Fredric Brown_8 Titles (Hard-Boiled; Classic Pulp) EPUB + MOBI

1942-1963 (1984 intro & collection)

This story collection contains: "A Date to Die", "Mad Dog", "Handbook for Homicide", "A Cat Walks", "The Missing Actor" and "Before She Kills".
Paperback
Published by Dennis McMillan Publications
original title
Before She Kills
ISBN
0960998632 (ISBN13: 97809609986



Del Rey / Ballantine, 1977. Paperback, 1st printing. Brown was a master of short-form science fiction. Introduction by Robert Bloch, and these stories: "Arena" (1944); "Imagine" (1955. poem); "It Didn't Happen" (1963); "Recessional" (1961); "Eine Kleine Nachtmusik" (1965, with Carl Onspaugh); "Puppet Show" (1962); "Nightmare in Yellow" (1961); "Earthmen Bearing Gifts" (1960); "Jaycee" (1955); "Pi in the Sky" (1945); "Answer" (1954); "The Geezenstacks" (1943); "Hall of Mirrors" (1953); "Knock" (1948); "Rebound" (1960); "Star Mouse" (1951); "Abominable" (1960); "Letter to a Phoenix" (1949); "Not Yet the End" (1941); "Etaoin Shrdlu" (1942); "Armageddon" (1941); "Experiment" [Two Timer]" (1954); "The Short Happy Lives of Eustace Weaver I" (1961); "The Short Happy Lives of Eustace Weaver II" (1961); "The Short Happy Lives of Eustace Weaver III" (1961); "Reconciliation" (1954); "Nothing Sirius" (1944); "Pattern" (1954); "The Yehudi Principle" (1944); "Come and Go Mad" (1949); "The End" (1961).



KIRKUS REVIEW

This author's ability with the fast, tricky switch here tells of Lloyd Johnson's torment over his wife's kidnaping following two others in which one woman has been murdered, another returned. Will Ellen, even if he keeps away from the police, pays the ransom, and keeps mum, alive? Aided by friends, scurrying to got the money, trying to the criminal he finds an unexpected ending. Taut.

Pub Date: April 16th, 1962
Publisher: Dutton



Donald Westlake said, “Fredric Brown had one of the eeriest and most fascinating minds of his time…he consistently saw new visions of strangeness and fear, or new ways of seeing the old. Every day was the day of the Jabberwock in that fertile imagination,” while Bill Pronzini simply stated, “Fredric Brown was one of the best storyteller of his time.”

It’s hard for me to top this praise, except to say that I am continually delighted to be reminded of the boundlessness of Brown’s creativity. “Twist endings” are, on their own, an expected cliché – but Brown’s twists are as twisted as his deviant characters, and as otherworldly as the purple monsters that stalk his sci-fi masterpiece What Mad Universe. But whether writing sci-fi or, in this case, mystery fiction, Brown's fiendish humor is unparalleled.

Homicide Sanitarium, the first volume in Dennis McMillan’s The Fredric Brown Pulp Detective Series, was originally published in 1984, with a second printing in 1987. Now out-of-print (though used copies can be found online at a reasonable price, though subsequent McMillan’s compilations can be quite pricey), Homicide Sanitarium collects seven short stories that are all excellent examples of the author’s style and capability.

Here’s a brief rundown of the stories included, as well as their original publication information and a favorite quote from each.

“Red-Hot and Hunted” (Detective Tales, November 1948)
“Is this a bad joke, Adrian, or is he…crazy?”
How far would an actor go to get a part? What are you to say when one calls you up to audition for a role and calmly confesses to murdering his wife?

“The Spherical Ghoul” (Thrilling Mystery, January 1943)
“I had no premonition of horror to come. When I reported to work that evening I had not the faintest inkling that I faced anything more startling than another quiet night on a snap job.”
A student working the night shift at the coroner’s receives an unpleasant shock when he discovers someone has mangled the unidentified corpse beyond recognition. But the door was locked, there was no sign of forced entry, and no one entered the building all night…

“Homicide Sanitarium” (Thrilling Detective, May 1941)
“Why, I wondered, in the name of sanity or insanity, had someone put that loaded tommy gun in my room?”
A detective takes an undercover job in an asylum to locate a missing killer.

“The Moon for a Nickel” (Street & Smith’s Detective Story Magazine, March 1938)
“Brakes screeched. A gun barked and a bullet buzzed past his left ear like an angry hornet.”
Brown’s first published story is a clever and charming tale of a stargazer whose telescope witnesses something it wasn’t supposed to.

“Suite for Flute and Tommy-gun” (Street & Smith’s Detective Story Magazine, June 1942)
“The flute, in the middle of a high note, seeming to give an almost humanly discordant gasp before it went silent.”
One of Brown’s unique gifts is to take an impossible-seeming title and make it possible. A flute-playing bank manager gets gunned down in the middle of rehearsal.

“The Cat from Siam” (Popular Detective, September 1949)
“And the cat, backing away from him, was shrinking to her real size, getting smaller, her claws still scraping the cement as she backed away.”
The stand-out story of the collection is a tense thriller about a university student, his professor, the professor’s daughter he is in love with, and a crazed lab technician on the loose with a gun. Brown’s prowess for psychological horror is on full display.

“Listen to the Mocking Bird” (G-Man Detective, November 1941)
“It’s a mocking bird. And it crochets.”
A performer’s unmatched ability for birdcalls gets him in trouble when witnesses hear his characteristic vocal abilities coming from the dead man’s room.



Brown's novel about an ex-reporter who, disenchanted with his career writing a radio soap opera, looks to create a new show, dubbed "Murder Can Be Fun," and change genres. Things get dicey when killings happen, using our heroe's unpublished scripts as a template. With its chess-playing and references to Alice in Wonderland, one suspects a Spanish admirer for Mr. Brown, as the great Arturo Perez-Reverte also wrote a book about chess-playing, before taking it to new heights with a Dumas-inspired mystery. This book was also published as "A Plot for Murder."



His name really was Sweeney, but he was only five-eighths Irish and he was only three-quarters drunk. But that’s about as near as truth ever approximates a pattern, and if you won’t settle for that, you’d better quit reading. If you don’t maybe you’ll be sorry, for it isn’t a nice story. It’s got murder in it, and women and liquor and gambling and even prevarication. There’s murder before the story proper starts, and murder after it ends; the actual story begins with a naked woman and ends with one, which is a good opening and a good ending, but everything between isn’t nice. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

About the Author

Born in 1906, Fredric Brown was an American science fiction and mystery writer. In early life he attended the University of Cincinnati and Hanover College, Indiana, before working as a newspaperman and magazine writer in the Midwest. His first foray into the mystery genre was The Fabulous Clipjoint (1947) which won the Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America for outstanding first mystery novel. As an author he wrote more than thirty novels and over three hundred short stories, and is noted for a bold use of narrative experimentation, as exemplified in The Lenient Beast (1956) Many of his books employ the threat of the supernatural or occult before concluding with a logical explanation, and he is renowned for both original plots and ingenious endings. In the 1950s he moved to Tucson and wrote for television and film, continuing to submit many short stories that regularly appeared in mystery anthologies. A cultured man and omnivorous reader, Brown had a lifelong interest in the flute, chess, poker, and the works of Lewis Carroll. He died in 1972.



A collection of seventeen stories, eight of which were published in "Astounding and Unknown" between 1941 and 1949.



Mystery icon and original Dutton Guilt Edged Mysteries author Fredric Brown’s inventive and shocking novel We All Killed Grandma, first published in 1952, is available as an eBook for the first time!

In We All Killed Grandma, Rod Britten’s first memory is speaking to the police on the phone, staring at the body of a woman with a bullet in her brain. He is completely unable to answer the police’s questions about who he is, where he is, or how he came to discover the woman — who he soon learns is his own grandmother. The killing is written off as a botched burglary, but Rod is determined to discover the truth, both about his life before the amnesia and his grandmother’s death. His quest entangles him with Robin, his beautiful ex-wife who he may be falling in love with all over again, but also puts him in grave danger: what does he know about the murder that his mind won’t let him remember?

Edgar Award winning author Fredric Brown, whom Mickey Spillane called “my favorite writer of all time,” weaves a fascinating mystery, now available to a whole new generation of readers.