Another Look: “Madball”

Warning: Artistic inspiration drawn from book titles may vary.



Left: Madball, by Fredric Brown (Dell, 1953); cover art by Griffith Foxley. Right: Madball, by Fredric Brown (Gold Medal, 1961); cover illustration by Mitchell Hooks. A new edition of this carnival crime novel will be released later this month by Black Gat/Stark House Press, fronted by Foxley’s painting.

Stanley’s Style: “The Case of the Dancing Sandwiches”

Part of a 100th-birthday tribute to artist Robert Stanley.


The Case of the Dancing Sandwiches, by Fredric Brown (Dell, 1951). I’d have bought this book for its title alone!

Because I Needed a Fredric Brown Fix …

One for the Road, by Fredric Brown (Bantam, 1959).
Illustration by Barye Phillips.

Friday Finds: “The Lenient Beast”

Another in our growing line of vintage book covers we love.



The Lenient Beast, by Fredric Brown (Bantam, 1958).
Illustration by Mitchell Hooks.

Ohio-born newspaperman-turned-pulp author Fredric Brown produced a wealth of both crime fiction and science fiction, and demonstrated a particular talent for composing first lines. His novels featuring Chicago private eyes Ed and Am Hunter (The Fabulous Clipjoint, 1947) still claim a healthy following, and many people include his unconventional The Wench Is Dead (1955) and his despair-ridden The Far Cry (1951) among their favorite Brown works, but it’s 1949’s The Screaming Mimi that’s been deemed a noir classic (you can read that entire book online here).

The Lenient Beast is a standalone tale of betrayal and obsession. A chunk of the story, titled “Line of Duty,” appeared in Manhunt magazine in April 1956, and Dutton published a hardcover edition of The Lenient Beast later that same year. British author Martin Edwards (The Golden Age of Murder) sums up its premise this way:

The first chapter gets the book off to an excellent start. John Medley, apparently a respectable bachelor with a taste for classical music, discovers a man’s body in his backyard one morning and call[s] the police. The dead man has been shot and a murder hunt is launched.

The story is short, crisp and fascinating and a clever feature is the way Brown uses multiple viewpoints, so that we see the same events from different perspectives. The characterization, especially of a cop of Mexican origin, is excellent and the setting in Tucson, Arizona, is vividly conveyed. I also thought that the depiction of racial prejudice was very well done. What is more, the murder motive is memorable--my only quibble is that I had a rather similar idea some time ago and am dismayed to discover that it is not as unique as I thought!

He adds that “The Lenient Beast certainly lived up to my expectations, high as they were.” As one who has probably not read nearly enough of Brown’s abundant output, I should move this 1958 paperback--with its dark and threatening Mitchell Hooks cover illustration--closer to the top of my most-wanted list.

The Wench Is Dead, by Fredric Brown

I’m sorry to have neglected this page recently; other editorial responsibilities were demanding my more immediate attention. However, I don’t want to wave out November without mentioning at least one more dynamite front cover, this one from Bantam Books’ 1957 paperback reissue of Fredric Brown’s The Wench Is Dead.

The novel actually started out as a short story. As Jack Seabrook recalls in his biography, Martians and Misplaced Clues: The Life and Work of Fredric Brown (1993), the hard-boiled crime-fiction digest Manhunt magazine offered Brown $1,000 in 1953 to compose an original, 10,000-word tale. The author was then living in Venice, California, still chasing after fame (though he’d won an Edgar Award for his debut novel, The Fabulous Clipjoint), and he needed the dough. So he batted out “The Wench Is Dead”--which, Seabrook says, “the magazine’s editors loved and published in the July 1953 issue.”

Brown presumably took his title from a line in playwright Christopher Marlowe’s 1589 stage drama The Jew of Malta, but the story--about a young man of good family from Chicago, who finds a new life among the bums, crooks, and prostitutes of Los Angeles’ poorer quarter, only to become involved in the stabbing death of his girlfriend’s upstairs neighbor--is all Brown’s. Remarking on the set-up of that yarn, Seabrook notes that “in ‘The Wench Is Dead,’ the hero is an alcoholic and the killer a drug addict--quite a picture of life in the sordid world of the Los Angeles underclass.”

By the time Manhunt readers finally had a chance to enjoy “The Wench Is Dead” in print, Brown had already moved on to writing other short stories as well as the science-fiction novel called His Name Was Death (which would be published in 1954). But he returned to “The Wench Is Dead” in January 1954, intending to beef it up to novel length--a task he finished by September of that same year. The book The Wench Is Dead, which Seabrook says differs “strikingly ... from the novelette in a number of important ways,” was published in hardcover by Dutton in May 1955, and was reviewed widely. Critic and mystery writer Anthony Boucher offered his opinion of Brown’s book in the May 8, 1955, edition of The New York Times:

Despite appearances, don’t look for a regular whodunit here; as such [The Wench Is Dead] has marked weaknesses. The surprise lies, not in the murder plot, but in the development of the character of the detective--a high school teacher from Chicago, candidate for an M.A. in sociology, who spends the summer on Los Angeles’ Skid Row learning the life of a wino in order to do social research from the inside. The setting is so sharply observed that one almost believes Brown must have done the same; and the gratifyingly unconventional story is told with conciseness and bite.

While the Dutton hardcover front for this novel (right) was pretty damn lackluster, Bantam’s paperback version (top) was nothing less than outstanding. This is a tribute primarily to the artist, Mitchell Hooks, who I’ve talked about before on this page in relation to Mike Avallone’s The Voodoo Murders. Hooks’ painting captures not only the squalor that backdrops Brown’s L.A. tale, but offers immediate suggestions of sex, fear, and violence--all of which helped produce favorable paperback sales during America’s post-World War II era. And still make this cover a winner, even more than half a century later.

READ MORE: “The Wench Is Dead (1955), by Fredric Brown,” by Sergio Angelini (Tipping My Fedora); “The Wench Is Dead (Reading California Fiction); “The Wench Is Dead,” by Tom Simon (Paperback Warrior).