio."
So
he hightailed it out of there, but when he got to a bend in the road
he saw a man lying in a ditch between the road and an orchard. His
throat had been torn out. But this is still only the beginning of his
troubles in Tremont.
Sheriff Jack Kingman
hates Chicago hoodlums and the only thing he hates even more is "a
Chicago private dick."
So he's not exactly
enamored with Ed Hunter when he reported the murder only to discover
that the body has disappeared without a trace. Not even a drop of
blood is found in the ditch! Sheriff Kingman is not amused and works
over the rookie detective in the privacy of his own office, which
results in cracked ribs and Ed left the police station a changed man.
To use his own words, "the first time you're ever beaten up,
especially when it's unjustly and through no fault of your own, does
something to you. It's like when your parents die; it's like the
first time you ever sleep with a woman. It does something to you; you
aren't quite the same after that." Ed is determined to settle
this business with the sheriff before leaving the town or part of him
would be left lying on the floor of the police station.
A second distraction
comes in the form of a beautiful librarian, Molly, who makes Ed feel
a little weak in the knees, but this plot-thread comes to unexpected
and slightly embarrassing end. I told you this was a hardboiled
coming-of-age story of a young detective. Justine Haberman even
commented that he appeared to have matured a good three years since
the last time they talked, because Haberman had the idea she had been
talking with an eighteen year old that time.
Ed still has to determine
the veracity of the interplanetary radio and Amory's opinion on the
radio signals he has been receiving is even more fascinating than the
rumors that he's been listening in on a Martian civilization. Not to
mention the werewolf murder.
John noted in his
previously mentioned review that this story is one of those rare
detective novels that treats lycanthropy "as a mental illness,"
rather than "relying on the usual mythology and legends found in
werewolf movies that threat the phenomenon as real," which is
actually more terrifying – because the criminally insane exist
outside of the printed page. Unfortunately, the answer to the
werewolf is not exactly, what you call, a rug-puller. However, every
single plot-thread is dovetailed so beautifully that you can't
possibly be left disappointed when you turn over the final page.
If there's anything to
complain about, it's that Brown completely overlooked the possibility
to blow his readers away with a tragic and devastating epilogue.
It's not a spoiler to say
that the signals didn't emanate from Mars, or any other celestial
body, but what if an epilogue had been added taking place on that
planet. A scene depicting an elderly Martian overlooking his
devastated and dying planet, which used to be the home of a great
civilization, but a disaster has reduced them to a small, dwindling
nomadic tribe traveling from one shallow watering hole to another.
Just trying to survive in this extremely hostile environment. This
elderly Martian looks up to the stars and wonders if they could have
been saved, if they had the means to send out a distress signal to
that blue planet where an advanced species had slowly began to emerge
when a comet had ended theirs. Admit it. This would have been a great
note to end the book on.
So, all of that being
said, The Bloody Moonlight is still a pretty good, hardboiled
detective story with a stacked plot, chuck-full of eerie and
blood-curdling murders, which doubled as a tough coming-of-age story.
I recommend it!
"I know of two mystery writers who used a radio to make their characters believe they were listening to voices from beyond the grave"
ReplyDeleteIt isn't a crime story, but in 1902 Ruydard Kipling wrote a short story "Wireless" in which a consumptive chemist is "possessed" by the spirit of John Keats in a radio experiment.
Perhaps the first use of the idea, though in a literal form here.
1902, huh? Kipling clocked in early and that was when radio was just transmitting signals. Not audio. That didn't happen until, I believe, the late 1910s.
DeleteI should probably have mentioned this in the review, but Nikola Tesla thought he was listening in an alien radio signals in 1899. This is the earliest, real-life example and probably where Brown got the idea.
This is one Brown novel I very much liked. I agree the ending is a bit of a letdown. But I learned all about Oliver Heaviside and the Capehart phonograph and some other pop culture trivia of the era so that made up for any disappointments in the plotting. Caroline Bemiss, the newspaper editor, was one of my favorite characters in the book.
ReplyDeleteI know. Your recommendation is what kept The Bloody Moonlight at the top of my TBR-pile for the past few years. So thanks for that! :)
DeleteI didn't have any problem with the ending at all. Sure, it's not a classic, but liked how Brown dovetailed every bizarre part of the plot. That man had imagination to spare!