The Fabulous Clipjoint

review of
Fredric Brown's The Fabulous Clipjoint
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - July 25, 2018

Blame it on Fredric Brown. He's sucking me into the underworld of plot-driven writing. I was engrossed in this. I loved it. I hardly took any reviewer notes on it at all for the usual reason that I don't want to spoil the plot & I don't have much to say about it that isn't plot-based. The father/husband/stepfather gets murdered & the family members have their various reactions wch seem real enuf. The son, Ed, realizes that he didn't really even know him & feels bad about it. This is emphasized when Ed meets the murdered father's brother after a hiatus of a decade & hears stories about the 2 of them that're surprising:

""Let's stick to Pop," I show more suggested. "He was in Spain."

""Yeah. Well, he came back. We finally got in touch with one another through a friend in St. Paul we both happened to write to. I was with a detective agency then—Wheeler's, out in L.A.—and Wally was in vaudeville. He used to be pretty good at juggling—oh, not a top act, even as jugglers go, but he was good with the Indian clubs. Good enough for a spot with a fair troupe. He ever juggle any lately?"" - p 77

"I was tired, but I had trouble getting to sleep. I kept thinking about what I'd learned about Pop.

"When he was my age, I thought, he'd owned and run a newspaper. He'd had a duel and shot a man. He'd had an affair with a married woman. He'd traveled across most of Mexico afoot and spoke Spanish like a native. He'd crossed the Atlantic and lived in Spain. He'd dealt blackjack in a border town." - p 81

This bk was copyrighted in 1947. I was born in 1953. I often find myself attracted to cultural products from the 1950s. I love Morton Feldman's "Intersection" piano pieces, e.g.. The Fabulous Clipjoint doesn't quite fit the era but it's close enuf. Ed calls his father "Pop". My mom called her stepfather "Pop" &, as a family tradition, I called mine "Pop". Is that common anymore?

""You mean you're going to—to—"

""Hell, yes. That's why I had to fix things with Hoagy and Maury—he bought the carney this season but kept Hobart's name on it—so I could stay away as long as I had to. Hell, yes, kid. You don't think we're going to let some son of a bitch get away with killing your dad, do you?"" - p 18

Uncle Am & Ed are going to investigate. The cover of the bk identifies this as "AN ED AND AM MYSTERY NOVEL" wch makes me wonder if there are others. I look online & learn that there are 7. This is the 1st one. I'm hooked, I want to read them all. (Then again, I really do have better things to do.) It helps that there's lingo I'm not familiar w/:

"Bassett's eyes unveiled a little, just a little. He asked, "You think you might want to run one?"

""I think maybe," my uncle said.

"They seemed to understand each other. They knew what they were talking about. I didn't.

"Like when Hoagy, the big man, had been talking to my uncle about the blow being sloughed. Only that was carney talk; at least I knew why I didn't understand it. This was different; they were talking words I knew, but it still didn't make sense." - pp 29-30

A subplot of sorts is that Ed's 15 yr old stepsister is horny & keeps trying to seduce him:

"She said, "Some day I'm going on the stage, Eddie. What do you? How'm I doin'?"

""You dance swell," I told her.

""Bet I could strip-tease. Like Gypsy Rose. Watch." She reached behind her, as she danced, for the fastenings of her dress.

"I said, "Don't be a dope, Gardie. I'm your brother, remember?"

""You're not my brother. Anyway, what's that got to do with how I dance? How—"

"She was having trouble with the catch. She danced near me. I reached out and grabbed her hand. I said, "Goddam it, Gartie, cut that out."

"She laughed and leaned back against me. The pull on her wrist had brought her into my lap.

"She said, "Kiss me, Eddie." Her lips were bright red, her body hot against mine. And then her lips were pressing against mine, without my doing anything about it." - p 63

Uncle Am is experienced & wily, Ed is young but has an imagination for taking risks that pay off. Here, after not being sure what he do, he spontaneously approaches a gangster's girlfriend in a direct way:

"I asked, "Does the name Hunter mean anything to you?"

""Hunter? It doesn't."

"I asked, "How about the name Reynolds?"

""Who is this?"

""I'd like to explain," I said. "May I come upstairs? Or would you meet me down in the bar for a drink?"" - p 139

The direct approach pays off in a way that Uncle Am's previous con attempt hadn't.

Brown also wrote science fiction & I like the way his respect for the genre keeps popping up in his crime fiction:

"The top floor was a very swanky ocktail bar. The windows were open and it was cool there. Up as high as that, the breeze was a cool breeze and not something out of a blast furnace.

"We took a table by a window on the south side, looking out toward the Loop. It was beautiful in the bright sunshine. The tall, narrow buildings were like fingers reaching toward the sky. It was like something out of a science-fitcion story. You couldn't quite believe it, even looking at it." - p 178

I really enjoyed reading this. I seem to like his crime fiction more than his SF even tho I generally like SF more than crime fiction. I've hardly told you anything about the bk to spoil it for you. READ IT! It's a quickie. Brown isn't afraid to depict 'beautiful' women as manipulative. I'm reminded of Raymond Chandler's The Little Sister b/c of that. I appreciate stories in wch women are shown equally as victimizers rather than only as victims — the latter seems unrealistic to me but there's plenty of it around these days.

Brown was supposedly popular in his day but in this reader's experience he seems close to forgotten now. That's a shame. Besides, he was born in Baltimore, my home town. show less

By the time Fredric Brown wrote this, his first full novel, he had already been a prolific contributor to the pulp mags of the 1930s & 40s, turning in works across multiple genres from Sci-fi to Noir. The Fabulous Clipjoint duly won the Edgar Award for Best First Novel and introduced a popular pair of would be detectives, Ed & Ambrose Hunter, that would feature in a further six novels. Ed is an 18 year old living in Chicago with his father, step mother and teenage step sister. His hum drum existence as a printer working at the same firm as his father by day and dreaming of becoming a jazz musician by night is shattered when his father is found dead, murdered in a dark alley in a seedy part of town. Teaming up with his Uncle, a carnival show more worker and ex private dick, who he hasn't seen for a decade, Ed vows to track down the killer. Brown has a unique approach to writing noir that surely shouldn't work. He manages to evoke a gritty, shadowy world filled with suspense, while also maintaining a streak of humour that runs throughout. It's both a crime story and a coming of age story as Ed follows what leads they have, while discovering how little he really knew about his own father from the stories Am tells. Brown's playfullness with the narrative comes to the fore in the scenes where Ed does a spot of roleplay, playing a sharp-suited gun killer with an imaginary gun as they try to bluff info out of suspects. And it's smooth. Brown's first person narrative and snappy dialogue just roll through the mind. It's not short of detail either with Ambrose's sometimes off the wall observations fuelled by the author's own wide experience ranging from the nature of handbags to the basic physical structure of the universe, carney lingo, pop culture references, Jazz, movies, books etc. There are clever little touches like Ed ordering "Rye," from the bartender because he'd seen George Raft order it in the 1935 version of The Glass Key but getting Dutch courage not from a stiff drink but rather from the Juke box and the high wail of Benny Goodman's clarinet. After reading several ultra cynical modern day noir novels recently it was refreshing to see that even during the golden age of the genre Noir wasn't always entirely bleak, cold and black. show less

The Fabulous Clipjoint is the Catcher In The Rye of mystery novels - or at least, it is for me.

While I read it, I'm living the life of Ed Hunter, a bright but bitter 18-year-old living in the Chicago slums of the 1940s. And the funny thing is that just like Catcher In The Rye, it doesn't feel a bit dated; Ed loves jazz and wants to play the trombone, but that feels exactly the same as a kid wanting to play the electric guitar would today. Ed's thoughts, as Brown writes them, feel just as fresh and "now" as anything written last week - and are a lot more engaging and real-feeling than 99% of the fiction being written these days.

That's probably why the novel won Fredric Brown the Edger for the best first mystery novel of the year*.

You'll show more like Ed, I think. You'll like his uncle Ambrose, "Am" for short, too. Am has been a lot of things, including a "carny", which is slang for a carnival worker. Brown spent some time as a carny himself, and knew the business well. Although only a little of the novel takes place at a carnival (the main action takes place in the seedier parts of 1940s Chicago) Brown's details ring true. If you're interested, Brown set a number of short mystery stories in carnivals too.

When Ed and Am Hunter team up to find out who murdered Ed's father, it doesn't feel anything like the traditional mystery novel. There are noir elements of course, but there's an immediacy and realism to the book that - well, I keep trying to explain what makes the book different, and I keep coming back to the same comparison. Just as some readers almost feel as if Holden Caulfield was a friend, someone they knew, so you may well feel about Ed Hunter - and through him, Fredric Brown. Or at least, I do.

It's really an exceptional and unique book, and I can't recommend it highly enough.

Ed and Am Hunter are one of mystery's outstanding teams, and Brown wrote six more novels about them. The Fabulous Clipjoint remains the best in the series, but the rest are also outstanding novels. Not all are currently being published, unfortunately. Small mystery publishing houses keep bringing Brown's mysteries back into print, and then inevitably go out of business. In any case, all of Brown's mystery novels are beautifully written and well worth the effort of finding them. Although he never achieved the general recognition that he deserved, Fredric Brown is highly respected by authors and those who've read his work.

Brown also wrote many short noir detective stories for the pulps - but unlike many such stories, his have heart and a gentleness, a sort of intellectual and thoughtful quality, that make them special. They, too, have been collected and published by several small companies.

Lastly, I have to note that Brown was also highly regarded for his science fiction stories and novels, of which there are many. If you like his work in either genre, you'll almost certainly like his work in the other genre - even if you don't normally like that sort of book.

If you like Brown, Anthony Boucher's writing style is in many ways similar. It may not be a coincidence that Boucher, too, worked both in mystery and SF.

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* - Unlike other genres, mystery writers only give awards to first novels. show less

"The Fabulous Clipjoint" is one of those books I would have missed out on if not for the relative ease with which copyright-expired (and, usually, out-of-print) books can be downloaded from the internet these days. Frankly, prior to discovering this title on the net, I knew nothing about Fredric Brown's writing career or about "The Fabulous Clipjoint," his first novel. What caught my eye was the cover art of the book's original 1947 edition - one glance, and I knew I had to read this one.

From the cover, I expected a hardboiled piece of American noir style detective fiction, the kind of stuff that is still so popular with readers today. And I got that plus a big surprise. "The Fabulous Clipjoint" is also a fine coming-of-age novel about show more Ed Hunter, an 18-year-old boy whose father is murdered late one night in one of Chicago's back alleys. The elder Hunter, apparently on his way home from an evening of local bar-hopping, never made it. Ed was not particularly happy about his home life even before his father's murder but, now that he is stuck at home with just his alcoholic stepmother and his randy 15-year-old stepsister, life at home is trickier than ever.

Things get interesting when Ed's Uncle Am (Ambrose) shows up to help the family through its grieving process. Am runs a game of chance in a traveling carnival that just happens to be passing through Chicago at the time of his brother's murder. Am is determined to identify the killer and, since Ed's boss has given him a few days off from the printing shop he works at, he decides to help his uncle nose around Chicago's north side.

Am knows that his amateur investigation will bring him and Ed into contact with the thugs and lowlifes that thrive in Chicago's criminal underbelly. If they are to achieve their goal - and survive the process - the Hunters are going to have to be as tough and fearless as those they want to intimidate into telling them the truth about what happened to Ed's father in that dark alley. Am, world-wise and rough enough around the edges to pull off a tough guy image, begins a makeover of young Ed that is half the fun of the book. Before long, Ed, dressed in his new tough-guy-suit, finds himself bluffing his way through confrontations with thugs and their women in a way he could not have imagined himself doing even a few days earlier.

This one is fun on several different levels, among them: its hardboiled look at big city life just after WWII; the nurturing relationship that develops between Ed and Am; the ease with which Ed grows into playing "gangster;" and the feeling of nostalgia that reading something from this period always generates.

"The Fabulous Clipjoint" won an Edgar for "Best First Novel" in 1948 and, as it turns outs, was the beginning of a series of seven "Ed and Am Hunter" novels written between 1947 and 1963. In addition to the Ed and Am series, Brown wrote at least twenty other novels in the fifties and early sixties, most of them science fiction. He is also the author of numerous short stories. I look forward to experiencing more of his work - in both genres.

Rated at: 4.0 show less

Reading a book by Brown is like having an old friend tell you a story. This one moves a little slow, but the characters of Ed and Ambrose Hunter, which he used in several more novels, are always interesting companions. Brown doesn't pull any punches about violence or about people's true natures, and that makes the book stay in your memory a lot longer than most other pulp writers.

Really a great tone and mood to this post-war Chicago noir/pulp fiction piece. You learn more about the characters from their actions than their words as neither author nor character use extraneous descriptors. The dialogue and action comes through as clipped and succinct yet evocative. Truly enjoyed this one.

I really liked this. I've previously enjoyed Fredric Brown's science fiction, so it seemed reasonable to try his other work.
It's a fast-paced story set in 1940s Chicago. A man is found dead in a dark alley, killed by a blow to the head and robbed. His son and his brother believe that the police won't take much trouble over a minor crime with little to go on, so they start to investigate it themselves,