Some love for Fredric Brown and The Dead Ringer (and travelling carnivals)

In between all the intense crime literature I have been reading of late, a more laidback book that I loved was Fredric Brown’s 1948 novel The Dead Ringer – the second entry in a mystery series about the teenage Ed Hunter and his kindly uncle Ambrose. I had read the first book in the series, The Fabulous Clipjoint, some weeks ago, but The Dead Ringer works as a standalone too. And one of the reasons I enjoyed it so much was its carnival setting: Ed is assisting his uncle, who works at a travelling “carny”, and as the narrative begins they are touring various towns in the American Midwest (Evansville, Louisville), staying a week or so in one place before moving on.

Much in the book reminded me of my childhood fascination with the circuses in Enid Blyton stories. Back then, reading about this itinerant life – the caravans which served as both cosy homes and as vehicles for the circus-folk, the bonhomie and sense of community between people and animals, children who had just arrived warily into this world and were learning to settle down – created a weird, nostalgia-like sensation for a place and time I hadn’t actually experienced myself (I would later learn that “anemoia” is the word for this; the Blyton circus books were among the first of many books and films that would evoke this feeling in me).

Later, of course, there were other carnival stories in my reading and viewing life – including the darker iterations to be found in the work of Ray Bradbury or Richard Matheson, or in horror/noir films like Freaks or Nightmare Alley or Dr Caligari. But the interesting thing about The Dead Ringer is that though it begins with the discovery of a murder in the carnival premises on a gloomy, rainy night (and there are two further deaths to come), the book doesn’t feel nasty or dangerous in the way that the narratives mentioned above are. There is a gentle, conversational quality to Brown’s writing even when he is presenting noirish elements – and there is something very comforting about the relationship between young Ed (the narrator) and his uncle Am, who has taken him under his wing.

Both this book and its predecessor (in which Ed and Am had investigated the murder of Ed’s father) are primarily coming-of-age stories. In both, Ed learns not just about sleuthing/crime-solving, but about life in a more general sense – about thorny relationships (including the ones he himself gets into with complex women, who may or may not be femme fatales), or about why people might take a certain path as they negotiate hardships.

I think of these as slice-of-life mysteries – meaning that even as the investigation is on (and we know that Ed and Am have to conjecture and find things out), there is an unhurried naturalism to the telling. For instance, rarely if ever do these books have the chapter-ending cliff-hangers you’d expect in most thrillers or suspense novels. (One of the few big dramatic moments that Ed experiences firsthand in The Dead Ringer –where he sees, or thinks he sees, something unnerving outside a trailer window – occurs right in the middle of a chapter, and he is quite drunk at the time, so there is a haziness about the whole thing.) More often, what happens is that Ed and Am saunter about, having a drink or two at multiple joints along the way, talking, turning things over in their heads, making further appointments. There are occasionally passages where you might expect something to happen that will significantly further the mystery – or provide an important clue – but it turns out that the chapter is simply about a night out on the town. (Though something said during the chat *might* turn out to be significant later.) And none of this was disappointing for me: I enjoyed the pace, and the constant sense that there is room for other things in these characters’ lives.

That said, the actual mysteries are very satisfying too. The plot of The Dead Ringer, since I haven’t said much about it, concerns the stabbing of an unidentified midget – followed, some days later, by the possibly suspicious death of a chimpanzee belonging to the carnival… meanwhile Ed finding himself getting involved with the beautiful young woman, a carnival “poser”, who had discovered the first body.

This could be called “soft-boiled" noir, with a reassurance that things will turn out okay in the end – though Ed might have his heart broken a bit, in a way that will make him more resilient for the future, and for the next journey that he and his uncle take. (I believe the later books in the series have the two of them officially starting a detective agency together. No more carnival, which is a pity.)

P.S. a bit more about Fredric Brown: long before I had read either of these novels, I had read a few of his short stories, two of which are collected in two of my favourite anthologies. Brian Aldiss’s A Science Fiction Omnibus has a wonderful “short-short story” by Brown, less than a page long – it is called “Answer”, and you can read it here – it will take only a minute or so. Consider that it was written in 1954, and then think about its implications in a world that will soon come to be even more dominated by AI and Big-Brother technology than we currently are.

The other Brown story is much longer, and is one of my favourite impossible-crime mysteries: “The Laughing Butcher”, about a “no-footprints-in-the-snow” murder and the subsequent lynching of a much-despised man by townsfolk.
I also have Brown’s collection Nightmares and Geezenstacks, which contains many of those short-short stories – will be getting through that one in the coming days.

P.P.S. see this pic for an Indian connection in The Dead Ringer: reading a very local/provincial midwestern newspaper, Ed sees a mention of riots in Calcutta. Well, all this IS happening in late 1947/early 1948.