Fredric Brown: The Best of Fredric Brown

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.