Fredric Brown

Fredric Brown was born on October 29, 1906, in Cincinnati, Ohio, the only child of Emma Amelia (née Graham) and Karl Lewis Brown. Karl, a salesman/jack-of-all-trades for the shady direct-mail-marketing kingpin William P. Harrison, would be arrested on January 2, 1908, when Fred was still an infant, on the charge of defrauding a buyer out of $419.75 (almost $15,000 today) of electroplating equipment (of dubious quality) that he never ordered. Harrison bailed Karl out of jail, and the case went away, but it wouldn’t be the last time the two would be ensnared in the criminal justice system. About three years later Karl would have to testify in his boss’s trial for mail fraud. His testimony unpersuasive, the jury convicted, and Harrison was sentenced to three years in a federal prison before having the conviction overturned on appeal.

How much of an impact these goings-on made on young Fred is impossible to know, though the unscrupulous behavior certainly informed his later crime fiction. During Fred’s early childhood, the family moved across the Ohio River to Conway, Kentucky (around the same time reformers descended on the notoriously corrupt “Queen City”), but had moved back to Cincinnati by the time Fred was eleven or twelve, where they lived in a large, Italianate brick house in the Northside neighborhood with Emma’s mother, Sarah Graham.

Though neither of his parents were religious (his father an atheist, his mother agnostic), religion ran in the family, and so Karl and Emma joined the local Presbyterian church for their son’s sake around this time. After his grandmother Sarah passed away in 1920, his mother was diagnosed with terminal cancer just three years later. Brown later recalled that he “ran out of the house crying,” praying to God “that if he would cure my mother, would pass the miracle of making her well again, I would devote the rest of my life to him, would become a missionary to Darkest Africa or wherever he might send me.” When Emma died on December 2, 1923, it confirmed the now seventeen-year-old’s own budding atheism. He would call his church-going years “the most mixed-up period of my life.”

Fred graduated from Hughes High School in 1925 at the age of eighteen. He was a very youthful-looking eighteen, slight in stature, standing just under five-foot-six and weighing 120 pounds. At Hughes he had been a member of the yearbook staff as well as being involved in other school clubs, was already an accomplished flutist, and had published stories and poems in the school magazine. After graduation, he started working at a machine tool jobbing firm, probably the same company his father Karl was managing at the time. When Karl passed away on October 17, 1926, just before Fred turned twenty, he was alone, having lost the three closest members of his family within six years of each other. With some life insurance money, doled out by his late father’s brother, Linn, Fred was able to attend Hanover College in Indiana in 1927, where he stayed for a semester before switching in the fall to the University of Cincinnati. After that, either the money had run out or he’d tired of college, or both.

Fred’s Uncle Linn was a retired grocer turned newspaper man in the small college town of Oxford, Ohio. He reported for the nearby Hamilton Journal-News, the Dayton Times-Star, and the Cincinnati Daily News, and though little is known about their relationship, it must have figured prominently in Fred’s life, as he would later go into journalism and even named his second son Linn, no doubt after his uncle. Of course, how much Ed’s Uncle Am resembles Fred’s Uncle Linn is anyone’s guess.

After leaving college, Fred began a long-distance courtship with a second cousin on his father’s side living in Wisconsin, Helen Ruth Brown, whom he married on April 13, 1929. Their son Linn would later write that his parents hardly knew each other: “The courtship was conducted totally by mail. When he wrote her suggesting marriage, he’d seen only a snapshot.” Like much of Fred’s life story, how he came to start a correspondence with a second cousin he’d never met and why he decided to propose to her has remained mysterious and hard to pin down.

Working as a stenographer at the time, Fred moved with his new bride to her family’s home in Milwaukee, where he found another job as a stenographer, this time with a detective agency, typing up the reports of the agency’s operatives.

The couple’s first son, James, was born in 1930, followed by Linn in 1932, by which time Fred was working as an insurance agent for New York Life. But he nourished his passion for writing by joining a local writers group of similarly inexperienced authors. In 1936 Fredric Brown began writing humorous short stories for several trade magazines while also writing a monthly column for The American Printer, which he would continue to do for ten years.

In 1937 he began work as a proofreader for the Milwaukee Journal, where he would continue off and on until 1945. Before that he had been proofing various pulp magazines, of which he would later recall that “the stuff he had to read gave him professional nausea” and made him realize that he could write better stories himself. While he’d had dozens of his short stories and vignettes appear in the likes of Excavating Engineer, Ford Dealer Service Bulletin, and Feedstuffs, he began to submit his fiction to the mystery pulps and got his first story, “The Moon for a Nickel,” published in Street & Smith’s Detective Story Magazine in March 1938. He published another forty pulp short stories, mostly crime fiction, between 1939 and 1941. Unable to serve after the U.S. entered World War II due to his allergies, bad eyesight, and general poor health, Brown would increase his output during the war years, writing nearly a hundred short stories for the pulps, including a number of science-fiction/fantasy tales in the pages of Unknown Worlds, Astounding Science Fiction, and others.

Sometime in the early 1940s he and the family moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico, to help alleviate his severe allergies. He took a day job with the Santa Fe railroad while continuing a furious pace of writing stories for the pulps. The sojourn in Albuquerque only lasted a couple of years, however, before they returned to Milwaukee, where Brown took a defense job at a foundry and toiled away at his real job at night and on weekends, writing his increasingly sought-after short stories while Helen looked after the apartment and raised their two boys.

At some point during this period, he spent time in the near-north side of Chicago and also lived for two weeks with a friend who was a mentalist in a traveling carnival. Both stints were probably research, as in 1944 he began work on his first novel, The Fabulous Clipjoint. Brown’s agent, Harry Altshuler, tried to sell the novel, but was turned down by a dozen publishers between 1945 and 1946. A more realistic, naturalistic kind of hard-boiled mystery with a soft heart, it was not in the mold of the bestselling mysteries of the time. Nevertheless, Altshuler did manage to sell serial rights to the novel to Mystery Book Magazine, which published a condensed version of the book under the title “Dead Man’s Indemnity” in April 1946. It was then that the publisher E.P. Dutton bought the rights to The Fabulous Clipjoint and released it as a hardcover in 1947.

The success of his first novel would be a turning point for Brown, professionally and personally. Signing an eight-book deal with Dutton, Brown wrote a follow-up to Clipjoint (which he’d intended as a one-off) and continued the adventures of Ed and Am in The Dead Ringer, which he finished in 1947. Also finished in 1947 was his marriage to Helen, from whom he’d been estranged for years—Brown had already moved out of the family’s apartment, first across the hall and then to a bachelor’s rooming-house. But now with money from his book deal, he finally could afford to get a divorce while providing alimony and child support, and also contribute to James and Linn’s college educations.

Around this time he met Elizabeth Charlier, a divorcée four years his senior, and fell in love. While he was dating Beth, he received an offer to work for a leading pulp publisher in New York for $7500 a year (about $100,000 today) and jumped at the chance. Learning when he got there that the pay was actually $75 a week (about half what he’d thought), he quit and decided to try and make a living solely from his writing. Beth joined him in New York, where they were married on October 11, 1948. After a short honeymoon, Brown learned that The Fabulous Clipjoint had won the prestigious Edgar Allan Poe Award, given by the Mystery Writers of America, for best first novel of 1947.

The Browns remained briefly in New York before visiting friends and family in the Midwest, staying in Chicago for a few weeks of brutally cold winter before deciding to give New Mexico a try, at Fred’s suggestion. They settled in Taos, and the bohemian artists’ colony suited them well. For some time, their life was a nomadic, unconventional one, the opposite of the settled family life Fred had been expected to embrace during his first marriage. His son Linn, who admired his father, had to admit that “Fred didn’t particularly like kids. . . . He told me, ‘I never really respected you until you were old enough to stand up at a bar and buy a drink . . . [and] talk intelligently.’”

After three years in Taos, the Browns moved to California in 1952, first to Venice and then El Segundo, closer to the heart of film and television production. He found limited success in Hollywood. In addition to the big-screen adaptation of The Screaming Mimi (1958), he had a number of his short stories adapted for episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents and other series, but only had one of his own teleplays produced. Still he continued to publish at least one novel a year and numerous short stories throughout the 1950s. After two years of creative productivity but declining health, doctors suggested Brown move to Tucson, Arizona, where it was hoped its warm, dry climate would help his allergies and breathing issues. It would be, except for a brief return to Southern California in 1961–1963, Fred and Beth’s permanent home.

Brown’s prolific output since striking out on his own following the publication of Fabulous Clipjoint included twenty-one more crime novels (six of which were additional Ed & Am Hunter mysteries), five sci-fi novels, and one semi-autobiographical novel, The Office (1958). He also continued to write short fiction, publishing another 140 short stories and vignettes in both the mystery and sci-fi genres from 1946 to 1965. Among his non–Ed & Am mysteries are minor classics of crime fiction like The Screaming Mimi (1949), about the pursuit of a serial killer in Chicago; and Night of the Jabberwock (1950), a comic mystery about a small-town newspaper editor desperate for a big story, taking inspiration from Lewis Carroll’s Alice books. And his science-fiction novels have likewise endured: What Mad Universe (1949), an early conceptualization of a multiverse with the editor of a sci-fi pulp magazine as protagonist; The Lights in the Sky Are Stars (1953), a prescient look at a future (1997–2001) where space exploration has fallen out of fashion and the hero must contend with the political realities facing scientific inquiry; and Martians, Go Home! (1955), a Mars Attacks–style farce with aliens more hilariously annoying than deadly. Of course, as influential as his novels have been, Brown’s short fiction, particularly his sci-fi stories and vignettes stand out for their originality, playfulness, and dramatic punch.

By 1965, Brown’s health had deteriorated to the point that he could no longer write. His final novel, Mrs. Murphy’s Underpants, was published in 1963, and his final short story, “Eine Kleine Nachtmusik,” co-written with Carl Onspaugh, came out in the June 1965 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. By 1971, battling emphysema and continuing to drink too much, Brown was also going blind. When he went to the hospital for what he correctly assumed was the last time, he left a note in his desk for his family to find, which they did after he died on March 11, 1972. The note read, “No flowers, no funeral, no fuss.”

Beth would continue to promote his work, shepherding new editions of his work into print—including the short-story collections Paradox Lost (1973) and The Best of Fredric Brown (1976)—until she passed away in 1986.