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Fredric Brown in the Detective Pulps #13
Three Corpse Parlay
FREDRIC BROWN IN THE DETECTIVE PULPS, VOLUME 13
- GenresShort Stories
186 pages, Hardcover
First published September 1, 1988
8 people want to read
About the author
Fredric Brown
807 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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July 29, 2015
FREDRIC BROWN IN THE DETECTIVE PULPS, VOLUME 13
This is number 216 of 450 signed and numbered copies signed by Max Allen Collins.
This is number 216 of 450 signed and numbered copies signed by Max Allen Collins.
August 31, 2024
CONTENTS
●"Don't Look" - Introduction - Max Allan Collins
●Stories by Fredric Brown:
▪︎ "Six-Gun Song"
▪︎ "Blood of the Dragon"
▪︎ "The Little Green Men"
▪︎ "Murder-on-the-Hudson"
▪︎ "Star-Spangled Night"
▪︎ "The Discontented Cows"
▪︎ "Boner"
▪︎ "Three-Corpse Parlay"
▪︎ "Here Comes the Hearse"
▪︎ "There are Bloodstains in the Alley"
▪︎ "Murder and Matilda"
▪︎ "Heil, Werewolf!"
▪︎ "Big-League Larceny"
Fredric Brown was an American writer who lived from 1909 to 1972. He principally wrote mysteries, science fiction, and fantasy.
Starting in 1984, the Dennis McMillan publishing company put out a series of collections of Brown's short mystery fiction. The overall title of the series was "Fredric Brown in the Detective Pulps." There were eventually nineteen volumes, the last being published in 1991.
Three-Corpse Parlay is Volume 13 in the series. This collection has thirteen stories, all of them originally published in the years 1939-1949. All but one of these stories first appeared in periodicals with the words "mystery" or "detective" in the title; the one outlier was published in a general interest magazine titled Coronet.
The Introduction by Max Allan Collins, who is also a renowned mystery author, is titled "Don't Look." Collins says he generally doesn't like mystery short fiction, with one exception: Fredric Brown's story "Don't Look Behind You." Collins considers Brown to be one of his favorite mystery writers, "a notch or two" under the six that he regards as "great."
I don't think that any of the thirteen stories gathered here are "great," but most of them are good. Only two of the stories involve the World War which was being fought when many of these stories first appeared - "Boner" and "Heil, Werewolf!," both originally published in 1942.
This collection includes a rare Brown historical tale, not really a mystery, titled "Star-Spangled Night." An American reader might well put the title together with the fact that it is set in 1814 in Chesapeake Bay around a night in which the British ships in the bay were firing on an American military base on the shore and realize who the American identified in the last sentence was. This is the story that appeared in Coronet rather than in a mystery periodical.
I think that three of the stories telegraph their endings, but I liked all of them anyway. In "Big-League Larceny," the star pitcher for the Green Sox is held for ransom. If he pitches, the Greenies usually win; if he doesn't, they might not.
In "Here Comes the Hearse," a man answers a knock on the door in the night, taking care not to wake his brother sleeping upstairs. The man puts a make-shift blindfold over his eyes before opening the door. He knows that the men at the door may kill him. He says that he is the man they're looking for and adds that he knows why they want him dead. He said that he had witnessed a bank robbery and might be asked by the police to identify a suspect. He tells them that everyone would be safe if he can't identify the robber. He says that he would rather be blind than dead. He tells the would-be killers that since he is wearing a blindfold, he can not identify them and if they gouge out his eyes he also would not be able to identify the robbers. This seems like a reasonable plan but will the men who have come to the house accept it? Max Allan Collins says that "Here Comes the Hearse" is "the most disturbing and...effective tale in this collection." (By the way, I don't get the knock-knock joke in this story.)
The story with the most obvious ending is "Blood of the Dragon." The police are looking for two wily counterfeiters. The six year old daughter of the chief of police encounters a red and green dragon near an abandoned hut on the chief's property. (I will add that the good guy in this tale uses a racial slur.)
The story that provided the title for this collection, "Three-Corpse Parlay,"
sounds like it should be about gambling. (An online dictionary defines "parlay" as "a cumulative series of bets in which winnings accruing from each transaction are used as a stake for a further bet.") Here it is just used as a catchy pun, substituting "three-corpse" for "three-horse." The three "corpses" are not what one might expect. The story is about a married private investigator who, with his wife, had started their own detective agency. Money is a problem. When the detective comes across children upset because their puppy has died, he goes on to prevent a robbery.
There is another story here with a joke title. In the early years of the Twentieth Century, the Carnation Condensed Milk company used the slogan "the milk from contented cows." The title of the story "The Discontented Cows" is obviously based on that slogan. In the story, it isn't cows that are discontented; it is an artist, kidnapped to keep adding or taking away cows in a painting of cows in a meadow. But why - and how can he escape?
I thought that "Six-Gun Song" might be some kind of Western. But no - these are modern guns. A reporter is in the next room when a man is shot. The reporter saw the gun and was sure the cartridges were blanks. The solution does involve a song and a twist ending. In the Introduction to the book, Collins says that this story and "Blood of the Dragon" have "some pretty half-assed ersatz irony." I don't see that, but Collins is way more knowledgeable about mystery tales than I am.
"Boner" is the shortest story in this collection and, as I mentioned above, is one of the two stories that have the then-ongoing war at their center. This one is nothing but irony. A man from Germany, now an American citizen, is threatened that if he doesn't aid in acts of sabotage against the United States, the one relative he still has living in Germany, a cousin, will be hunted down and put in a concentration camp. I didn't anticipate the ending, partly because it's absurd.
The other World War II story is "Heil, Werewolf!." Livestock is disappearing from people's farms. Other animals are left dead, looking like they have been attacked by a wolf. There is an obvious suspect - Jim Mennsinger, a not very bright man whom the neighbors have long suspected of being a werewolf. The sheriff, who narrates the story, doesn't think Mennsinger is guilty - but then, who is? A spy, a German submarine, and a Doberman pinscher all are involved in the solution. I think that this is one of the better stories in this book.
Another sheriff is the narrator in "Murder and Matilda." The sheriff is told by a milkman that he thinks something must have happened to one of his customers, because that customer hadn't taken his milk in for days and did not respond to knocking on the door. The sheriff's new female deputy, Matilda, whom he had been forced to hire, is anxious to be more involved. She asks if she could be the one to do the check and the sheriff agrees. She soon calls the sheriff and says that the man was dead, with a knife in his chest. The solution is improbable, but I certainly didn't guess it.
"There Are Bloodstains in the Alley" is exactly what I would expect a 1940s mystery to be. A body is found in an alley; the victim had been stabbed to death. He was a sneak thief, on his first day out of prison. The dead man's brother-in-law owned a restaurant near where the body was found. The police officer in charge of the case investigates and by a message about the contents of the dead man's pockets, he figures out who the murderer was - but not until he has had two sets of crooks trying to kill him. (In this story and several others in this collection, the good guy - usually unarmed - manages to take down up to three armed men at a time. Not realistic, I guess, but fun to read about.)
There are no little green men in "The Little Green Men" (Brown later did write a science fiction novel about the Earth being invaded by little green men. It was titled Martians, Go Home!.) In this story The Little Green Men is the title of an unsuccessful play, which has little to do with the story. A woman shows up at the office of a newspaper columnist, asking for the two hundred dollars she was promised. The columnist has no idea what she's talking about and tries to find out the facts. One of those facts is a murder. In his Introduction, Collins says of Brown that "more often he out-O.-Henry's-O.-Henry..." This is not the only story here with a surprise ending, but this one really was a surprise to me.
There are three stories here that first appeared as by names other than "Fredric Brown." "Here Comes the Hearse" was credited to "Allen Morse." "Big-League Larceny" was credited to "Jack Hobart." And "Murder-on-the-Hudson" was credited to "Bob Woehlke." The copyright page has a note about the last of these:
Bob Woehlke was a terminally ill young man from Milwaukee who coauthered this tale with Brown, and when he died before it could be published, Brown had it published under Woehlke's name.
This is the longest story in the book and the one that I like most. I'll try not to make this as complicated as the story itself. A young unemployed lawyer, recently discharged from the Marines, and now walking with a limp, is sitting in a hotel lobby in Riverdale, the town in which he used to have his practice. (This is evidently not the "Riverdale" from Archie comics.) The desk clerk is startlingly lovely. The man she is just checking in is ugly. The ugly man comes over to the lawyer and asks if he would like to make five hundred dollars. The lawyer is broke but wary. The job seems simple enough ; he has to go to specified places, order a drink or a meal, and then leave a twenty dollar tip. (This was 1945, and a twenty dollar tip would be the equivalent of over three hundred dollars in 2024, when I am writing this.) The lawyer's appearance must be changed both by make-up and by wearing different clothes. This seems harmless, and the lawyer agrees to do this. He later finds out that he has been put in the middle of a gang war. He has also met and fallen in love with the beautiful desk clerk. The lawyer is smart and brave, but will that be enough to keep him alive?
The front of the dust jacket shows a man being handed three tickets by an employee at what I believe is meant to be a racetrack. The track employee is a skeleton, wearing a green eyeshade. The back cover shows a baseball pitcher, the head of a woman with red hair, and a skull. The two flaps of the jacket each have another skull. This is by Joe Servello.
Quoting once again from the Introduction:
Still, it should be noted that these are pulp stories. Had Brown considered these first-rate, he would have no doubt gathered them himself, in one of his many collections; had the stories been first-rate, frankly, they would have sold to better markets...
Nonetheless, these are first-rate pulp stories, and better than that, they are Fredric Brown stories, which means even the worst of 'em is going to have first-rate moments.
This is far from Brown at his best. If a reader generally enjoys old pulp mysteries, he or she will probably enjoy these. I did.
●"Don't Look" - Introduction - Max Allan Collins
●Stories by Fredric Brown:
▪︎ "Six-Gun Song"
▪︎ "Blood of the Dragon"
▪︎ "The Little Green Men"
▪︎ "Murder-on-the-Hudson"
▪︎ "Star-Spangled Night"
▪︎ "The Discontented Cows"
▪︎ "Boner"
▪︎ "Three-Corpse Parlay"
▪︎ "Here Comes the Hearse"
▪︎ "There are Bloodstains in the Alley"
▪︎ "Murder and Matilda"
▪︎ "Heil, Werewolf!"
▪︎ "Big-League Larceny"
Fredric Brown was an American writer who lived from 1909 to 1972. He principally wrote mysteries, science fiction, and fantasy.
Starting in 1984, the Dennis McMillan publishing company put out a series of collections of Brown's short mystery fiction. The overall title of the series was "Fredric Brown in the Detective Pulps." There were eventually nineteen volumes, the last being published in 1991.
Three-Corpse Parlay is Volume 13 in the series. This collection has thirteen stories, all of them originally published in the years 1939-1949. All but one of these stories first appeared in periodicals with the words "mystery" or "detective" in the title; the one outlier was published in a general interest magazine titled Coronet.
The Introduction by Max Allan Collins, who is also a renowned mystery author, is titled "Don't Look." Collins says he generally doesn't like mystery short fiction, with one exception: Fredric Brown's story "Don't Look Behind You." Collins considers Brown to be one of his favorite mystery writers, "a notch or two" under the six that he regards as "great."
I don't think that any of the thirteen stories gathered here are "great," but most of them are good. Only two of the stories involve the World War which was being fought when many of these stories first appeared - "Boner" and "Heil, Werewolf!," both originally published in 1942.
This collection includes a rare Brown historical tale, not really a mystery, titled "Star-Spangled Night." An American reader might well put the title together with the fact that it is set in 1814 in Chesapeake Bay around a night in which the British ships in the bay were firing on an American military base on the shore and realize who the American identified in the last sentence was. This is the story that appeared in Coronet rather than in a mystery periodical.
I think that three of the stories telegraph their endings, but I liked all of them anyway. In "Big-League Larceny," the star pitcher for the Green Sox is held for ransom. If he pitches, the Greenies usually win; if he doesn't, they might not.
In "Here Comes the Hearse," a man answers a knock on the door in the night, taking care not to wake his brother sleeping upstairs. The man puts a make-shift blindfold over his eyes before opening the door. He knows that the men at the door may kill him. He says that he is the man they're looking for and adds that he knows why they want him dead. He said that he had witnessed a bank robbery and might be asked by the police to identify a suspect. He tells them that everyone would be safe if he can't identify the robber. He says that he would rather be blind than dead. He tells the would-be killers that since he is wearing a blindfold, he can not identify them and if they gouge out his eyes he also would not be able to identify the robbers. This seems like a reasonable plan but will the men who have come to the house accept it? Max Allan Collins says that "Here Comes the Hearse" is "the most disturbing and...effective tale in this collection." (By the way, I don't get the knock-knock joke in this story.)
The story with the most obvious ending is "Blood of the Dragon." The police are looking for two wily counterfeiters. The six year old daughter of the chief of police encounters a red and green dragon near an abandoned hut on the chief's property. (I will add that the good guy in this tale uses a racial slur.)
The story that provided the title for this collection, "Three-Corpse Parlay,"
sounds like it should be about gambling. (An online dictionary defines "parlay" as "a cumulative series of bets in which winnings accruing from each transaction are used as a stake for a further bet.") Here it is just used as a catchy pun, substituting "three-corpse" for "three-horse." The three "corpses" are not what one might expect. The story is about a married private investigator who, with his wife, had started their own detective agency. Money is a problem. When the detective comes across children upset because their puppy has died, he goes on to prevent a robbery.
There is another story here with a joke title. In the early years of the Twentieth Century, the Carnation Condensed Milk company used the slogan "the milk from contented cows." The title of the story "The Discontented Cows" is obviously based on that slogan. In the story, it isn't cows that are discontented; it is an artist, kidnapped to keep adding or taking away cows in a painting of cows in a meadow. But why - and how can he escape?
I thought that "Six-Gun Song" might be some kind of Western. But no - these are modern guns. A reporter is in the next room when a man is shot. The reporter saw the gun and was sure the cartridges were blanks. The solution does involve a song and a twist ending. In the Introduction to the book, Collins says that this story and "Blood of the Dragon" have "some pretty half-assed ersatz irony." I don't see that, but Collins is way more knowledgeable about mystery tales than I am.
"Boner" is the shortest story in this collection and, as I mentioned above, is one of the two stories that have the then-ongoing war at their center. This one is nothing but irony. A man from Germany, now an American citizen, is threatened that if he doesn't aid in acts of sabotage against the United States, the one relative he still has living in Germany, a cousin, will be hunted down and put in a concentration camp. I didn't anticipate the ending, partly because it's absurd.
The other World War II story is "Heil, Werewolf!." Livestock is disappearing from people's farms. Other animals are left dead, looking like they have been attacked by a wolf. There is an obvious suspect - Jim Mennsinger, a not very bright man whom the neighbors have long suspected of being a werewolf. The sheriff, who narrates the story, doesn't think Mennsinger is guilty - but then, who is? A spy, a German submarine, and a Doberman pinscher all are involved in the solution. I think that this is one of the better stories in this book.
Another sheriff is the narrator in "Murder and Matilda." The sheriff is told by a milkman that he thinks something must have happened to one of his customers, because that customer hadn't taken his milk in for days and did not respond to knocking on the door. The sheriff's new female deputy, Matilda, whom he had been forced to hire, is anxious to be more involved. She asks if she could be the one to do the check and the sheriff agrees. She soon calls the sheriff and says that the man was dead, with a knife in his chest. The solution is improbable, but I certainly didn't guess it.
"There Are Bloodstains in the Alley" is exactly what I would expect a 1940s mystery to be. A body is found in an alley; the victim had been stabbed to death. He was a sneak thief, on his first day out of prison. The dead man's brother-in-law owned a restaurant near where the body was found. The police officer in charge of the case investigates and by a message about the contents of the dead man's pockets, he figures out who the murderer was - but not until he has had two sets of crooks trying to kill him. (In this story and several others in this collection, the good guy - usually unarmed - manages to take down up to three armed men at a time. Not realistic, I guess, but fun to read about.)
There are no little green men in "The Little Green Men" (Brown later did write a science fiction novel about the Earth being invaded by little green men. It was titled Martians, Go Home!.) In this story The Little Green Men is the title of an unsuccessful play, which has little to do with the story. A woman shows up at the office of a newspaper columnist, asking for the two hundred dollars she was promised. The columnist has no idea what she's talking about and tries to find out the facts. One of those facts is a murder. In his Introduction, Collins says of Brown that "more often he out-O.-Henry's-O.-Henry..." This is not the only story here with a surprise ending, but this one really was a surprise to me.
There are three stories here that first appeared as by names other than "Fredric Brown." "Here Comes the Hearse" was credited to "Allen Morse." "Big-League Larceny" was credited to "Jack Hobart." And "Murder-on-the-Hudson" was credited to "Bob Woehlke." The copyright page has a note about the last of these:
Bob Woehlke was a terminally ill young man from Milwaukee who coauthered this tale with Brown, and when he died before it could be published, Brown had it published under Woehlke's name.
This is the longest story in the book and the one that I like most. I'll try not to make this as complicated as the story itself. A young unemployed lawyer, recently discharged from the Marines, and now walking with a limp, is sitting in a hotel lobby in Riverdale, the town in which he used to have his practice. (This is evidently not the "Riverdale" from Archie comics.) The desk clerk is startlingly lovely. The man she is just checking in is ugly. The ugly man comes over to the lawyer and asks if he would like to make five hundred dollars. The lawyer is broke but wary. The job seems simple enough ; he has to go to specified places, order a drink or a meal, and then leave a twenty dollar tip. (This was 1945, and a twenty dollar tip would be the equivalent of over three hundred dollars in 2024, when I am writing this.) The lawyer's appearance must be changed both by make-up and by wearing different clothes. This seems harmless, and the lawyer agrees to do this. He later finds out that he has been put in the middle of a gang war. He has also met and fallen in love with the beautiful desk clerk. The lawyer is smart and brave, but will that be enough to keep him alive?
The front of the dust jacket shows a man being handed three tickets by an employee at what I believe is meant to be a racetrack. The track employee is a skeleton, wearing a green eyeshade. The back cover shows a baseball pitcher, the head of a woman with red hair, and a skull. The two flaps of the jacket each have another skull. This is by Joe Servello.
Quoting once again from the Introduction:
Still, it should be noted that these are pulp stories. Had Brown considered these first-rate, he would have no doubt gathered them himself, in one of his many collections; had the stories been first-rate, frankly, they would have sold to better markets...
Nonetheless, these are first-rate pulp stories, and better than that, they are Fredric Brown stories, which means even the worst of 'em is going to have first-rate moments.
This is far from Brown at his best. If a reader generally enjoys old pulp mysteries, he or she will probably enjoy these. I did.
November 26, 2023
Are you. wheezingly, headache-y. sick and tired of me. and these damn Fredric Brown collections?
If you see me give one more 5-star rating to these books, is your finger ready to vomit all over Unfriend? Fanboy nonsense, how can hastily churned-out forgotten, barrel-bottom, make-a-quick-buck pulp ephemera by an ignored author deserve this treadmill of love - is that the perception?
Well I don’t know what to tell you. But before I get to the personal and specific delight I got from THIS PARTICULAR entry in the Fredric Brown and the Detective Pulps series - funplucky # 13! - let’s sweep up heavenly basics:
There‘s a werewolf story! And when you finally get a werewolf story (okay, another one) from Fredric Brown, you naturally expect a hoax, a trick, Scooby Doo Doo Doo, who’s dressing up?, why does a counterfeiting scheme need a phoney lycanthrope sort of thing. Ah, BUT… okay, I don’t want to give anything away, but there’s a werewolf story!
There’s a story that takes place in 1814! That’s very un-Fredric Brown. I love it! It’s not his best thing ever…but I love it! I don’t know where it came from - Fred doesn’t take us to Europe (I’m still waiting to be proven wrong, or, have I forgotten something…?), and he doesn’t do 19th-Century. Ah, BUT…he does finally do 19th Century!
I forget how many of these gems give us a wonderful twist in the very last line, but it happens a lot, and they’re such juicy last teeny bites, before the next big treat.
How does Fred make me buy one guy, surrounded by three murderous goons with guns, getting out of said jam as part of a deliciously action-oriented finale (plus twist…maybe last-line twist!)…how does he make me lap that up over and over again and love it? I don’t know - but though it sounds repetitive or contrived, it’s really not, when our latest Outgunned & Outnumbered specimen gets the sudden upper hand - huge fist - in a way that is different than the likeable fella from three stories ago. Clever tough guys with a supreme talent for always original improv, and whittling down scary numbers. Samey shitheels, different day, same but different way out.
I guess it’s no surprise that this 13th volume in the series has 13 stories. It should be noted that’s a lot of stories, relative to the other books. So if it’s quantity over quality you want from anything labeled “Fredric Brown in the Detective Pulps”…you’re still outta luck. This is quantity, AND quality - but really big quantity. Then again, I liked Mad Man’s Holiday as much as this one, and that’s just two novellas of slightly-psychedelic espionage or something (hey, there’s even a little of that in this one!).
Oh, right…my personal thrill, gotten from THIS collection, and not its beautiful sisters and brothers:
I’ve never hit any connection between Fredric Brown and P. G. Wodehouse, two of my favourite authors. Time and reading connected Wodehouse and Ed McBain, McBain being another big fave of my reading journey…and those links are as strange as they are cool. But, did Wodehouse ever meet or correspond with Fredric Brown? Seemed unlikely. More realistic scenario: did Wodehouse read Fredric Brown’s stuff, or vice versa? Their writing is so different, and yet, at the very very least - and I know how well-read both Wodehouse, and Fredric Brown, were! - would not Fredric Brown have read Wodehouse…?
He did!
“Then Varney, who looked like something out of a Wodehouse novel but talked Brooklynese, appeared in the doorway.”.
My life is possibly fulfilled (Okay, that’s getting fanboy. Doubly. — Full stop. Until next time.)
If you see me give one more 5-star rating to these books, is your finger ready to vomit all over Unfriend? Fanboy nonsense, how can hastily churned-out forgotten, barrel-bottom, make-a-quick-buck pulp ephemera by an ignored author deserve this treadmill of love - is that the perception?
Well I don’t know what to tell you. But before I get to the personal and specific delight I got from THIS PARTICULAR entry in the Fredric Brown and the Detective Pulps series - funplucky # 13! - let’s sweep up heavenly basics:
There‘s a werewolf story! And when you finally get a werewolf story (okay, another one) from Fredric Brown, you naturally expect a hoax, a trick, Scooby Doo Doo Doo, who’s dressing up?, why does a counterfeiting scheme need a phoney lycanthrope sort of thing. Ah, BUT… okay, I don’t want to give anything away, but there’s a werewolf story!
There’s a story that takes place in 1814! That’s very un-Fredric Brown. I love it! It’s not his best thing ever…but I love it! I don’t know where it came from - Fred doesn’t take us to Europe (I’m still waiting to be proven wrong, or, have I forgotten something…?), and he doesn’t do 19th-Century. Ah, BUT…he does finally do 19th Century!
I forget how many of these gems give us a wonderful twist in the very last line, but it happens a lot, and they’re such juicy last teeny bites, before the next big treat.
How does Fred make me buy one guy, surrounded by three murderous goons with guns, getting out of said jam as part of a deliciously action-oriented finale (plus twist…maybe last-line twist!)…how does he make me lap that up over and over again and love it? I don’t know - but though it sounds repetitive or contrived, it’s really not, when our latest Outgunned & Outnumbered specimen gets the sudden upper hand - huge fist - in a way that is different than the likeable fella from three stories ago. Clever tough guys with a supreme talent for always original improv, and whittling down scary numbers. Samey shitheels, different day, same but different way out.
I guess it’s no surprise that this 13th volume in the series has 13 stories. It should be noted that’s a lot of stories, relative to the other books. So if it’s quantity over quality you want from anything labeled “Fredric Brown in the Detective Pulps”…you’re still outta luck. This is quantity, AND quality - but really big quantity. Then again, I liked Mad Man’s Holiday as much as this one, and that’s just two novellas of slightly-psychedelic espionage or something (hey, there’s even a little of that in this one!).
Oh, right…my personal thrill, gotten from THIS collection, and not its beautiful sisters and brothers:
I’ve never hit any connection between Fredric Brown and P. G. Wodehouse, two of my favourite authors. Time and reading connected Wodehouse and Ed McBain, McBain being another big fave of my reading journey…and those links are as strange as they are cool. But, did Wodehouse ever meet or correspond with Fredric Brown? Seemed unlikely. More realistic scenario: did Wodehouse read Fredric Brown’s stuff, or vice versa? Their writing is so different, and yet, at the very very least - and I know how well-read both Wodehouse, and Fredric Brown, were! - would not Fredric Brown have read Wodehouse…?
He did!
“Then Varney, who looked like something out of a Wodehouse novel but talked Brooklynese, appeared in the doorway.”.
My life is possibly fulfilled (Okay, that’s getting fanboy. Doubly. — Full stop. Until next time.)
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