Compliments of a Fiend by Fredric Brown

First off, my discovery of Fredric Brown stems from the unauthorized adaptation of his 1949 novel The Screaming Mimi. That film was Italian horror maestro Dario Argento’s The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1969). It was an international success and a defining example of the Giallo mystery subgenre. 

The giallo-film is a highly stylized type of murder mystery or crime film that usually places a strong emphasis on the violent and sexual aspects of the story. The giallo-film stems from Italian publisher Mondadori’s set of pulp paperbacks with yellow covers hence the name “giallo”. Since the study of the giallo-film leads to the Italian giallo paperbacks, the Italian paperbacks naturally lead to American crime fiction of the early and mid- 20^th Century. Translated into Italian, many American crime authors had books published in the giallo paperback series. Therefore, my love for the Italian genre film, called the giallo, has metamorphosed into my love of American crime novels.

Anyway, a long story short, I know, too late; I first tried to track down Fredric Brown’s novel The Screaming Mimi. I quickly found out it is out of print along with the majority of Brown’s work. My first copy of the text was a bootleg. I read it and enjoyed it quite a bit. Furthermore, I’ve always kept an eye out for any of Brown’s novels, and just recently, I stumbled onto a private collection sold to Rhino booksellers. Now, after enjoying The Screaming Mimi, I’m digging into the rest of Brown’s work for the first time and in publication order.

Compliments of a Fiend (1950) was the fourth novel in Brown’s detective series featuring Am and Ed Hunter. As stated above, reading the novels in order I am able to see the progression of a much larger story arc that details the establishment of the Hunter and Hunter Detective Agency. In the first novel, The Fabulous Clipjoint (1947), Ed Hunter stays under Uncle Ambrose’s guidance after his father is murdered. They work together to solve the crime. Ambrose, who has had experience as a detective, works at a Carny and eventually takes Ed, in the subsequent books The Dead Ringer (1948) and The Bloody Moonlight (1949), into the Carny life until they decide to venture out into the world of private cops. Prior to starting their own agency, the Hunters work for the Starlock Dectective Agency and this is where Compliments of a Fiend begins.

Brown’s premise for this novel, inspired by Charles Fort’s work Wild Talents (1932), surmises that after two notable people named Ambrose, Ambrose Bierce and Ambrose Small, disappear under mysterious circumstances that a strange Ambrose Collector must be at work. Strangely enough, Uncle Ambrose doesn’t return home from a job after a man named “Collector” calls and specifically asks for Uncle Am. So begins, Ed’s adventure retracing his Uncle’s steps with the help of their boss, Starlock, and a former carnival burlesque dancer, Estelle. Along the way, we discover a multitude of suspects including a low rent psychic, an amateur photographer, a low life car skip, a crime boss and his menacing henchman. Only Ed is able to tie all the loose ends together to discover what has really happened to his Uncle (and mentor) Am. Only Ed can figure out if a fiend is actually collecting people with the first name of Ambrose.

Brown’s writing is consistently clean and straightforward with a sense of humor. There are a few suggestions of the supernatural to keep things mysterious and light. As I continue to read his work, I am constantly surprised at how well his stories hold up. I also have quite a few of his novels lined up to read this year, so I will continue to log them into my journal entries. McMillian Press published several collections of Brown’s short fiction a few years back, but sadly, those have gone out of print and are collecting enormous sums on the collector’s market (I guess those puns were intending since the book was about collecting). Also available, an omnibus of the first four Ed and Am Hunter novels, published in 2002, by Stewart Masters Publishing that isn’t too hard to find.