Here Comes a Candle

by Fredric Brown, Bill Pronzini (Introduction)

Here Comes a Candle is Fredric Brown at his most audacious in a novel that was far ahead of its time. It is the story of Joe Bailey, whose young life is at a crossroads. Not only is he involved with a tough Milwaukee racketeer and two completely different women, but he is haunted by childhood trauma. Psychologically complex and told in an array of stylistic variations, it is a tour de force with a savagely ironic ending not to be soon forgotten.

Genres: Horror, Fiction, Noir, Mystery, Crime, Classics, Thriller

297 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1950

About the author

Fredric Brown was an American science fiction and mystery writer. He was one of the boldest early writers in genre fiction in his use of narrative experimentation. While never in the front rank of popularity in his lifetime, Brown has developed a considerable cult following in the almost half century since he last wrote. His works have been periodically reprinted and he has a worldwide fan base, most notably in the U.S. and Europe, and especially in France, where there have been several recent movie adaptations of his work. He also remains popular in Japan.

Never financially secure, Brown - like many other pulp writers - often wrote at a furious pace in order to pay bills. This accounts, at least in part, for the uneven quality of his work. A newspaperman by profession, Brown was only able to devote 14 years of his life as a full-time fiction writer. Brown was also a heavy drinker, and this at times doubtless affected his productivity. A cultured man and omnivorous reader whose interests ranged far beyond those of most pulp writers, Brown had a lifelong interest in the flute, chess, poker, and the works of Lewis Carroll. Brown married twice and was the father of two sons.

Reviews

[Nancy Oakes · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Here comes a candle to light you to bed
And here comes a chopper to chop off your head"

The above couplet is taken from the rhyme called "Oranges and Lemons," and serves as a centerpiece of this awesome noir crime novel written in 1950. The main character of Here Comes a Candle is young Joe Bailey, who has a phobia of candles and axes based on an early childhood trauma associated with that rhyme.

Joe worked as a numbers runner in Milwaukee for a thug named Mitch until a police investigation put that racket on hold for a while, and now just kind of hangs out, supported by handouts from Mitch. He's kept on the payroll because Mitch might need him later, and everything moves along as normal until he meets Ellie, the niece of the owner of a local diner. Ellie is a nice girl, who has moved to the area to work for her uncle, and she and Joe hit it off. But there's another dame in the picture: Francine, Mitch's girlfriend. She's the kind of woman Joe can only aspire to, but it doesn't matter...he wants her, or at least someone like her, but it takes the kind of money that buys a robin's-egg blue convertible and Joe doesn't have it. But he may get his chance when Mitch comes up with a proposition for him that might put him up in the big time.

The story itself is good, but what makes this book unique (well, at least for the 50s anyway) are the various techniques used by Brown throughout the novel in telling Joe's backstory. Flashbacks and dreams that enter in Joe's psyche are experienced via different "media": a radio broadcast of "The Adventures of Joe Bailey" starts off these odd chapters, and from there we get a glimpse into Joe's earliest childhood traumas. Then there's "the screen," composed as a screenplay complete with fade ins, dissolve tos, cut tos, etc. A sportscasts of a game of cops and robbers is the next format, and a telecast of one of Joe's dreams is also presented. In between each one is straight narrative so that the story continues. It was probably very unusual for its time, but it works.

The book has a nice little twist at the end and is a bit on the pulpy side. The characters are rather stereotypical but it hardly matters. Brown also offers the reader a look at prevailing attitudes of the time (life in the shadow of the atomic bomb, for example) and his experimental cuts into Joe's psyche are incredibly well done. Here Comes a Candle is really a lot of fun as well as a good story. There are also (in my edition) two added entries: a short story entitled "The Joke," which reads like an episode from the old Twilight Zone series, and what Brown calls a "bitch piece," about the foibles of Christianity and religion.

I'm looking forward to more of Fredric Brown's work. If you like noir or like your crime fiction with a doosey of a twist at the end, you may enjoy this one.

[Antonius Block]

One of the most audacious books I’ve ever read, this is noir fiction at its most existential, fatalistic, and experimental. It tells a familiar story of a young, ambivalent man (‘Average Joe' Bailey) who can’t decide if he wants to follow the straight path in life of honest work, marriage, and limited hopes, or the crooked but ambitious path to achieving The American Dream under the wing of a local gangster. His dilemma is defined in terms of two girls he meets on the same day: one a nice, sweet, hard-working girl and the other an intimidating, voluptuous femme fatale. The push/pull attraction he feels toward each consumes his thoughts and exacerbates his indecisiveness.

What’s so unusual about the novel is the form in which it is told, beginning with an omniscient, sardonic narrator that gradually recedes into third person limited (with bouts of intense second person), and then punctuating the book by at times turning it into – in order – a radio program, a screenplay, a sportscast, a video, a stage play, and a newspaper article – devices which at once distance and deconstruct Joe’s dilemma and at the same time delve into his psychological states with bold perspectives only afforded by a dream logic that is impossible in reality.

Dreams and nightmares actually form the crux of the story. The title refers to a children’s nursery rhyme that has plagued Joe with nightmares since his childhood:

Here comes a candle to light you to bed
And here comes a chopper to chop off your head

The candle and the axe both recur throughout his dreams and his waking life, his memories and his present reality, and become emblematic of his deep-seated, textbook Freudian phobia that originated in the depths of his childhood and which will doom him as surely as the narrator assures us he is doomed from the opening pages. Joe is consumed by fear; not just this childhood phobia, but fears over life decisions, fear of commitment and being tied down, the fear of his mentor’s wrath for having eyes for his girl, and even that greater fear that consumed an entire generation: the fear of the atomic bomb, referenced repeatedly throughout the book, intensifying the absurdity of total imminent doom and nothing at all making any difference. But while these fears are always somewhere in the background, buried in his subconscious, the narrative is ironically about his existential dilemma in choosing one of two alternatives, with each character and each situation pushing or pulling him in one of two directions, a choice which is at the very same time being negated by the fatalism at the core of his life experience.

It’s an imaginative, thoughtful, formally daring book whose true subject is, as the above should suggest, nothing short of the human condition itself.

[Wreade1872 · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ohhh... i have thoughts many thoughts :) . Firstly this is the cover that first attracted me to this book and its a complete lie, clearly someone just googled the word candle. This is the cover off the version i read and is much more appropriate.

So this is a fairly standard crime drama, on one level. It starts though with the narrator telling you that the protagonist is going to kill someone in a few days. It feels like a Twilight Zone episode or something.
The story itself is more adult than i expected at times. The 50’s films it reminds me of are obviously vary sanitized so whenever this was a bit more adult it always surprised me, it definitely wouldn't have gotten past the Hayes Code.

Plotwise its something like Baby Driver etc. young guy getting drawn deeper into crime. Definitely not my genre but there's some interesting characterization. The main characters friends and interests are unusual and there's background stuff about people worried about nuclear war.

However on to the really good stuff. So the author used every gimmick he can think of, some sections are done in Second Person and lots of chapters are done in the style of different forms of media. So the first time this happens its a flashback done in form of a Radio-Drama.
There are a lot more of these in both number and variety than i would have thought possible and some of them are quite funny.

So while i’m a little conflicted about the ending... and this is still not my genre by any means i have to say the author always managed to keep things interesting. A somewhat standard plot told in a very non-standard way.

[Timothy Mayer · Rating 4 out of 5]

Frederic Brown isn't well-known today, but his short stories and novels were widely published when he was in his prime. After he passed on in 1972, he was mostly remembered for the novel Martians Go Home, a hilarious SF satire. He wrote for both the science fiction and mystery market, earning countless awards in each.
Here Comes A Candle was first published in 1950.
The hero of Candle is Joe Bailey, a 19-year-old numbers runner for a local Milwaukee gangster named Mitch. Mitch has been feeling the heat lately, so he's had to curtail his lucrative sports lottery games and look for other opportunities. While he's cooking up the next scheme, he keeps Joe on a small retainer, allowing Joe the time to think about the past.
And Joe's past isn't pretty: he grew up in poverty after seeing his father gunned down in a bungled movie theater robbery. It gets worse: Joe has a pathological fear of candles and hatchets. His uncle had taught him a poem which ended with the rhyme:

"Here comes a candle to light you to bed,
Here comes a chopper to chop off your head."

As a young child, Joe suffered from horrid nightmares, until a psychologist was able to help him. Still, he feels guilty over his father's death and still abhors those candles and axes.
Now Joe has met two women who will forever change his life. One is the pretty and sensible Elle, who works as a waitress at the local diner owned by her uncle. The other is the seductive Francy, Mitch's gun moll girlfriend. Elle is the sensible choice, but how many men make sensible choices when their hormones are raging?
Brown did an unusual thing when he wrote Candle: he told the flashbacks and dream sequences in other writing formats than the standard novel: radio script, movie script, sports cast, etc. Such literary experiments are not unusual today, but were quite visionary for 1950.
Ultimately, the novel is one depressing trip. You just know Joe is going to do the wrong thing and there is no one around to give him sound advice. His best friend and fellow science fiction magazine fan is a communist. The bartender who warns Joe of Mitch's plans keeps howling about nuclear doom. The only father figure who appears in the book is Dixie, a sadistic hold-up man.
Candle is an excellent psychological horror novel from the same stream that produced Nightmare Alley.

[Graham P · Rating 3 out of 5]

While innovative in its execution, 'Here Comes a Candle' is steeped in familiarity. The typical 'average Joe' (in this case, Joe Bailey) toils between becoming a criminal or a stand-up guy, and pains himself between going steady with the 'good girl', the waitress with a heart of gold, or the lusty, curvaceous moll, who happens to be the crime boss's #1 dame. There is something seething and disturbing underneath all the Freudian claptrap, but in the end, melodrama wins out.

[Karl · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is copy 52 of 300 signed numberd copies published by Milipede Press in Hardcover.

[Ben Loory · Rating 4 out of 5]

Okay, wow! This book was a delight! And also almost impossible to describe. It's a pretty by-the-numbers crime novel that's injected with some (creepy and spooky) Freudian mumbo-jumbo and then unexpectedly told through super-fun alternating stylistic sections-- here's a radioplay, a teleplay, a sportscast replete with interviews, a futuristic dream-broadcast, a stage play, etc-- and which then blossoms into full-blown (and very convincing!) horror in the last few pages. Which really scared me; it was kind of amazing. I really don't know how this whole thing came together; the thought process behind it escapes me-- but it hangs together! And the feeling of delight-in-invention is off the charts. If Brown wrote with a little less "aw shucks" in his style and a little more attention to feeling and sensation (as opposed to exclusively (endlessly spiraling) thought processes), he'd probably be a little more well-remembered today. Not that he isn't well-remembered. But more so!

This has been the best Brown novel I've read yet. (But I haven't read em all-- yet.)

[Olga · Rating 5 out of 5]

You could never guess how far self-punishment can go. Making one mistake after another, young Joe Bailey lets us in his intricate world, filled with constant doubt and regret. Desperately looking for a meaning of his own life, Joe becomes a boy-toy of two absolutely different femmes. Maybe, they are not that different? In the end, only one of them will survive.

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great crime fiction. Also a great psychological thriller. Also has a love story in it with 2 women involved. I liked the ending.

[Vladimir Ivanov · Rating 4 out of 5]

Джо Бейли девятнадцать лет, и он сирота. Джо мечтает о большой любви и обожает фантастику про подвиги бравых астронавтов. Он вежлив, аккуратен, неглуп, почти не пьет. Джо в целом неплохой парень, и не его вина, что единственный способ заработать денег в послевоенной Америке - это криминал. Но ему и в голову не могло прийти, что необременительное и почти законное дельце по быстрому подъему бабла вскоре превратится в кошмар наяву, из которого есть только один выход.

У нас в стране Фредрик Браун известен как автор коротких НФ-юморесок с парадоксальным финалом, но должен сказать, что и в жанре криминального романа он чувствует себя абсолютно уверенно. Очень психологично, очень мрачно, очень нуарно. Однозначно стоит поближе познакомиться с детективной ипостасью Брауна.

8/10

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

The hero of Frederic Brown's Here Comes a Candle is Joe Bailey, a small-time numbers runner who is haunted by a nursery rhyme ("Here comes a candle / To light you to bed, / And here comes a chopper / To chop off your head") and by his belief that he was responsible for his father's death. The narrative alternates between sections of straightforward narration (called "The Story") and detours into other narrative modes. The first two detours, "The Radio" and "The Screen," are flashback continuations of "The Story" given in the forms indicated: a radio script and a screenplay. For most of the novel, Brown has no apparent reason for making these narrative shifts, other than the fact that he can. Maybe readers will be amused by Brown's shifting modes, or maybe they will be annoyed, but they will likely not find the story enriched. The third and fourth of these sections are the most likely to amuse or to annoy: in "The Sportscast," a play-by-play man rides along to narrate our hero's first robbery, and in "The Video," scientists use virtual-reality-style technology to broadcast one of our hero's dreams. It is only in the last two of these sections, "The Stage" and "The Newspaper," that Brown seems to be doing more than just showing how clever he is. Say what you want about Here Comes a Candle, you cannot blame Frederic Brown for not trying hard enough.

[Sam · Rating 5 out of 5]

A crime novel that's anything but stereotypical. Sure it's about murder and two-bit gangsters, but Brown plays with prose style in revolutionary ways. Apart from sturdy narrative passages, there are a number of sequences where the narrator shifts from an omniscent voice to a screenwriter, a newscaster, a sports announcer -- and somehow, none of it is schticky, none of it is just a gimmick. These, after all, are the voices of the coming information age, and they loom over the life of our man Joey just as much as the moral conscience and lust for power that clash with one another and bring about his fall.

[Barry Eysman · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you've not read Fredric Brown, this is a good place to start. But pretty much everything he wrote is a good place to start. This novel is a morality play, a summery Saturday pulp fiction, and a horror story. It is written in a variety of styles, as a novel, as a movie script, as the calling of a radio ballgame. The horrifying ending to nursery rhyme is threaded throughout the book. It's delicious 'cause you know it's coming. And makes for a neat sardonic ending.Recommend this book? Oh, yes. It's a quiet subtle novel that will get under your skin

[Cullen Gallagher · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brown's masterpiece, a mixed-media melange that incorporates the novel, the stage play, the radio play, the screenplay, and the newspaper. Brown's playfulness with narrative form highlights the inter-disciplinary field of all things "noir," and the crossover between the literary, stage, screen, and radio world and reality (represented by the newspaper). Indicative of Brown's fusion of comedy, suspense, horror, and psychology.

[Dragonfruit · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Here Comes an Candle to Light You to Bed, Here Comes a Chopper to Chop off Your Head" What a horrible rhyme to tell a child! Once I started this one I couldn't put it down. And it's hard to predict too, even though the author gives away the ending right away.

[Tentatively, Convenience · Rating 4 out of 5]

review of
Fredric Brown's Here Comes A Candle
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - July 18, 2018

This is the 3rd bk I've read by Brown, all mysteries. The 1st was Night of the Jabberwock (my review: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... ), the 2nd was The Lenient Beast (my review: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... ). They've all been different but this one shares psychological depth w/ The Lenient Beast while expanding it formally.

It's divided into chapters of "The Story" alternating w/ different formal treatments: "THE RADIO", 'THE SCREEN", "THE SPORTCAST", "THE VIDEO", "THE STAGE", & "THE NEWSPAPER". Each of these alternative treatments allow disclosure of viewpoints that wd be unrealistic in the general story flow. There's a very noir set-up:

"And that, in a general sort of way, is everything that had happened to Joe Bailey, up to August 26, 1948. That's as good a starting place as any. It's the day Joe met the girl he was going to kill." - p 1

Brown always shows insight.. or at least says things that I agree w/:

"And what you don't know doesn't hurt you. Or does it? A dentist puts you under gas and pulls a tooth; you come out of anesthesia and you have no memory of pain. But can you be sure you didn't feel it at the time?" - p 4

Exactly. It's my opinion that such anesthesia makes things 'workable' at the time but doesn't affect the underlying subconscious trauma. Brown seems to be pushing his realism envelope a little w/ this one, I wonder if it approached discomfort for his publisher (Dutton, 1950; Bantam, 1951):

"He reaches up and pushes the damp hair back from his forehead and then, eyes open now, rolls over onto his back and stares up at the celining. Don't let what you notice now startle you. It is natural for men, especially young men, to awaken so." - p 6

"Francy is back; she sits in the chair on whose arm you're sitting. If you could only drop your arm around her. Those breasts. Her dress cut low. You can almost see the aureoles around the nipples. To kiss them. To put your face between. Quit looking. Her hair brushing your hand on the back of the chair." - p 131

"Joe had brought a Journal with him so she could look at the theater ads and pick what show she wanted to see. He'd looked them over himself and rather wanted to see an exciting jungle picture, Man Eaters of Kumoan, at the Warner. They sat down in a booth to look over the ads together and he had no difficulty at all on selling her on the jungle picture. Just casual mention of a slight preference did it; she said she hadn't seen a good jungle picture in a long time and she'd like it." - pp 31-32

Do "jungle pictures' even exist as a genre anymore? There was a movie called "Man-Eater of Kumaon" made in 1948. Maybe he was referring to that. I tend to think of the Tarzan movies wch were probably very popular in their day. The "Man-Eater" one was set in India, the Tarzan ones were set in Africa. These days, the few jungle movies I can think of from the last 40+ yrs have been mostly set in the Amazon. It's fun for me to think of a genre as having gone out of fashion. I'd go for a good jungle picture right now.

"He learned that she read quite a bit, mostly novels, but that she hadn't read any science fiction, which was Joe's favorite reading. That she smoked occasionally, drank a little beer or wine occasionally, but not too much. That she liked "good" music although she didn't really know anything about it, and liked good swing like Stan Kenton or Benny Goodman" - pp 32-33

I like the plug for SF. Brown also wrote SF & I'm reading one of those novels now. If he'd specifically mentioned Kenton's "City of Glass", wch he did in collaboration w/ Robert Graettinger, that wd've really made my day.

Joe, the fledgling criminal, has a 'Pinko' friend. These days, maybe his friend wd be a 'Greenie'.

"["]What's the moment of greatest ecstasy in a man's life? The culmination of intercourse, the orgasm. The moment when a part of him is returning to the body of a woman. That's the closest he ever gets to going back where he came from. His one moment of pure ecstasy."

""And besides, it's fun," Joe said. He thought of Francine.

""Don't you ever take anything seriously, Joe? Except making money, being a big-shot gambler? No, I guess I'm wrong; you do think some, or you wouldn't read the kind of stuff you read. It takes imagination, abstract imagination, to like science fiction and fantasy. Know what I think, Joe? That you're afraid to think, afraid to let yourself think." - p 38

Then there comes the 1st of the interpolations, "THE RADIO", where Brown throws away realist conventions in the presumed interest of making the perspectives on the story more entertaining & varied:

"MUSIC: Series theme (motif from Rachmaninoff's Isle of the Dead.)

"ANNOUNCER: Hold tightly to your chairs, folks. Today we bring you another thrilling episode in—

"MUSIC Eerie sting.

"ANNOUNCER: THE ADVENTURES OF JOE BAILEY!" - p 47

I don't know the Rachmaninoff piece (1908) but I know the painting (1880), & quite like it, by Arnold Böcklin. In "THE RADIO" there's an 'interview' w/ Joe about his childhood & its relevance to the title of the bk is revealed:

"JOE:" [..] ""Here comes a candle to light you to bed. And here comes a chopper to chop off your head."

"DOCTOR: And did it frighten you when you first heard it?

"JOE: I don't remember for sure. A little, I guess. I've often wondered why they put something like that in nursery rhymes for kids. It's silly, isn't it?" - p 50

An incident involving the nursery rhyme & the death of his father are revealed as 2 traumatically formative experiences in his childhood:

"JOE: (Sullenly.) I didn't hear it. I was there.

"MUSIC Eerie sting.

"JOE: I was there. I saw him get killed.

"DOCTOR: (Startled.) You mean he took you along, on a holdup?

"JOE: No. All right, if you've got to know! I took the cops there! It was my fault he got killed!" - p 59

The mood of doom so characteristic of post-WWII SF is here too in the mouth of a bar-tender:

"Krasno shrugged. "Joe, every war up to now has been a war, but the next one won't be; it'll be something you can't picture. It'll end up with the few of you who're left living in caves and fighting wild dogs—if all the dogs aren't eaten before it gets that far. And it's going to happen, Joe. It could happen next week. Just read the papers."" - p 74

I commented on the newness of pizza in my review of The Lenient Beast, here it's brunch:

"["]If you'll go shopping with me and help carry it back, I can make us a brunch."

""Brunch?"

""Cross between breakfast and lunch."

"Joe grinned at her. "Been eating 'em all my life and never knew what they were. Sure, Ellie. Why not?"" - p 78

"THE SCREEN" comes along & adds movie-making instructions:

"Again there is a sound effect instead of music; a kettledrum, tuned low, is being thumped to the exact rhythm of the ticking clock in the previous scene. Kettledrum continues at exactly the same tempo and volume throughout this scene. Camera lens should be slightly out of focus to give a blurred, unreal effect. Joe slowly sits up in bed and his eyes open, although he is obviously, from the glazed stare in them, not awake." - p 97

In "THE SPORTCAST" Rachmaninoff's "Isle of the Dead" is back. The 'sport' context is "Cops & Robbers":

"We're broadcasting a game that's always exciting, even when you played it when you were kids and it wasn't for keeps. The good old game of Cops & Robbers!" - p 147

This device allows even more 'impossible' & unrealistic Points-Of-View than before, as does "THE VIDEO":

"ANNOUNCER: For number eight in our science series, we bring you something truly unusual. Something that has never been attempted before on a television program. Ladies and gentlemen, we are going to telecast a dream." - p 176

"VOICE FROM OFF SCREEN: I am an electroencephalographist.

"ANNOUNCER: Ah, yes. Currently a practicing electronencephalographist of Adelaide, South Australia." - p 177

Having spent some quality time in Adelaide, this piques my interest.

"Here in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia, it is six P.M. It is, therefore, four o'clock in the morning in the American city, an excellent time to set our trap for shadows. We have chosen a point of origin almost halfway around the earth for two reasons. First, the time differential; second, to minimize to the vanishing point the possibility that any one of our audience might chance to know the dreamer and guess, from portions of the dream or characters in it, who the dreamer is. Thus we assure him the privacy that dreams deserve." - p 179

I don't know where dream research is at these days but I do know that I knew a guy as early as the beginning of the 1980s who was seriously working in such an area. Otherwise, these days, an 'ordinary citizen' such as myself can play a duet w/ someone 14 hours away in time zones as if there were nothing to it:

"2018.06.15 duet with Warren Burt — Australia — via Skype" - uploaded July 14, 2018 - 10:20
https://youtu.be/6DJRuxzjz8Q
https://archive.org/details/2018.06.1...

This bk is special. I'd never heard of it before finding it & deciding to read it. Its obscurity is even more proof that the best things in life often lay neglected. That's why you shd attend & support the UNDERAPPRECIATED MOVIEMAKERS FESTIVAL: http://idioideo.pleintekst.nl/UNDERAP... .

[Brent Legault · Rating 3 out of 5]

The premise of this novel is patently ridiculous. A candle? An axe? Don't make me laugh! Oh wait, ok, I get it. I'm laughing, I'm laughing! As a comedy or a comic-book, the premise and the story are legit. It is not for taking too seriously.

Much has been made over the "different styles" Brown used to tell his very silly story. And I admit, they are a treat, especially those that are less suited for such exposition (like the sportscast and the dreamcast). These are fun and even better, you can tell that Brown was having fun. I love to be there when an author is having fun!

But please, a candle? An axe? And then there is the dialogue. A lot of it is just repetition of what the protagonist had already been thinking. Maybe that was a way for Brown to show how simple-minded he, the protagonist, was, but it grew tiresome. Brown's narrative voice was stronger and I would have liked more of it. The first few pages are quite funny and more interesting than whatever was going on in the mind of the protagonist.

But what can I say? I'm a sucker for an old-fashioned noir. And I really liked the author's irreverence to the genre. I'll read more of his work. And if I was on the fence about him after the ultimately disappointing denouement of the main story, his short essay about his stance on religion and Christianity convinced me that I need to inhabit more of his worlds in the future.

[Randy Jones · Rating 5 out of 5]

An Innovative And Well-Plotted Thriller

Ostensibly the story of a young man who falls in with criminals while also falling in love with a young waitress and then must choose which way he’ll go in life, this is actually a very cleverly told story that rises above it’s fairly standard plot. Brown alternates third person narration (which has a knowing and sardonic tone) with chapters the tell the story in other ways - a movie script, a radio script, a sports broadcast, a play and other formats. It’s an innovative and entertaining way to move the story forward, and something I’ve never seen before, at least to this extent. Sadly, it’s also a very depressing story, which isn’t giving anything away since Brown tells us at the very beginning how the tale will end. And yet it’s still surprising because it doesn’t seem to be going where it should be going. All in all, one of Brown’s best, and a very capable thriller.

[Ronn · Rating 3 out of 5]

More like 3 1/2 stars. I was actually really charmed by this book. The main character was born in Chicago in 1929, the same place and year as my father. And most of the story takes place in Milwaukee, where I have lived most of my life. I have frequently walked the streets that are named. I knew none of this when I picked this book up [probably for a quarter] at a yard sale.
This is pretty much typical noir fiction: mob-connected guy trying to decide if you should go hard-core and get the big buck & the hot woman vs should he settle down to a quite life with the plain girl who promises a life of devoted love.
I would have rated this higher if it werent for a quirky writing style; one part is presented as if it were a sort of sporting event radio broadcast, another as if were a script for an off-broadway drama. I suppose some might find this approach interesting. I found it to be a unnecessary distraction.

[Boris Cesnik · Rating 3 out of 5]

Think about the ending, the rest is redundant.

It would have worked better as a short story - one of those magnificent, sublimely enthralling tales only Frederic Brown could write that captures your eyes, mind and hearts from the very first line and punches you in the gut with the very last words.

[Lukas Persson · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is BY FAR my favorite book by Fredric Brown, and possibly even on my top five of all time. What an inventive, touching, funny, and engaging story, I would LOVE to see this made into a movie!

[Viktor · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a 5-star AND a 1-star. I think that this novel might define the "dime store novel psychology" that we've all heard about.

[Brad · Rating 4 out of 5]

What a wonderfully demented thriller! Highly readable and a bit experimental in style. I'm always impressed with Fredric Brown.

[Mark · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not the best known of Brown's work but well worth checking out for its style and layout.
This edition contains a good short story (The Joke) at the end too.

[Yazlina Saduri · Rating 3 out of 5]

The ending? I didn't expect it.

[David Stephens · Rating 2 out of 5]

I’m a fan of Fredric Brown’s work. He has a slapdash quality to his writing that, at the best of times, can seem raw, punchy, and unpredictable and, at other times, can appear charming in its dopiness. Here Comes a Candle has little of the former, some of the latter, and a whole lot of basic characters sweating over decisions that never feel like they matter.

The story reads like a child’s understanding of the world of crime and an adolescent’s understanding of women. There is the goody-goody girl who can’t have any involvement in criminal activity and the sultry femme fatale who won’t settle for anything less than the young protagonist’s full attention even if it means getting him in trouble. But, she’s hot, so what is he really supposed to do?

The omniscient narrator is the only colorful character in the book, and too often his voice disappears behind the tepid drama. Numerous times the narrative devolves into radio scripts and dream sequences (also written in script format), and these come across much more as lazy than postmodern. The final one is such a madcap mix of ghosts, women tearing their clothes off, and other things that don’t fit together, it’s almost fascinating in its poor conception. But, most of the time, the storytelling just drags.

For a book named for an ominous sounding nursery rhyme (Here comes a candle to light you to bed / Here comes a chopper to chop off your head), it sure doesn’t make much use of this. The rhyme only comes into play during the protagonist’s traumatic (read = accidentally hilarious) backstory that caused him to be afraid of candles and axes (?) and during the finale of the last few pages. I suppose, at that moment, Brown offers one of his trademark twists, but it is far too little, far too late.

[Mark Schiffer · Rating 5 out of 5]

It’s been said that if you want to learn about the social issues and existential dilemmas of a culture, you read the crime fiction it’s produced. Somehow learning about the worst possible action a person can commit and the way it can be the result of a network of influences can teach a reader how a person should and should not live their life. Frederic Brown’s Here Comes a Candle (1950) not only reflects the potential horrors of living in post WWII urban society, but it does so in a shockingly contemporary manner. It is unflinchingly grotesque and readable.
Brown’s protagonist, Joe Baily, is just trying to make his way through life in the city. He’s making next-to-no cash, and none of it legitimately. A series of bizarre and upsetting childhood events have left him reeling with traumas with incalculable consequences. The terrors of the nuclear age leave Baily and his acquaintances uncertain of life’s moral center. And yet, as a human with agency, what’s a guy to do?
Possibly the most fascinating element of Here Comes a Candle is its structure. Scattered throughout the work are flashbacks which alter the medium of the text. We have a play, a radio drama, a scientific description of a videotaped dream, a sportscast, and a newspaper article. Each of these serves to illuminate both Joe’s interior life and his past experiences. Though this framework is inventive, it never comes across as gimmicky. Here Comes a Candle was recently reissued by Centipede Press, but exhaustingly this release now appears to be OOP. One can only hope a different publisher puts it back out. Perhaps Valancourt, or Hard Case Crime?

[Clyde · Rating 3 out of 5]

it was just OK.....