Written in the late 1940s. Classic noir mystery. ( )

I really liked this. I've previously enjoyed Fredric Brown's science fiction, so it seemed reasonable to try his other work.
It's a fast-paced story set in 1940s Chicago. A man is found dead in a dark alley, killed by a blow to the head and robbed. His son and his brother believe that the police won't take much trouble over a minor crime with little to go on, so they start to investigate it themselves,

I didn't really care for this book; the reason I picked it up is because the father and the son (who is the protagonist) are linotype operators. When I worked in type setting, there were still lineotype machines in my workplace, two of them. So I observed the way they work, the way type is set from these machines. Soon after, lineotype was gone. Computer typesetting machines we'mre already out, and constantly getting more sophisticated. Yet there came a time when desktop publishing systems were invented. That's when the typesetting jobs evaporated. Companies who were our clients: ibm, raychem, raytheon, came to be done by in house workers at that time.
But this young man, gives up the typesetting business when he's still an apprentice, at the end of the book.
The beginning of the book, the protagonist's father is killed. Ed is musing to himself:
"but it was as though I was standing a long way off looking at him, the little I really knew of him, and it seemed now that I'd been wrong about a lot of things.
His drinking, mostly. I could see now that that didn't matter. I didn't know why he drank, but there must have been a reason. Maybe I was beginning to see the reason, looking out the window there. And he was a quiet drinker and a quiet man. I'd seen him angry only a few times, and every one of those times he'd been sober.
I thought, you sit at a lineotype all day and set type for A&P handbills and a magazine on asphalt road surfacing and tabular matter for a church council report on finances, and then you come home to a wife who's a b**** and who's been drinking most of the afternoon and wants to quarrel, and a stepdaughter who's an apprentice b****.
And a son who thinks he's a little bit better than you are because he's a smart alec young punk who got honor grades in school and thinks he knows more than you do, and that he's better.
And you're too decent to walk out on a mess like that, and so what do you do? You go down for a few beers and you don't intend to get drunk, but you do. Or maybe you did intend to, and so what?"
It's terrible when your parent dies and you have not been in good communication. Terrible suffering you're going to go through before you can get that behind you.

Ed goes to the town where he knows his uncle's employer, a traveling carnival is, to tell his uncle about his brother dying.
His uncle arranges for someone else to take over his booth, and goes back to Chicago with ed. They are going to find out who killed Ed's father.
As time goes on, there comes a moment when his uncle, Uncle Ambrose, shares some of Wally's life with Ed. It was interesting, but I didn't appreciate the racial slurs that were apparently okay in that time.
".. he was working at the gambling joint. Dealing blackjack. He was fed up with Juarez by the time I got there, so he quit the dealing. He was picking up Mex and wanted me to head with him for Veracruz.
Kid, that was a trip. VeraCruz is a good 12 or 1300 miles from Juarez and it took us 4 months to make it. We left Juarez with a stake of, I think, 85 bucks between us. But that changed into about 400 bucks mex, and while it wasn't much on the border, it made you rich when you got a hundred or so miles in, if you talked the lingo and didn't get yourself into the sucker joints.
We were Rich for half of that 4 months, n***** rich. Then in Monterrey we ran into some guys that were smarter than we were. We should headed back for the border then, for laredo, but we'd decided on Veracruz and we kept going. We got there on foot, in Mex clothes, what there was of them, and we hadn't had a peso between us in 3 weeks. We'd damn near forgotten how to talk english; we jabbered spik even to each other, to get better at it.
We got jobs in Veracruz and straightened out. That's where your dad picked up linotype, ed. A Spanish-language paper run by a German who had a swedish wife and who'd been born in burma. He needed a man who was fluent in both English and Spanish - he didn't speak much English himself - so he taught Wally how to run his linotype and the flatbed press he printed the paper on."

By doing some sleuthing, the two of them dig up some history about Ed's father. It turns out, before they moved to chicago, Wally had been serving on a jury duty. The lawyer for the accused was paying off jury members who would accept it to vote acquittal. Wally took the $1,000, and then crossed up the lawyer. That's when he needed to disappear. He paid off some debts, took out a life insurance policy, and moved the family to chicago. However, he told everyone he was moving somewhere else. It seems that now, thugs have tracked him down, and put a hit out on him.
"Why he could wait 3 weeks after the trial before he landed. Look, here's how I read it. Wally gets put on the Reynolds jury. This schweinberg was disbarred for bribing jurors; that was his racket. Somehow he got to Wally and gave him a thousand bucks, more or less, to vote acquittal. He couldn't have hoped for anything more than to split the jury and get a misstrial, from the evidence.
Wally took it - and crossed him up. Wally had nerve, all right; he might have done that. Hell he must have. He got about a thousand from somewhere. Right after the trial he uses part of it for an insurance policy - one big enough to carry Marge till you kids were through school. Then he lammed out of Gary and covered his trail so they couldn't find him. I don't know why he waited 3 weeks; there must have been something protected him for that long. Maybe they did hold Harry Reynolds for a while, intending him to get a stretch for perjury or as an accessory, then let him go. And with Harry lose, Wally would know he'd be done for."

The shocker is in the end, when they start to put two and two together, finding out that bunny, a friend of Ed and Wally and their co-worker, killed Ed's dad:
"Uncle Ambrose said, 'he was planning to marry Madge. He knew she liked him and that she'd be looking for another husband pretty soon. Her type always marries again - she wouldn't have wanted to go back to being a waitress when a guy with a good job like Bunny's wants to support her. And she isn't so young anymore and - well I don't have to draw you a diagram do i?'
Bassett [the detective assigned to the case] said, 'you mean he didn't know about that premium receipt and thought Madge wouldn't know about the policy until after he'd married her? But how did he account for having hidden the policy?'
uncle am said, 'he wouldn't have to. After they're married he could pretend to find it somewhere among some stuff of wally's. And Madge would let him use it for starting his own printing shop; he could talk her into that, because that way it would give them an income for life.' "
So it turns out that Wally had hinted to Bunny that he wanted to be killed. He felt he was no good for Madge and her daughter, and he knew his son looked down on him. He bought the life insurance policy, and set out to have himself killed.

Uncle Ambrose talks Ed into returning to the carnival with him, and taking up the carney life. Throwing away his apprenticeship, and good money. This made me sad. But who knows what's going to happen in the next book? I won't, because I won't be continuing this series.
"I hurried home and packed. I was both glad and sorry that Mom and Gardie were out. I left a note for them.
Uncle am was already at the corner when I got there. He had his suitcase and a trombone case, a new one.
He chuckled when he saw how I looked at it. He said, 'a going away present, kid. With a carney, you can learn to play it. With a carney, the more noise you make, the better. And someday you'll play yourself out of the carney. Harry James' first job was with the circus band.' "

( )

Wally Hunter era un hombre fracasado. Lo había intentado todo, y todo le había salido mal. Acabó asesinado, tras una borrachera triste y solitaria, en un mísero callejón de Chicago. Parecía que nadie pudiera tener el menor interés en matarlo, pero escarbando en su monótona existencia empezaron a aparecer sospechosos; unos gángsters traicionados, una mujer -su segunda esposa- aún atractiva y con esperanzas de cobrar el seguro de vida, o un amigo demasiado interesado por la mujer y el seguro.

review of
Fredric Brown's The Fabulous Clipjoint
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - July 25, 2018

Blame it on Fredric Brown. He's sucking me into the underworld of plot-driven writing. I was engrossed in this. I loved it. I hardly took any reviewer notes on it at all for the usual reason that I don't want to spoil the plot & I don't have much to say about it that isn't plot-based. The father/husband/stepfather gets murdered & the family members have their various reactions wch seem real enuf. The son, Ed, realizes that he didn't really even know him & feels bad about it. This is emphasized when Ed meets the murdered father's brother after a hiatus of a decade & hears stories about the 2 of them that're surprising:

""Let's stick to Pop," I suggested. "He was in Spain."

""Yeah. Well, he came back. We finally got in touch with one another through a friend in St. Paul we both happened to write to. I was with a detective agency then—Wheeler's, out in L.A.—and Wally was in vaudeville. He used to be pretty good at juggling—oh, not a top act, even as jugglers go, but he was good with the Indian clubs. Good enough for a spot with a fair troupe. He ever juggle any lately?"" - p 77

"I was tired, but I had trouble getting to sleep. I kept thinking about what I'd learned about Pop.

"When he was my age, I thought, he'd owned and run a newspaper. He'd had a duel and shot a man. He'd had an affair with a married woman. He'd traveled across most of Mexico afoot and spoke Spanish like a native. He'd crossed the Atlantic and lived in Spain. He'd dealt blackjack in a border town." - p 81

This bk was copyrighted in 1947. I was born in 1953. I often find myself attracted to cultural products from the 1950s. I love Morton Feldman's "Intersection" piano pieces, e.g.. The Fabulous Clipjoint doesn't quite fit the era but it's close enuf. Ed calls his father "Pop". My mom called her stepfather "Pop" &, as a family tradition, I called mine "Pop". Is that common anymore?

""You mean you're going to—to—"

""Hell, yes. That's why I had to fix things with Hoagy and Maury—he bought the carney this season but kept Hobart's name on it—so I could stay away as long as I had to. Hell, yes, kid. You don't think we're going to let some son of a bitch get away with killing your dad, do you?"" - p 18

Uncle Am & Ed are going to investigate. The cover of the bk identifies this as "AN ED AND AM MYSTERY NOVEL" wch makes me wonder if there are others. I look online & learn that there are 7. This is the 1st one. I'm hooked, I want to read them all. (Then again, I really do have better things to do.) It helps that there's lingo I'm not familiar w/:

"Bassett's eyes unveiled a little, just a little. He asked, "You think you might want to run one?"

""I think maybe," my uncle said.

"They seemed to understand each other. They knew what they were talking about. I didn't.

"Like when Hoagy, the big man, had been talking to my uncle about the blow being sloughed. Only that was carney talk; at least I knew why I didn't understand it. This was different; they were talking words I knew, but it still didn't make sense." - pp 29-30

A subplot of sorts is that Ed's 15 yr old stepsister is horny & keeps trying to seduce him:

"She said, "Some day I'm going on the stage, Eddie. What do you? How'm I doin'?"

""You dance swell," I told her.

""Bet I could strip-tease. Like Gypsy Rose. Watch." She reached behind her, as she danced, for the fastenings of her dress.

"I said, "Don't be a dope, Gardie. I'm your brother, remember?"

""You're not my brother. Anyway, what's that got to do with how I dance? How—"

"She was having trouble with the catch. She danced near me. I reached out and grabbed her hand. I said, "Goddam it, Gartie, cut that out."

"She laughed and leaned back against me. The pull on her wrist had brought her into my lap.

"She said, "Kiss me, Eddie." Her lips were bright red, her body hot against mine. And then her lips were pressing against mine, without my doing anything about it." - p 63

Uncle Am is experienced & wily, Ed is young but has an imagination for taking risks that pay off. Here, after not being sure what he do, he spontaneously approaches a gangster's girlfriend in a direct way:

"I asked, "Does the name Hunter mean anything to you?"

""Hunter? It doesn't."

"I asked, "How about the name Reynolds?"

""Who is this?"

""I'd like to explain," I said. "May I come upstairs? Or would you meet me down in the bar for a drink?"" - p 139

The direct approach pays off in a way that Uncle Am's previous con attempt hadn't.

Brown also wrote science fiction & I like the way his respect for the genre keeps popping up in his crime fiction:

"The top floor was a very swanky ocktail bar. The windows were open and it was cool there. Up as high as that, the breeze was a cool breeze and not something out of a blast furnace.

"We took a table by a window on the south side, looking out toward the Loop. It was beautiful in the bright sunshine. The tall, narrow buildings were like fingers reaching toward the sky. It was like something out of a science-fitcion story. You couldn't quite believe it, even looking at it." - p 178

I really enjoyed reading this. I seem to like his crime fiction more than his SF even tho I generally like SF more than crime fiction. I've hardly told you anything about the bk to spoil it for you. READ IT! It's a quickie. Brown isn't afraid to depict 'beautiful' women as manipulative. I'm reminded of Raymond Chandler's The Little Sister b/c of that. I appreciate stories in wch women are shown equally as victimizers rather than only as victims — the latter seems unrealistic to me but there's plenty of it around these days.

Brown was supposedly popular in his day but in this reader's experience he seems close to forgotten now. That's a shame. Besides, he was born in Baltimore, my home town. ( )