There's No Such Animal: "Miracle on Vine Street" (1941) and "The Sematic Crocodile" (1941) by Fredric Brown

Fredric Brown was a wildly imaginative pulp writer of science-fiction and detective stories who was not averse to cross pollinating seemingly incompatible genres, "stretching the boundaries of any given genre" into his very own "strange, private geography" – giving us such wonderful oddities as The Bloody Moonlight (1949) and Night of the Jabberwock (1951). Recently, I stumbled across two of his little-known, somewhat anomalous, short stories differing greatly in tone and presentation from his more hardboiled, science-fiction tinged mysteries.

During the early 1940s, Brown penned two short stories for The Layman's Magazine, a periodical of the Episcopal Church, in which Rev. Roger L. Young, Doctor of Divinity, solves two so-called "slice of life" mysteries.

"No esoteric mumbo-jumbo could fool that fellow. Lord, no! His two feet were solidly planted on God's good earth."

The first of these stories, entitled "Miracle on Vine Street," was published in the January, 1941, issue of The Layman's Magazine and presents "the young Doctor Young," as he's known to his parishioners, with an honest to God impossible problem! Doctor Young learns a miracle has taken place on his street when his wife, Martha, asks him how a cat could have walked across a ceiling. One of their neighbors, Mr. Weatherby, had been painting and papering a new nursery the previous day, but, on the following morning, there was a track of paw prints on the ceiling – a track of prints made in pink paint! Before he went to bed, Mr. Weatherby had called his wife into the nursery to have a look at it and they both looked up at the ceiling, which they're "absolutely positively sure" was bare of any cat tracks. So how did they get up there?

Doctor Young tells his wife that he has no problem with people believing that "cats walk across ceilings" or that "the devil makes them do it," but when parishioners blame God, well, that's something else altogether. And he's determined to "take that cat off the ceiling" and "put it on the floor where it belongs."

"Miracle on Vine Street" is a very short story with a relatively simplistic plot, but not everything is shared with the reader and this will prevent you from working out the finer details of the solution. Nonetheless, it's still a fun, sweet little mystery with a likable and lively detective who has more than a touch of G.K. Chesterton's Father Brown. Particularly his personal outlook on what constitutes a miracle, which is not something as cheap as mere paw prints on a ceiling. I enjoyed it.

The second and final story, "The Sematic Crocodile," was published in the February, 1941, issue of The Layman's Magazine and is a cross between a juvenile mystery and a slice of life story. Something along the lines of Theodore Roscoe's "I Was the Kid with the Drum" (collected in The Argosy Library: Four Corners, 2015) and John Russell Fearn's "The Thief of Claygate Farm" (collected in The Haunted Gallery, 2011), but without any serious crimes.

Doctor Young is told by Sheriff Rance Clayton that his five-year-old son, Tommy, came home that morning with "a real whopper." Tommy had been playing outside when he came dashing home with the story that he had been chased by "an enormous crocodile" with "big red eyes," but the stream is only a foot deep. So his father finds it hard to believe he was chased by a fifteen foot crocodile and grounded him for the rest of the day. However, Doctor Young believes there's a kernel of truth to the boy's story and demonstrates there was something very human underneath the monstrous appearance at the stream.

"The Sematic Crocodile" is a minor, but charming, story with the kind of solution you would expect from one of Robert Arthur and William Arden's The Three Investigators mysteries. I enjoyed reading this one as well.

So, yeah, these stories are absolute lightweight mysteries, but showed a unexpectedly different side of Brown with surprisingly down-to-earth plots and homely characters that are the polar opposite of those usually found in his darker, grittier and more hardboiled detective fiction – which makes them standout among his work. You can read these stories in The Layman's Magazine of the Living Church, Numbers 1-20, on Google Books. Enjoy!

The Bloody Moonlight (1949) by Fredric Brown

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!

Carnival of Corpses

"It doesn't matter whether this world is crazy or not. It doesn’t matter if this absurdity is real. It doesn't matter how messed up this place may be… I want to survive!"

- Ganta Igarashi (Deadman Wonderland).

Fredric Brown's The Dead Ringer (1948) is the second chapter in the casebook of the nephew-and-uncle detective team of Ed and Ambrose Hunter, which followed in the wake of the Edgar Award winning novel The Fabulous Clipjoint (1947). I have, unfortunately, not read that particular book, but I know it has an 18-year-old Ed Hunter roaming the mean streets of Chicago for the man who mugged and killed his father. It was very well received at the time and Bill Pronzini labeled it as "unquestionable more than just another hard-boiled detective tale," but that’s a book for another day and the only reason I bring it up is to provide myself with a springboard into this review.

When his father was slugged and rolled into a grubby alley, Ed also brings his father's only other living relative back into the picture, a carnival barker and one-time private investigator named Ambrose "Am" Hunter, eventually becoming business partners when they set themselves up as licensed investigators, but at the opening of The Dead Ringer they run a ball game stand together – as part of a traveling carnival. The carnival life appears to agree with Ed Hunter, even though Brown's depiction of backstage gambling and drinking blew the stardust of the place, but hey, when a gorgeous woman from the posing show is making eyes at the now 19-year-old man romanticism has pretty much become a moot thing. Well, the fun has to stop at some point – even at the carnival! 

A body of a naked midget becomes, briefly, the unwanted star attraction of the fair, but it's not their own midget, who's in a terrible funk and eventually flees for his life, followed up by the drowning and resurrection of a terminally ill monkey. This provides the story with two excellent and evocative scenes, in which the earth-caked face of an undead monkey stares with glassy eyes through a window at Ed and the exhumation of its grave in a dark forest at the dead of night. Excellent stuff! The last murder is that of a kid who tap-danced under the stage name "Jigaboo" and was found naked at the side of a road. Run over by a car. Yeah. Brown was not a mystery writer who attended classes at The Realist School of Detective Fiction.

It's admirable how Brown turned this patchwork of unusual incidents and bizarre murders into a logical, coherent sequence of events and it could've been a minor masterpiece if it had been written more as a detective story. There was only one real clue (and an obscure one at that) that could give you an inkling of the truth, if you're lucky enough to catch it, but, other wise, you're groping around in the dark until the final chapter – and that bothered me to no end with this book because the solution was both original and imaginative. If this had been better handled, it would've easily conquered a spot on my list of favorite detective stories, but, as things are as they are, I could only really recommend The Dead Ringer for it's "wonderful 'carnie' atmosphere" – as the late "Grobius Shortling" described it.

I have to bring one more thing up about this book and that's its reverse take-on the meddling of amateur detectives in murder cases. After the third murder, Ed and Am have an argument over whether or not they should've acted sooner as they may've prevented more murders from happening. Uncle Am gives a few arguments in favor of the letting the police handle the case themselves, while a slightly guilty Ed prefers to take matters into his own hand. I found this interesting because (additional) deaths are usually caused by the amateurs interference and not by them sitting on their hands (e.g. Ellery Queen's guilt-trip in Cat of Many Tails, 1949).

Oh, just one more thing! Fellow locked room aficionado Mousoukyoku, who blogs On the Threshold of Chaos, has reviewed two Herbert Resnicow novels, The Gold Solution (1983) and The Gold Deadline (1984), and our opinions align and I feel confident that I have made a convert! You can read all my scribbles on Resnicow by clicking here. He also posted a favorable review of Paul Halter's The Fourth Door (1987). You can read all my scribbles on Halter by clicking here. 

Martians, Go Home!

“We have your satellite if you want it back send 20 billion in Martian money. No funny business or you will never see it again.”

- Reportedly seen on a wall in a hall at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California, after losing contact with the Mars Polar Lander, 1999.

Malevolent ghosts emerging from their molding mausoleums, rooms which kills those left alone in them, vampires who dead awaken from their day-time slumber and vindictive curses hacking away at the branches of an ancient family tree had their respective turns as stage props for the locked room mystery in order to provide a backdrop harking back to the ink induced nightmares of Edgar Allan Poe and M.R. James. Some of them have since become tropes, but in the hands of a skillful writer they are still effective embellishments for the impossible crime story. Not so familiar are the, unfortunately, rare occasions when a visitor from the outer regions (read: SF-genre) wrote a locked room story festooned with the unknown horrors from the uncharted regions of outer space. Well, that's not quite true. The ones I have read were light-hearted and almost playful. 

Mack Reynold's The Case of the Little Green Men (1951) is an oddball private eye novel, in which an even odder group of SF-fans hire a run-down, failed detective to investigate the presence of alien life forms on Earth, who are taking shots at them with ray guns or throwing them from their flying saucers – one of them taking a hit while at a costumed science-fiction and fantasy convention. I thought this was far more engaging, funnier and better plotted than Anthony Boucher's Rocket to the Morgue (1942), which had one of the most disappointing locked room tricks and it's only redeeming quality as a novel was its depiction of the 1940s SF-community, and even that was done better by Reynolds. All the same, I did grin at one of the characters take on the genre, stating that the fourth dimension takes the problem out of a locked room for science fiction writers, but, as a detective story, it never really left the launching pad. Yes, The Case of the Little Green Men should be added to my list of favorite impossible crime stories.

The American science-fiction writer Fredric Brown, who regularly descended back into the atmosphere for his second profession as a mystery novelist, gave us another specimen in Death Has Many Doors (1951) – in which his nephew-uncle team of private detectives, Ed and Ambrose Hunter, attempt to help a weak-hearted woman who's being menaced by Martians!

It's an unlikely story, to say the least, but Ed is determined to restore Sally Doerr's disturbed peace of mind, convincing her to spend the money she had scrapped together to hire a detective on a psychiatrist instead and plants himself on her couch for the night to stand guard against any threats – terrestrial, extraterrestrial or imagined. Unfortunately, being a good detective does not necessarily mean that you are a reliable bodyguard or an alert watch dog (c.f. Martin Méroy) and at the dawning of a new day he finds Sally dead in her bed. Her heart had simply stopped beating. 

Everything indicates a natural death: a medical history and the fact nobody could've gotten to her. The apartment door was locked from the inside, the windows were fastened and the dust of the day lay undisturbed on the windowsill, Ed was flat on the couch standing guard and the roof was recently tarred – leaving it soft and unmarked by any footprints. But an unknown voice on the phone, claiming to be a Martian, retains the services of the Hunters to investigate her death and spirits a crisp $1000 note into their office as a retainer. Sally's sister, Dorothy, also turns up with premonitions of her own impending doom and Ed decides to take her out town and sticks to her like a shadow, but is unable to prevent another death. You could consider this second murder an impossible one, but the solution is a flat-out cheat and Ed's moronic behavior only made it worst.

Death Has Many Doors has a lot of the elements in common with the marvelous Night of the Jabberwock (1951), in which a small town newspaper editor tumbles down the rabbit's hole, and the short locked mortuary story "The Spherical Ghoul," combining the intelligence of the ratiocinative detective school with the exterior of the hardboiled private eyes – except not as good. Sally's idée fixe isn’t developed into anything more than the delusions of a confused young woman and that their source of her fancies is obviously from fairly early on they hold no horrors whatsoever. If this book had been written by John Dickson Carr, we would’ve at least got a terrifying account of an encounter with these Martians and their possible involvement in the death of Sally would’ve been played up a lot more.

The idea of the first locked room trick was not bad, but it's not terrific, either, as you can easily guess the raw method of the solution (have seem them too many times) and the finer details require a bit of technical knowledge. Death Has Many Doors comes up a bit short as a detective story, but I would lie if I said I did not enjoy the ride in spite of its imperfections. Still, I would not recommend this book to readers who are new to Fredric Brown and advice to start out with Night of the Jabberwock.

Isn't funny that my biggest exposure to science-fiction comes from detective stories?