Fredric Brown: The Taos Years

This summer's cross-country trip took us to Santa Fe, New Mexico, which is only 90 minutes away from Taos, where one of my favorite writers, Fredric Brown, lived for a couple of years. So of course I dragged my family up there. (Longtime Secret Dead Blog readers will be familiar with my slightly-obsessive attempts to trace Brown's former addresses in El Segundo and Venice, CA. One day, I will collect them all. Oh yes, I will.)

Anyway, we headed to Taos, but I wasn't armed with much in the way of research. My copy of Happy Ending -- the Dennis McMillan collection which includes Elizabeth Brown's memoir of living in Taos -- was at home in Philly. I had no address. But I did remember that Brown used to drink at a joint called El Patio. And sure enough, just off the town square, I encountered a place called The Alley Cantina, which used to be El Patio until the late 1990s. Did I drag my family inside for lunch? Hell yes I did. Here's the view from the inside:

So I can finally say I threw back a beer (Sierra Nevada Pale Ale) in the same room where Brown tossed one (probably not a Sierra Nevada Pale Ale) back. No idea if the place has been significantly remodeled since Brown's day (1949-1950), but there was a nifty vintage menu posted in the hallway. Ah, those prices:

As cool as that was, I was still hoping to pin down the actual Fredric Brown residence. I tried doing a little Google searching on my phone, but no dice. After cursing myself for not packing that copy of Happy Ending, I checked out the rest of Taos. Not far from the former El Patio was a place dedicated to a grisly bit of local history:


Seems this is where the first governor of the New Mexico Territory, Charles Bent, got his ass scalped and killed by a band of angry Mexicans and Pueblo Indians. ("Hey, kids, check this out!")

Only later, when I returned home and consulted my copy of Happy Ending did I realize:

This is where Fredric Brown lived.

Seems a writer pal named Walt Sheldon knew that an apartment in the Governor Bent House was open, and urged Fred and Elizabeth to take a look. In the words of Elizabeth Brown:

There was a legend... that the governor's ghost walked in the patio at night. The whole story made me shudder. But on seeing the place in bright sunshine one did not think of Indians and war whoops and murder and ghosts in the patio.

They moved in soon after. So, mission accomplished, in a strange way.

I also wandered by a place featured in Brown's (highly recommended) novel The Far Cry: the Hotel La Fonda.


The kids did not complain, as there was a Rocky Mountain Chocolate Factory on the ground floor. (Probably not there in Brown's day.)

Fredric Brown Update

A few months ago I blogged about Fredric Brown's two early California residences. One, in El Segundo, is long gone. But the other, an address on a street in Venice that didn't seem to exist, left me stymied.

That is, until commenter "Used to Live in Venice" supplied this clue:

1309 Alexandria Way is now (probably) 1309 Palms Blvd.

Palms used to be called Alexandria, west of Centinela, back in the 1950s. Not sure why they renamed it. You can look it up in an old Thomas Bros Guide from the 50s, if you can find one.

I'm not sure when I'll be in Venice next, but I'll have to cruise by the address and see if anything's around. Thanks, Used to Live in Vence, whoever you may be!

The Fredric Brown/El Segundo Mystery Solved! (Sort Of!)

About a year ago I blogged a little about Fredric Brown, one of my all-time favorite writers, and his short stints in Los Angeles. (For much of his career, he lived and wrote in New Mexico and Arizona.) In particular, I wondered about his time in Venice and El Segundo in the early 1950s. This is what nerds do in their spare time, you see. Wonder about stuff like this.

Well, a Marvel Comics retreat is bringing me to El Segundo next week, and a few days I started wondering again—specifically, what if Brown's house was still around? How could I find his address? According to Jack Seabrook's Martians and Misplaced Clues, El Segundo was where Brown wrote His Name Was Death, my favorite Brown. I tried Googling. I re-read Martians, as well as Newton Baird's A Key to Fredric Brown's Wonderland (Talisman Literary Research, 1981), which includes a helpful timeline, but no addresses for El Segundo. Finally, I tried the Fredric Brown Group at Yahoo! Groups, and within hours... an answer! Kind of.

Alex Verstegen, a fellow Brown junkie who lives in Amsterdam, forwarded me an excerpt from "Oh, For the Love of an Author's Wife," the unpublished memoir of Elizabeth Brown, Fredric's wife:

"We stopped at the Charcoal Broiler for a drink and to study our map before going on. A man sitting beside Fred, overhearing us mapping out our route, asked if he could be of help. He could, Fred told him, if he knew of a furnished house with a fenced-in yard for rent. He did! A three-room cottage with a high board fence around the yard. It was back maybe eight-ten blocks on Main Street at Imperial Highway. (....) We retraced our route, and there on the corner of Main and Imperial was the little cottage with the high board fence with the little white sign on the big yellow gate. Charming it looked from across the street where we parked. (...) We went next door. Mrs. Kelly [landlady] answered the bell."

So there was the answer: the corner of Main and Imperial.

A Google Maps search revealed, however, that Main and Imperial is on the southern edge of LAX. And clicking on satellite mode revealed nothing that looks like a little cottage. (I wonder what part time sf-writer Brown would think of that last sentence.) I know that back in the 1950s, LAX wasn't even the LAX we know today; prior to 1953, the whole dang thing was East of Sepulveda Boulevard.

But what the hell—I'm going to check the corner anyway and report back later this week. I'll also try to take some photos of the area before the Department of Homeland Security slips a hood over my head and pushes me into the back of a white van. This is LAX, after all. It does make me smile, though, to think of Brown sitting there 55 years ago, cranking out a nasty little mystery like His Name Was Death on the edge of what would become one of the busiest airports in the world.

(Of course, other Brown L.A. mysteries remain. Newton Baird's timeline lists Brown's Venice address as "1309 Alexandria Way," which doesn't seem to exist. And then in the early 1960s, Brown lived in Van Nuys while doing some TV work. But I'll save those searches for another trip...)

Huge thanks go to Alex Verstegen for breaking the case wide open.

Opening Shots: A Fredric Brown Sampler

Late this morning I found a dead man in my backyard.

The Lenient Beast
by Fredric Brown
(Dutton, 1956)






Sudden terror in her eyes, Jenny backed away from the knife, her hand gripping behind her for the knob of the kitchen door. She was too frightened to scream and ayway there was no one to hear, no one but the man who came toward her with the knife--and he was mad, he must be mad. Her hand found the knob and turned it; the door swung outward into the night and she whirled through it, running. Death ran after her.

Eight years passed.

Then:

The Far Cry
by Fredric Brown
(Dutton, 1951)


You can never tell what a drunken Irishman will do.

The Screaming Mimi
by Fredric Brown
(Dutton, 1949)






Her name was Joyce Dugan, and at four o'clock on this February afternoon she had no remote thought that within the hour before closing time she was about to commit an act that would instigate a chain of murders.

His Name Was Death
by Fredric Brown
(Dutton, 1954)

Fredric Brown Said It

"There are no rules. You can write a story, if you wish, with no conflict, no suspense, no beginning, no middle, or end. Of course, you have to be regarded as a genius to get away with it, and that's the hardest part—convincing everybody you're a genius."


From Walt Sheldon's "My Friend Fredric Brown," reprinted in The Big Book of Noir, edited by Ed Gorman, Lee Server and Martin H. Greenberg. I love that Brown kept a flyswatter within reach.

Fredric Brown... California writer?

In case you missed it, Ed Gorman shared some cool news in the comment section from Monday's "Opening Shots" post: there's going to be a new, limited edition of Fredric Brown's carnival noir, Madball. I own a Gold Medal edition of Madball, but I'm afraid to read it, because one false move and the thing will crumble.

This news sent me back to Jack Seabrook's Martians and Misplaced Clues, which is an excellent survey of Brown's work. I was suprised to learn that Brown wrote Madball in Venice, California, along with another mystery novel, The Deep End, and the novelette version of "The Wench is Dead." (A year later, he'd write one of my favorite crime novels, His Name Was Death, in El Segundo.)

For some reason, I always considered Brown a Milwaukee/Chicago/Taos/Tucson writer (with some early years in NYC). I totally forgot about the two and a half years he spent in California. The Venice thing was interesting to me, because I've spent quite a bit of time there over the summer, and even went as far as walking around the neighborhood, looking for Ray Bradbury's old address (no luck; the house was long gone).

Does anybody out there know where Brown lived while in Venice? (Or El Segundo, for that matter?) According to Seabrook, Brown and his wife Beth moved to a small house in Venice "with a goldfish pond and a large yard" in January 1952. They eventually left Southern California and moved to Tucson, Arizona in June 1954 because of Brown's severe allergies. I'd love to track down either place the next time I'm out there.

And in honor of Brown, I'm going to post a bunch of my favorite Brown opening lines for this Monday's "Opening Shots." Check back then.

Opening Shots: Knock Three-One Two

He had a name, but it doesn't matter; call him the psycho.

Knock Three-One-Two
by Fredric Brown
(Dutton, 1959)

This is one of my favorite Brown novels—right up there with His Name Was Death. And it's absolutely screaming to be reprinted.

Ethan Iverson is Still Trying to Kill Me

I'm very happy about Ethan Iverson's reaction to both Severance Package and my buddy Sunshine's latest, Savage Night. (And yes, he's right -- there is a Bad Plus reference folded up and tucked away where you probably least expect it. Heh heh heh.)

I'm also glad he got over his funnybook phobia and picked up Criminal, Ed Brubaker's brilliant n' nasty crime comic published by Marvel's Icon imprint. All I have to do now is convince him to check out Scalped. And 100 Bullets. And DMZ...

There's also a great bit at the end of the post about my hero Fredric Brown and his mystery writer pal William Campbell Gault, taken from David Laurence Wilson's 1984 L.A. Times piece on Gault:

Gault’s closest friend was Fredric Brown, a frail intellectual who had also started out in Milwaukee. "Fred was the great, innovative one," Gault said. "He had a mind like Einstein and he peddled it for two cents a word."

What a brain whore.

(Photo by Chadwick Ginther. Yes, those are scotch bottles to the left and right of Sunshine's book.)

Clipjoints, Nightmares and Geezenstacks

Check out Dick Adler's short essay on Fredric Brown, who is one of my all-time favorite writers—and a huge influence on me when I first started writing crime fiction. Adler singles out The Fabulous Clipjoint, but I have two more recommendations for you: His Name Was Death, which was reprinted by Black Lizard back in the late 1980s, and Nightmares and Geezenstacks, a collection of Brown's famous sf/horror short-short stories. Death uses a very interesting structure that I totally ripped off... I mean, that inspired the structure of Severance Package. And as for Geezenstacks? Oh man, you have no idea. You really don't. Just track down a copy. Meanwhile, Ed Gorman recommends Five Day Nightmare, which I own but haven't read yet. Seems like the perfect excuse to dig it out now.

The Return of Fredric Brown

About a month ago Secret Dead Blog interviewed Ed Holub, the director who's working hard to bring David Goodis's Cassidy's Girl to the silver screen. Now, I'm proud to bring you a Q&A; with writer/director Lance Doty, whose current project is One Dead Man, an adaptation of Fredric Brown's The Lenient Beast. I hope this heralds a resurgence of Brown, who's one of my all-time favorite writers. (His work is the reason I feel comfortable blending mystery, humor, sci-fi and violence. Brown did it all the time--and brilliantly.) There's a recent French adaptation of The Lenient Beast (La Bête de Miséricorde), but Doty's film will be the first American adaptation of a Brown work since... well, you'll see.

Secret Dead Blog: When did you read your first Fredric Brown novel/story?

Lance Doty: My First Fredric Brown novel was Martians, Go Home which I read about ten years ago, or so. I thought it was a terrific little novel, then for some reason, I put the book back on my shelf and forgot all about Fredric Brown until I picked up and read a number of his novels within a period of about three weeks: Here Comes a Candle, The Fabulous Clipjoint, and eventually The Lenient Beast.

SDB: Can you tell us about securing the rights? Was it at all difficult tracking them down? Sadly, Brown departed to another dimension over 35 years ago.

Doty: It was very difficult, but God Bless the internet and a couple of hours free time. I stumbled upon a fansite dedicated to Fredric called Paradox Lost, e-mailed a man by the name of James Roberts, who passed on the query to the author Barry Malzberg (a very talented writer), who was serving as the agent to the estate. I ran into a bit of a stumbling block with regard to the rights because the book had been adapted and produced years ago in France. A previous agent did not pass on the legal documents (or lost them), so we were unclear of what or what we could not do. Eventually, I decided to make France a non-exclusive territory and all was settled.

SDB: I read Lenient Beast a good 10 years ago, and remember it being very fast-moving, but moody. What drew you to this novel?

Doty: The atmosphere that Fredric created with this story, the mood definitely, the idea of telling the story from the point of view of each character, to get inside their head, in thinking of the story in terms of a f film, felt very fresh to me. But the strongest component that stood out for me was the theme of conviction, to witnessing how far a person will go to fight for what they believe in, that idea, really grabbed me.

SDB: How far along are you in the production process?

Doty: Right now, I'd say we're in pre-pre production. My first choice for the role of John (the serial killer) read the script and liked it (I can't mention his name), we're now trying to figure out his schedule and will base everything else on that. We've raised the money, enough to shoot it as a low-budget film, but we do not yet have a start date.

SDB: The most recent Fredric Brown adaptation in the U.S. seems to have been Martians, Go Home, starring Randy Quaid. I have nothing against Mr. Quaid, but man, am I glad to see Brown's crime work finally making its way on screen. (Okay, isn't really a question. But feel free to comment.)

Doty: You know, [Brown] really is an amazing talent, very diverse, all of his novels feel very different, I love how he experiments with narrative. It's a shame that he is not a household name, I hope that somebody, somewhere can give this man the due recognition he deserves. Whether or not it'll come out in this film, I'm not sure. But I'll certainly do my part to make his talents known.