Fredric
Brown
from Nov.
1, 2008
Yes, I had an epiphany last night. Honest.
I was re-reading one of my favorite Fredric Brown novels, The Deep End,
and I realized suddenly why I’ve always felt such a spiritual closeness to
his crime fiction.
I
had a paper route when I was twelve and thirteen. I delivered in the
neighborhood where I lived, a working class quadrant of the small city packed
with bars. The men and women in the bars always liked to treat to me a bottle
of pop or a game of shuffleboard or pool. We were all Micks from the same
parish.
I
can’t say I got to know any but a few of them personally. But I did have an
understanding of them as an aggregate, especially the men who were in their
twenties, their fates already sealed by families, lack of college education
and, in most cases, a compliance with the wishes of the gods (Lovecraft’s gods
to my mind).
The
bar was their escape. My favorite bar was part of a seedy hotel. The owner
liked hillbilly music and he put all of Elvis’ Sun records on it as early as
1955 before Elvis was widely known. Same with Johnny Cash. A very cool place.
I
overheard stories. Men fighting with their wives; men stepping out on their
wives; men who couldn’t pay their bills and were heavy into loan companies
already. Some of the men blue collar, some of the men lower-echelon white
collar. There were fights sometimes; wives occasionally appeared and hauled
their humiliated husbands out of the places. The great tragedy was the
much-decorated Marine who’d fought in Korea. Popular high school basketball
player, happy hard-working good-looking guy who was crazy about his wife and
brought her in frequently, lovely frail Irish girl-woman. He got killed in a
highway accident and his wife (true facts) set herself on fire in grief.
Lives
significant only to them and their kind (my kind).
And
while I was reading The Deep End last night (a novel so redolent of
Fifties morality it could be used in a sociology text book, even though it
takes enormous liberties with the sexual mores of the time, the love affair
here is a knockout) I realized that I like Brown so much (I was already reading
him back then) because he wrote about my neighborhood and my people. Most of
his crime novels, I know now, are filled with the men and women in the bars on
my old paper route.
I
keep hearing about how Brown’s Coming Back. I sure hope that’s true.
Click here to purchase the trade paperback.
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This article
originally appeared on Ed Gorman’s blog, New Improved Gorman, on Nov. 1,
2008. It is reprinted here by permission. Ed wrote dozens of novels in a
variety of genres, but his most popular work (and my favorite of his work)
was in the crime and western genres. His ten Sam McCain mysteries—set in the
fictional Iowa town of Black River Falls during the 1950s, ’60, and ’70s—are
suspenseful, mysterious, and often funny excursions into small town America. The
New York Times called Sam McCain, “The kind of hero any small town could
take to its heart” and The Seattle Times called McCain “an intriguing
mix of knight errant and realist…”
But Ed was also a tireless reader and
promoter of other writers’ work. His blogs—there were three, none of them
operating at the same time—are treasure troves for readers of crime, horror,
and western fiction both old and new. Ed died Oct. 14, 2016.
Click here to check
out Ed Gorman’s Sam McCain novels on Amazon.
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