Fredric Brown (1906–1972)

Psychiatry was all the rage in late 1940s popular culture, very au courant, as witness films such as Spellbound and The Snake Pit, or the three dazzling novels that John Franklin Bardin published between 1946 and 1948, The Deadly Percheron, The Last of Philip Banter, and Devil Take the Blue-Tail Fly. So when a character early in Fredric Brown's equally dazzling The Screaming Mimi makes a seemingly casual reference to having had psychiatric training, you may be sure it is a significant show more moment.

Fredric Brown (1906-1972) is one of the rare authors to distinguish himself in both crime fiction and science fiction, and he brought an offbeat sense of humor to both. The Screaming Mimi (1949) is a standalone hard-boiled mystery with a newspaper reporter rather than a detective as its protagonist. Bill Sweeney is an unmarried Irish-American scribe in his early 40s who claims not to be an alcoholic (right) but who goes on benders during which he winds up on park benches with other drunks - which is how the novel opens, as a matter of fact, and it gives nothing away to say that is how it ends, as well. Loop the loop!

Brown says on the opening page, "it isn't a nice story. It's got murder in it, and women and liquor and gambling and even prevarication" (love that "even," a neat specimen of Brown's puckishness). Sweeney will witness the aftermath of an attempted killing and become obsessed with the victim, who just happens to be a stripper who performs an act with a large and ferocious-looking dog. You can already see how this gets psychological.

The "Screaming Mimi" of the title is a semi-mass-produced "fine art" statuette of a terrified nude woman, which figures heavily in the narrative: "The mouth was wide open in a soundless scream. The arms were thrust out, palms forward, to hold off some approaching horror." Believe me that I know that the phrase "semi-mass-produced 'fine art' statuette" is rife with internal contradictions, which happen to be completely germane to the story. Sweeney is a high-culture snob who dotes on his semi-mass-produced classical music 78s and shudders when he hears Irving Berlin mentioned. (This is funny, since Berlin and his "Great American Songbook" colleagues are now considered classical composers, just about.)

It gets better. The statuette looks like it is made of ebony, but it's not. "It is made of a new plastic that can't be told from ebony, unless you pick it up. The dull gloss is the same as ebony's, to the eye." Things are not what they seem!, check. Repros and knock-offs.

Then when Sweeney's apartment is burgled, the thief fails to take "a stickpin with a zircon in it that [he] could not have been sure wasn't a diamond." Who can be sure of anything, those days or these days?

In case you're wondering, Walter Benjamin's seminal 1936 essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" would not be published in English translation until 1968, but in 1949 Brown is already channeling its spirit, big-time.

I don't want to go any further with the plot of The Screaming Mimi; you really need to read it. It is an absolute classic of its kind, easily as good as Raymond Chandler when he was cooking. It has a coterie reputation, but is not as well-known as it should be (although you know about it now, and that's all that really counts). No Brown title was included in the Library of America's big two-volume set of noir novels of the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, and that was a criminal oversight.

The Screaming Mimi has been adapted for the movies twice, by Gerd Oswald as Screaming Mimi in 1958, and by Dario Argento as The Bird with the Crystal Plumage in 1970. I haven't seen either, but I feel confident that the Oswald film, at least, must have considerably altered Brown's overall thrust, because there is no way that a 1958 movie, even luridly put forward as "The strip-tease murder case!" and featuring Gypsy Rose Lee in a supporting role, could have encompassed some of the twists of the original.

Yes, I have been mimicking Brown's Mimi style throughout this piece. Sharp of you to notice. show less

In Olafur Eliasson's exhibition The Blind Pavilion for the Danish pavilion at the most recent Venice Biennale, virtually all the strategies that the artist had employed up until now were activated: mirror reflections, glass kaleidoscopes, stretches of stairway, architectural interventions, and camera obscuras. An all-encompassing exhibition, it cancelled out the dividing lines between work and viewer, between outside and inside, between art and science. A parallel counterpart to the show more pavilion, rather than a mere representation of it, is the book The Blind Pavilion. Created by Eliasson in close collaboration with Danish author Svend Uge Madsen, who has persistently challenged our notions of time and space in his writings, The Blind Pavilion gathers writing by authors, poets, and theoreticians who were invited to contribute texts that explore our constantly shifting and ever-evolving capacity for "orienting" ourselves. The texts serve as contributions to an examination of how we physically and psychologically orient ourselves to the world--and of what happens when we are deprived of one or more of our orientation possibilities, for example our ability to hear and remember, to expect something, or to experience the passage of time show less

Willy Griff is a struggling actor trying to make a go of it in Hollywood. He lives in a room in a boarding house filled with similarly marginal characters and nags his agent for work. He does have a married woman he's been meeting in motel rooms, at least until her husband visits him to demand he stop. Which is when Willy comes up with the idea of killing the husband so that he and Doris can continue their relationship and have her husband's money. So a banal reason to commit an show more uninteresting crime. The plans become more complex as time passes. Willy is determined to not get caught and he knows that having been Doris's lover makes him an automatic suspect. Then a solution presents itself, it's one we've seen before, but the way Brown puts the story together makes for a highly entertaining read. What makes this noir sing is how Brown writes the characters, none of whom you'd want to meet, and for the absolute amazing jaw-dropping ending. show less

This book collects the complete short fiction of Fredric Brown, originally published between 1941 and 1965, arranged in chronological order. Brown was a midwesterner, never much involved in the SF author/fan culture that sprang up on both coasts in the genre's early years. While it's not unusual to find SF or mystery writers who've dabbled in the other genre, Brown is one of the few to be a genuinely significant figure in both.

Within SF, Brown is better known for his short fiction than for show more his novels, and I do mean short. He specialized, especially in the latter half of his career, in short-shorts, stories of one or two pages. From 1954 to 1963, this collection includes 62 stories, totaling 130 pages.

At that length, he's not writing stories so much as jokes, single ideas that build to a clever twist or punch line. And Brown's final twists could be clever indeed. "Millennium" is one of my favorite "deal with the devil" stories; "Rebound" is a precisely structured miniature that puts all the punch in the next-to-last word; "Hobbyist," really more of a crime story than SF, builds quickly to a delightful just-desserts ending.

Of his longer stories, the best known these days is probably "Arena," which was the inspiration for a Star Trek episode. (Well, sort of. Trek writer Gene Coon came up with the story, having apparently forgotten the Brown story he'd read earlier. Coon's version wasn't exactly like Brown's, but the basic concept is identical. The Trek lawyers caught the similarity, contacted Brown, paid him for the rights, and gave him screen credit.)

Had I been in charge of this book, I might have chosen not to arrange the stories chronologically. Putting all of the short-shorts at the end might leave the reader with the final impression that Brown was merely clever, skilled with a quick punchline or sharp pun. But he's more than that (though that's not nothing). His prose is crisp and graceful, even after eighty years; he carries his ideas to their logical conclusions in creative ways; and he finds unexpected resolutions to his stories. The ending to "Etaoin Shrdlu," for instance, is not only an unexpected victory over the story's menace, but shows an unusually cosmopolitan worldview for 1942.

When you collect the complete works of any artist, there's bound to be a bit of slush in the pile. But Brown is never so bad as to be unreadable. At worst, his stories are a bit unoriginal, and even that is probably exaggerated for the modern reader, who's read a half-century or more more of variations on the same familiar tropes. show less