The Best of Fredric Brown

INTRODUCTION by Robert Bloch

I hope they don't misspell his name.

At the height of his acclaim, with more than two dozen books and over three hundred short stories to his credit, certain careless critics and reviewers were still referring to "Frederic" or even "Frederick" Brown.

While their comments were generally (and deservedly) laudatory, he resented the spelling errors. He was a stickler for accuracy, and he took justifiable pride in his correct byline—Fredric Brown.

To his friends, of course, he was always "Fred."

I first met him in Milwaukee, during the early forties. Born in Cincinnati in 1907, a graduate of Hanover College in Indiana, he'd knocked about—and been knocked about—in a variety of occupations, ranging from office boy to carnival worker.

At the time we became acquainted he was a proofreader for the Milwaukee Journal and had settled down in a modest home on Twenty-seventh Street with his first wife, Helen, and two bright young sons. The household also included a Siamese cat named Ming Tah, a wooden flutelike instrument called a recorder, a chess set, and a typewriter.

Fred played with the cat, played on the recorder, and played at chess. But the typewriter was not there for fun and games.

Fred wrote short stories. He wrote them in his spare time because he needed job security to support a family. And he sold them to the pulp magazines because they offered the best available market for a beginner's work. He turned out detective stories, mysteries, fantasy, and science fiction. Nostalgia buffs pay high prices today for magazines featuring his name on the cover, but at the time he was merely one of hundreds of contributors competing for the cent a word or two cents a word offered by publishers of pulps.

Diminutive in stature, fine-boned, with delicate features partially obscured by horn-rimmed glasses and a wispy mustache, Fred had a vaguely professorial appearance. His voice was soft, his grooming immaculate. But woe betide the casual acquaintance who ventured to compete with him in an all-night session of poker-playing or alcoholic libation! Nor was there any hope for an opponent who dared to engage him in a duel of verbal wit—words were his natural weapons, and his pun mightier than the sword. When not speculating upon the idiosyncrasies of idiom—why, for example, do people prefer a shampoo to the real poo?—he spent his time searching for excruciating story titles. I recall him once paying ten dollars for the right to use one suggested by a friend for a mystery yarn; the resultant story was called I Love You Cruelly.

The shameless wretch responsible for this offering was, like Fred, a member of Allied Authors, a writers^' group which met regularly at the Milwaukee Press Club. To many of his associates the poker games and bar facilities constituted the major attractions, but despite Fred's prowess in these areas, he was deadly serious about plot discussions and story techniques. He acquired a New York agent, and on his own he kept abreast of writing markets, word-rates, and contracts.

There was no mistaking his ambition, nor his qualifications. Impelled by lifelong intellectual curiosity, he was an omnivorous and discerning reader; his interests embraced music, the theater, and the developments of science. Wordplay was more than a pastime, for he was a grammatical purist. The mot juste and the double entendre were grist for his mill, but he was equally fascinated by the peculiarities of ordinary speech and could reproduce it in his work with reportorial accuracy. Like most of us who found an outlet for our wares in the pulps of that period, Fred wrote his share of undistinguished stories featuring the cardboard characterization and stilted dialogue which seemed to satisfy editorial demands. From time to time, however, he broke new ground. And finally he tackled a novel.

The Fabulous Clipjoint was published in 1941. It drew raves from the critics and won the coveted Edgar Allan Poe Award from the Mystery Writers of America. His second mystery novel, The Dead Ringer, was equally successful and established him as a leading figure in the field. In 1948 his innovative What Mad Universe appeared in Startling Stories. Expanded for hardcover publication a year later, it brought Fred deserved fame as a science-fiction writer.

Meanwhile his personal circumstances underwent a drastic change. There was an amicable divorce; he married for a second time a year or so later. And, encouraged by the reception of his books, he began to turn out mystery novels at an accelerated rate. But he didn't forsake his proofreading job—a true child of the Depression came to learn the value of security and seniority, and Fred was not about to abandon a steady income for the uncertainty of a free-lance writer^'s career.

During this period we spent a great deal of time together, in professional discussion of his projected novels and private explorations of his more intimate decisions. One day he came to me all aglow; he^'d just received a phone call from a prominent editorial figure in New York who headed up one of the leading pulp-magazine chains. Would Fred consider taking over a portion of the editing assignment for seventy-five hundred a year?

Granted, the figure doesn^'t sound impressive today. But if you'll hop into the nearest available time machine and transport yourself back a quarter of a century, you^'ll discover that seventy-five hundred dollars was a respectable annual income; roughly the equivalent of twenty thousand dollars today. It was far more than Fred was earning, or hoped to earn, at his newspaper job—and if he could augment the sum by writing novels on the side, it would exceed his wildest expectations. Fred talked it over with me, and with other friends; he talked it over with his wife, Beth. Then he quit his job and went to New York, where he learned there'd been a slight misunderstanding during his telephone conversation.

The stipend quoted by the editorial director had not been seventy-five hundred a year; it was seventy-five dollars a week.

A dark cloud settled over Fred^'s life. Fortunately, he soon discovered the silver lining.

In a few short years, the imposing chain of pulp magazines he'd hoped to head up had disappeared forever. And in their place was a mushrooming market of paperbacks, competing for the privilege of reprinting hardcover mysteries and science fiction. Foreign editions began to command more-respectable earnings, television was purchasing stories for adaptation, and the new men^'s magazines, led by Playboy, paid higher and higher rates for short stories.

Through fortuitous circumstance, Fredric Brown found himself in the right place at the right time. Critically, commercially, and above all creatively, he was a success.

A series of outstanding and unusual mysteries issued from his typewriter—now clattering away in Taos, New Mexico. Fred had acquired a car and learned to drive; wanderlust, plus the realization that he suffered from respiratory problems, led him to the desert area.

Full-time writing taxed even Fred's ingenuity. He was becoming increasingly renowned for story-twists and surprise endings, both in mysteries and science fiction, and such innovations didn't come easily. When he was stuck for an idea, he took to the road for a few days—not as a driver, but as a passenger on a bus. Destinations were unimportant; he'd discovered that the sheer monotony of the trip itself stimulated him in devising plots. Some of his best work came to him via Greyhound express.

And not all of that work was dependent upon gimmickry or outwitting the reader. As a mature writer he drew heavily upon his variegated personal experience to bring the stamp of authenticity to his subject matter. And he wasn't content to rest on his laurels as a latter-day O. Henry; he took the risk of innovation.

Innovation, in the science fiction of the fifties, was generally considered synonymous with advanced extrapolation of orthodox scientific theory, or the extension of contemporary social phenomena. Thus it was that stories involving antigravity and anti-matter were hailed as daring concepts, and fictional constructs of future society governed by advertising agencies or insurance companies seemed to be the ultimate in speculative expertise.

Characteristically, Fred chose to turn his back to the trend. Quirky individualist that he was, he wrote The Lights in the Sky Are Stars.

It was one of his best—and bravest—books.

Today an entire generation of younger writers has emerged to tell it like it is, or at least like they think it is. Their speculative fiction is peopled with angry young anti-Establishment figures, drug-users, and ambisextrous characters who freely express philosophical profundity in four-letter words. One does not necessarily question the sincerity or dedication of such writers. But the cold truth is that they are not quite as courageous as they profess to be. Today they are merely setting down in print the speech and attitudes which had already surfaced amongst young militants and street people a full decade ago. Rather than formulating a future based on their own imaginative abilities, their work is merely an echo of a past reality.

The Lights in the Sky Are Stars doesn^'t fall into this category. It didn't deal with kinky sex, and its characters spoke in ordinary dialogue rather than verbalized graffiti. Nevertheless, it was a daring work.

Appearing at the zenith of the Eisenhower administration, at a time when science-fiction writers as well as their readership idealized and idolized the launching of the Space Program and the brave young men who pioneered it, Fred's book deliberately dumped on dreams and offered, instead, a raw reality.

In an era when virtually all science-fiction heroes were young —and the few ^"middle-aged^" exceptions were presented as grizzled veterans of thirty-five or thereabouts—Fred^'s protagonist was a man well over fifty. On top of that, he was physically handicapped, and yet (a horror unthinkable to youthful science-fiction readers of the time) he was sexually active. Moreover, the plot of Fred's novel dealt not with the gung-ho glories of space projects, but with the machinations of politicians and the military-industrial complex bent on subverting such efforts to their own ends.

This was heresy with a vengeance. It was also, I submit, far more ^"realistic^" than any tale of a hippie transplanted virgo intacto to a future society bearing a suspicious resemblance to present-day New York City during a garbage strike.

Oddly enough, the book was well-received. It won no awards, nor did it score a breakthrough to the best-seller lists, but today this novel deserves recognition for what its author achieved by way of honest statement.

Yes, Fred was an innovator. Along about this time he ventured another experiment. Safely ensconced as a leading mystery-writer, with assured contacts and contracts in the field, and rapidly rising in the science-fiction field, he decided to write a mainstream novel. And in the face of his reputation for unusual plot angles, colorful characters and off-beat humor, he would write a "straight" book; really telling it like it is at a time before the phrase had even been invented.

The result was The Office, a semiautobiographical account of his own experiences in the twenties. But such was his honesty that he succeeded only too well—and in succeeding, failed. Because the way it is, or was, for Fred in the twenties, proved humdrum and pedestrian in the telling. Minus murder and mayhem, sans piled-up plot complications, and lacking rapid-fire repartee, this day-by-day account of real people in an ordinary office setting seemed dull to readers who expected a typical Fredric Brown entertainment.

He never repeated the venture. Instead he returned to the mixture as before—but what a rich and variegated mixture it was! The burgeoning men^'s magazine market offered outlets for his talent, and new freedom of expression. Sexual taboos were giving way, and while Fred eschewed vulgarity, he found welcome opportunity to base his fantasies and science-fictional efforts on once-forbidden themes. He gave free rein to his wealth of wit, and discovered a new story-form in the "short-short."

In that connection, aficionados may be interested in a 1960 Warner Bros. recording, Introspection IV, in which a narrator named Johnny Gunn, accompanied by the background musical effects of Don Ralke, reads a series of short tales. Five of these—"Sentry," ^"Blood,^" "Imagine," "Voodoo," and "Pattern"—are the work of Fredric Brown at his whimsical best.

Moving to the West Coast in the early sixties, Fred and Beth established residence in the San Fernando Valley. I had already arrived on the scene and we again saw a great deal of one another.

For a time Fred tried his hand at films and television. Way back in the forties a producer had purchased a story from him in order to use its ending for a motion picture called Crack-Up, starring Pat O^'Brien. Again, in the fifties, his mystery novel, The Screaming Mimi, was filmed. A number of his stories had been adapted for radio and later for various television anthology shows. It was only natural that he would attempt to do some adaptations or originals on his own. And, Hollywood being what it was—and, alas, is—it was only natural that his efforts met with little acceptance. Producers didn^'t understand Fred. Their definition of a "pro" was a hack who could and would write anything to order. But Fred, genuine ^"pro^" that he was, wanted to write Fredric Brown stories.

Again, he reverted to print. And Hollywood's undoubted loss was our gain, for he continued to turn out a series of unique, highly individualistic tales; stories which established him in the genre. If he^'d never written anything except ^"Puppet Show,^" we^'d have reason to be grateful for Fredric Brown^'s contribution to science fiction, but there were many others. You^'ll find some of them in the following pages, and if you happen to be discovering them for the first time, I think you'll share the general gratitude for his efforts.

And it is in his stories that Fred^'s fame endures. He was never, to my knowledge, attendant at a science-fiction convention; he was not a trophy collector or a publicity seeker, and a surprisingly large number of fans and fellow professionals knew only the name, not the person who bore it. But as readers, they came to appreciate the qualities which so distinguished his best work—the sardonic humor, the irony which at times brings to mind Ambrose Bierce. And yet there was a leavening element of playfulness which adds an extra dimension to his most savage satire or scaring cynicism. Add to this his gift for the realistic rendering of dialogue and accurate observation of character traits and the result is as impressive as it is entertaining.

There^'s not much more to tell. Fred^'s respiratory problems increased, forcing a move to Tucson in the midsixties. And it was there, on March 11, 1972, that he died.

Those of us who were privileged to know him, mourn his passing. But those who were privileged to read his work remain eternally grateful for what he gave them.

A sampling of that work has been gathered here. There^'s more, much more, and I urge you to seek it out. For into it he poured a lifetime of effort and experience, wit and wisdom and whimsy, honesty and make-believe, joy and despair—all of the qualities which mark the measure of a man, and which make his writing truly, and aptly, The Best of Fredric Brown.