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Mostly Murder: 18 Stories
Eighteen Stories by Fredric Brown:
1.The Laughing Butcher
2.The Four Blind Men
3.The Night the World Ended
4.The Motive Goes Round and Round
5.Cry Silence
6.The Nose of Don Aristide
7.A Voice Behind Him
8.Miss Darkness
9.I'll Cut Your Throat Again, Kathleen
10.Town Wanted
11.The Greatest Poem Every Written (orig: Four Letter Word)
12.Little Apple Hard to Peel
13.This Way Out
14.A Little White Lye
15.The Dangerous People (orig: No Sanctuary)
16.Cain (orig: Each Night He Died)
17.The Death of Riley (orig: The Ghost of Riley)
18.Don't Look Behind You
1.The Laughing Butcher
2.The Four Blind Men
3.The Night the World Ended
4.The Motive Goes Round and Round
5.Cry Silence
6.The Nose of Don Aristide
7.A Voice Behind Him
8.Miss Darkness
9.I'll Cut Your Throat Again, Kathleen
10.Town Wanted
11.The Greatest Poem Every Written (orig: Four Letter Word)
12.Little Apple Hard to Peel
13.This Way Out
14.A Little White Lye
15.The Dangerous People (orig: No Sanctuary)
16.Cain (orig: Each Night He Died)
17.The Death of Riley (orig: The Ghost of Riley)
18.Don't Look Behind You
- GenresShort Stories
247 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1953
11 people are currently reading
37 people want to read
About the author
Fredric Brown
808 books354 followersFredric 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.
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.
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
December 10, 2018
Mostly Murder was Fredric Brown's second collection of short stories. His first, Space on My Hands, was made up entirely of science fiction or fantasy stories. Mostly Murder consists almost entirely of mysteries.
The "almost" is the single tale, "The Greatest Poem Ever Written." This was originally published under the give-away-the-ending title "Four Letter Word" in the April, 1948 issue of Adventure. Not genre fiction at all, "The Greatest Poem Ever Written" tells of a reporter interviewing the "dean of American literary critics" and asking what that man regards as the greatest poem written in the English language. The reporter is told the tale of a young poet marooned alone on an island for nine years and spending that time writing and then distilling a poem down to its essence.
"The Four Blind Men" (Adventure, September, 1948) starts with a parable that I first knew as another poem, "The Blind Men and the Elephant" by John Godfrey Saxe. The parable and the poem each tell of a group of blind men who encounter an elephant. Each feels one part of the beast and assumes that is what the whole must be like. "One touched his trunk and thought an elephant was like a snake; one touched his tail and figured an elephant was like a rope" and so forth. Saxe's poem concludes:
And so these men of Indostan
Disputed loud and long,
Each in his own opinion
Exceeding stiff and strong,
Though each was partly in the right,
And all were in the wrong!
MORAL.
So, oft in theologic wars
The disputants, I ween,
Rail on in utter ignorance
Of what each other mean,
And prate about an Elephant
Not one of them has seen!
An entertaining poem based on a famous parable which, by the way, has almost nothing to do with Brown's rather poor story about why a man committed suicide at a circus.
A couple of the stories get their names from songs. "The Motive Goes Round and Round" (Thrilling Detective, October, 1943) derives its title from the song "The Music Goes Round and Round." Brown set a number of stories in circuses and carnivals; in this one, a carnival is robbed, a man is dead, and the proprietor of the merry-go-round has a personal reason for wanting to solve the case.
"I'll Cut Your Throat Again, Kathleen" (Mystery Book Magazine, Winter, 1948) owes its title to the song "I'll Take You Home Again, Kathleen." Johnny Marlin was a band leader, who played saxophone and clarinet. Now he's in an asylum. He has gaps in his memory but he is told that he slit his wife's throat and then his own wrists. His wife recovered, but Johnny will never be able to play his instruments again. This is a fine, nasty story.
"Little Apple Hard to Peel" (Detective Tales, February, 1942) is another strong story. John Appel was a violent kid who moved to Chicago and became a full-fledged gangster. He returns to his home town. He does a horrible thing and gets a horrible response.
There are two more circus or carnival-related stories in this collection. "The Laughing Butcher" (Mystery Book Magazine, Fall, 1948) takes place largely in Corbyville, a town with a number of former circus people. A man is found dead in a snow-covered field. There are two sets of footprints going into the field, with none coming out. The solution is ingenious but unlikely.
In "A Voice Behind Him" (Mystery Book Magazine, January, 1947), a carnival "human cannonball" decides to leave his wife, but something he has forgotten leads to tragedy.
Another frequent Brown theme is madness. That was an important part of the previously mentioned "I'll Cut Your Throat Again, Kathleen" and is a prominent aspect of several of the other tales here. "Don't Look Behind You" (Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, May, 1947) is one of Brown's best (and most acclaimed) stories. My comments from a previous review say:
The final story is "Don't Look Behind You." This is something of a stunt, but a fine, successful stunt, a tour de force. The tale begins:
Just sit back and relax now. Try to enjoy this; it's going to be the last story you ever read, or nearly the last. After you finish it you can sit there and stall a while, you can find excuses to hang around your house, or your room, or your office, wherever you're reading this; but sooner or later you're going to have to get up and go out. That's where I'm waiting for you: outside. Or maybe closer than that. Maybe in this room.
The narrator is an expert printer and binder, a former counterfeiter, tortured by thugs until he has been driven mad - homicidally mad.
In "The Dangerous People," originally published as "No Sanctuary" (Dime Mystery, March, 1945), a man has escaped from the Asylum for the Criminally Insane. Two men at the railroad station waiting for a train each begin to suspect that the other is the escapee. Each thing one of them says, every action taken, seems insane to the other one. This is actually a comic story, with an especially funny conclusion.
"Cain" is another story originally published under a different title (which once again reveals more than it should), "Each Night He Died" (Dime Mystery, August, 1949). A man who murdered his brother awaits execution in a terrible state of panic, not realizing that that his insanity has changed things.
In "This Way Out" (Dime Mystery, February, 1949), a man whose wife and son recently died in an accident commits suicide. There is no question that it is suicide. His former partner says that he thinks that the dead man "thought he was hearing voices"; "A lot of them do," says the investigating police officer. But not all the voices they hear come from inside their heads. This is a very cynical story.
The main character in "The Night the World Ended" (Dime Mystery, January, 1945) is not insane, just alcoholic. And deluded. A most unpleasant newspaper editor has printed a false front page to convince the alcoholic that the world will be coming to an end in a few hours. However, things do not go according to the editor's plans. (This was filmed as an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents.)
In "Cry Silence" (Black Mask, November, 1948), a man killed his wife and a male friend of hers by locking them in a smokehouse until they died, not responding to their cries and pounding. The man said he had locked them in accidentally and had suddenly gone deaf. But had he?
"Town Wanted" (Detective Fiction Weekly, September 7, 1940) is just barely a "story." The narrator of this very short tale is a gangster, thrown out of town by his boss, who found out that the narrator was planning to take over. Now the narrator is looking for a town that he can run himself. The ideal town would be one in which the citizens didn't pay much attention to their government.
"The Nose of Don Aristide" (Two Detective Mystery Novels, Summer, 1950) is a story, but a rather poor one. This is intended to be a comic tale. Aristide Pettit, the great French detective, is summoned to the city of Rio de Aires to find a list on a tiny piece of microfilm hidden by the spy Señora Doña Maria de Rodriguez, a make-up artist in the vast Panamera Moving Picture Company.
"Miss Darkness" (Avon Detective Mysteries #3, 1947) is one of the few stories by Brown that could be described as "sweet." People living in a boarding house observe that a new tenant seems never to have the light in her room turned on. The driver of the car in a bank robbery that took place recently is said to be a young woman. Who is this mysterious tenant?
"The Death of Riley" (originally published with yet another poor title, "The Ghost of Riley") (Detective Tales, February, 1944) is the most successfully comic story in the book. Ben Riley is a police officer, but none too good at the job. His feet hurt constantly, he is always tired, and he drinks somewhat more than he should. He is not revered in the police department - not while alive, that is. But when a man identified as Riley throws himself on an explosive device and saves forty little girls, opinions change.
The remaining story, "A Little White Lye" (Ten Detective Aces, September, 1942) is perhaps the most traditional "mystery" story in this collection. A young newlywed couple finds a splendid house at a great price. A wonderful deal, as long as they don't mind that a murder had been committed there - and that the murderer is still at large. This could be the beginning of half the romantic comedy movies of the time.
These eighteen stories, all from the years 1940-1950, still remain fun and entertaining. My favorites are "The Motive Goes Round and Round," "Little Apple Hard to Peel," "A Little White Lye," "The Death of Riley," "This Way Out," and "Don't Look Behind You."
A note of thanks: The edition of Mostly Murder that I have does not list information about the original sources of the stories. That all came from Jack Seabrook's invaluable book Martians and Misplaced Clues: The Life and Work of Fredric Brown.
The "almost" is the single tale, "The Greatest Poem Ever Written." This was originally published under the give-away-the-ending title "Four Letter Word" in the April, 1948 issue of Adventure. Not genre fiction at all, "The Greatest Poem Ever Written" tells of a reporter interviewing the "dean of American literary critics" and asking what that man regards as the greatest poem written in the English language. The reporter is told the tale of a young poet marooned alone on an island for nine years and spending that time writing and then distilling a poem down to its essence.
"The Four Blind Men" (Adventure, September, 1948) starts with a parable that I first knew as another poem, "The Blind Men and the Elephant" by John Godfrey Saxe. The parable and the poem each tell of a group of blind men who encounter an elephant. Each feels one part of the beast and assumes that is what the whole must be like. "One touched his trunk and thought an elephant was like a snake; one touched his tail and figured an elephant was like a rope" and so forth. Saxe's poem concludes:
And so these men of Indostan
Disputed loud and long,
Each in his own opinion
Exceeding stiff and strong,
Though each was partly in the right,
And all were in the wrong!
MORAL.
So, oft in theologic wars
The disputants, I ween,
Rail on in utter ignorance
Of what each other mean,
And prate about an Elephant
Not one of them has seen!
An entertaining poem based on a famous parable which, by the way, has almost nothing to do with Brown's rather poor story about why a man committed suicide at a circus.
A couple of the stories get their names from songs. "The Motive Goes Round and Round" (Thrilling Detective, October, 1943) derives its title from the song "The Music Goes Round and Round." Brown set a number of stories in circuses and carnivals; in this one, a carnival is robbed, a man is dead, and the proprietor of the merry-go-round has a personal reason for wanting to solve the case.
"I'll Cut Your Throat Again, Kathleen" (Mystery Book Magazine, Winter, 1948) owes its title to the song "I'll Take You Home Again, Kathleen." Johnny Marlin was a band leader, who played saxophone and clarinet. Now he's in an asylum. He has gaps in his memory but he is told that he slit his wife's throat and then his own wrists. His wife recovered, but Johnny will never be able to play his instruments again. This is a fine, nasty story.
"Little Apple Hard to Peel" (Detective Tales, February, 1942) is another strong story. John Appel was a violent kid who moved to Chicago and became a full-fledged gangster. He returns to his home town. He does a horrible thing and gets a horrible response.
There are two more circus or carnival-related stories in this collection. "The Laughing Butcher" (Mystery Book Magazine, Fall, 1948) takes place largely in Corbyville, a town with a number of former circus people. A man is found dead in a snow-covered field. There are two sets of footprints going into the field, with none coming out. The solution is ingenious but unlikely.
In "A Voice Behind Him" (Mystery Book Magazine, January, 1947), a carnival "human cannonball" decides to leave his wife, but something he has forgotten leads to tragedy.
Another frequent Brown theme is madness. That was an important part of the previously mentioned "I'll Cut Your Throat Again, Kathleen" and is a prominent aspect of several of the other tales here. "Don't Look Behind You" (Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, May, 1947) is one of Brown's best (and most acclaimed) stories. My comments from a previous review say:
The final story is "Don't Look Behind You." This is something of a stunt, but a fine, successful stunt, a tour de force. The tale begins:
Just sit back and relax now. Try to enjoy this; it's going to be the last story you ever read, or nearly the last. After you finish it you can sit there and stall a while, you can find excuses to hang around your house, or your room, or your office, wherever you're reading this; but sooner or later you're going to have to get up and go out. That's where I'm waiting for you: outside. Or maybe closer than that. Maybe in this room.
The narrator is an expert printer and binder, a former counterfeiter, tortured by thugs until he has been driven mad - homicidally mad.
In "The Dangerous People," originally published as "No Sanctuary" (Dime Mystery, March, 1945), a man has escaped from the Asylum for the Criminally Insane. Two men at the railroad station waiting for a train each begin to suspect that the other is the escapee. Each thing one of them says, every action taken, seems insane to the other one. This is actually a comic story, with an especially funny conclusion.
"Cain" is another story originally published under a different title (which once again reveals more than it should), "Each Night He Died" (Dime Mystery, August, 1949). A man who murdered his brother awaits execution in a terrible state of panic, not realizing that that his insanity has changed things.
In "This Way Out" (Dime Mystery, February, 1949), a man whose wife and son recently died in an accident commits suicide. There is no question that it is suicide. His former partner says that he thinks that the dead man "thought he was hearing voices"; "A lot of them do," says the investigating police officer. But not all the voices they hear come from inside their heads. This is a very cynical story.
The main character in "The Night the World Ended" (Dime Mystery, January, 1945) is not insane, just alcoholic. And deluded. A most unpleasant newspaper editor has printed a false front page to convince the alcoholic that the world will be coming to an end in a few hours. However, things do not go according to the editor's plans. (This was filmed as an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents.)
In "Cry Silence" (Black Mask, November, 1948), a man killed his wife and a male friend of hers by locking them in a smokehouse until they died, not responding to their cries and pounding. The man said he had locked them in accidentally and had suddenly gone deaf. But had he?
"Town Wanted" (Detective Fiction Weekly, September 7, 1940) is just barely a "story." The narrator of this very short tale is a gangster, thrown out of town by his boss, who found out that the narrator was planning to take over. Now the narrator is looking for a town that he can run himself. The ideal town would be one in which the citizens didn't pay much attention to their government.
"The Nose of Don Aristide" (Two Detective Mystery Novels, Summer, 1950) is a story, but a rather poor one. This is intended to be a comic tale. Aristide Pettit, the great French detective, is summoned to the city of Rio de Aires to find a list on a tiny piece of microfilm hidden by the spy Señora Doña Maria de Rodriguez, a make-up artist in the vast Panamera Moving Picture Company.
"Miss Darkness" (Avon Detective Mysteries #3, 1947) is one of the few stories by Brown that could be described as "sweet." People living in a boarding house observe that a new tenant seems never to have the light in her room turned on. The driver of the car in a bank robbery that took place recently is said to be a young woman. Who is this mysterious tenant?
"The Death of Riley" (originally published with yet another poor title, "The Ghost of Riley") (Detective Tales, February, 1944) is the most successfully comic story in the book. Ben Riley is a police officer, but none too good at the job. His feet hurt constantly, he is always tired, and he drinks somewhat more than he should. He is not revered in the police department - not while alive, that is. But when a man identified as Riley throws himself on an explosive device and saves forty little girls, opinions change.
The remaining story, "A Little White Lye" (Ten Detective Aces, September, 1942) is perhaps the most traditional "mystery" story in this collection. A young newlywed couple finds a splendid house at a great price. A wonderful deal, as long as they don't mind that a murder had been committed there - and that the murderer is still at large. This could be the beginning of half the romantic comedy movies of the time.
These eighteen stories, all from the years 1940-1950, still remain fun and entertaining. My favorites are "The Motive Goes Round and Round," "Little Apple Hard to Peel," "A Little White Lye," "The Death of Riley," "This Way Out," and "Don't Look Behind You."
A note of thanks: The edition of Mostly Murder that I have does not list information about the original sources of the stories. That all came from Jack Seabrook's invaluable book Martians and Misplaced Clues: The Life and Work of Fredric Brown.
February 13, 2025
A Delightful Collection Of Short Stories
The fourteen stories in this collection involve, as the title suggests, mostly murder, and do so in ways both clever and entertaining. Brown has a great talent for introducing us to characters, setting up a plot and drawing us into the story in just a couple of short paragraphs. And he has a way with endings, often surprising us and always satisfying us. (He’s also very fond of carnivals and carnival folk. Five of the fourteen stories are either set in a carnival or have characters who come from that world.) All in all, a great collection of crime stories from a master of the genre.
The fourteen stories in this collection involve, as the title suggests, mostly murder, and do so in ways both clever and entertaining. Brown has a great talent for introducing us to characters, setting up a plot and drawing us into the story in just a couple of short paragraphs. And he has a way with endings, often surprising us and always satisfying us. (He’s also very fond of carnivals and carnival folk. Five of the fourteen stories are either set in a carnival or have characters who come from that world.) All in all, a great collection of crime stories from a master of the genre.
September 5, 2022
Delightfully creative & extremely moreish noir shorts. Frederic somehow consistently manages to infuse classic pulp detective tropes with original twists, and doesn't linger a moment longer than necessary.
November 28, 2024
Frederic Brown is an American author mostly known for his science fiction short stories but I discovered him, and this book of pulp, crime thrillers, through a Twitter account that specializes in pulp. I was intrigued by how the account described this collection, and when I finally sat down to read it, I was not disappointed.
Brown's prose cuts sharp. His plots are demonically delicious. And the way he makes his characters so real, while also making their predicaments even realer is a thing of envy. What captivated me across the 18 stories in this collection was just how vastly Brown's imagination works. From petty crimes of passion to dangerous tales of betrayal to even slightly postmodern touches across some stories, reading this collection left me gasping for air with how thrilling it is.
Brown is the sole reason why I now am more and more interested in reading more pulp thrillers. Literature should be fun above all, but also have a bite, and this author's stories has all that and more. An amazing read.
Brown's prose cuts sharp. His plots are demonically delicious. And the way he makes his characters so real, while also making their predicaments even realer is a thing of envy. What captivated me across the 18 stories in this collection was just how vastly Brown's imagination works. From petty crimes of passion to dangerous tales of betrayal to even slightly postmodern touches across some stories, reading this collection left me gasping for air with how thrilling it is.
Brown is the sole reason why I now am more and more interested in reading more pulp thrillers. Literature should be fun above all, but also have a bite, and this author's stories has all that and more. An amazing read.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews