I’m a HUGE fan of Fredric Brown. I knew of him as a science fiction and fantasy writer, but I was reading The Annotated Alice, and Martin Gardner had a note about Brown’s mystery novel The Night of the Jabberwock, so I had to pick it up. It was in an omnibus edition of four mysteries. The guy who sold it to me said “Huh! I didn’t know he wrote mysteries!”
Boy, did he. I can highly recommend his work. Brown’s writing is a model of crisp, simple prose. He came up with some of the most wonderful, involved ideas. But his mysteries are bigger on character and mood. The volume I started with included:
The Fabulous Clipjoint – Brown’s first novel. It won him an Edgar. Definitely worth reading. It introduced his detective team of Ed and Am Hunter, who showed up in several later novels and stories. In this first one, Ed’s father is murdered in an apparent mugging in Chicago, and Ed enlists the help of his carny uncle Ambrose to help him track down the killer. A coming-of-age novel as well as a mystery.
The Screaming Mimi – atmospheric mystery where a down-and-out homeless reporter witnesses the attempted murder of a woman in a hotel lobby through the glass. Her dog leaps up and pulls off her dress, leaving her nude (she’s a stripper, it turns out, and this was their act). He vows to sober up and track down her attempted killer. Beautifully told, with unexpected twists. It was filmed (with Gypsy Rose Lee!), but I’ve never seen the film, which I suspect isn’t at all faithful. This book actually recalls Robert Bloch’s work.
The Night of the Jabberwock – a small-town newspaper editor is approached by a man who says he is to recruit the editor into a secret society called The Vorpal Blades, which knows the REAL secrets behind Lewis Carroll’s works. He leads the editor into a house, where there’s a bottle on a table that says “Drink me”. The recruiter takes the bottle and does – and falls down dead.
Knock 3-1-2 a murder told from multiple points of view, including the murderer’s I’m told this one has been filmed, too.
Carnival of Crime – a collection of short Brown mysteries, including one story where the victim is the reader.
A company called MacMillan published several volumes of Brown’s old pulp stories back in the 1980s and 90s. The hardcover editions have become collector’s items, but some of the paperback editions had big print runs, and can still be found – Homicide Sanitarium, Before She Kills, Pardon my Ghouliosh Laughter, Thirty Corpses Every Thursday, The Freak Show Murders were all printed in paperback editions.
For a time inj the 1980s and 1990s it seemed as if they were rteprinting a Brown mystery every year – **Murder Can Be Fun, The Far Cry, ** and others appeared in paperback then. I don’t see them in used book stores much anymore (whern I can find used book stores), but you ought to be able to find them online, or in libraries. The Salt Lake City library used to have a fine collection of Browns.