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The Fabulous Clipjoint Fredric Brown 9781596541191 Books

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The Fabulous Clipjoint Fredric Brown 9781596541191 Books

In The Fabulous Clipjoint, Fredric Brown spins a great story with most of the elements of noir fiction as written in the 1940’s. This is the first in what became a series featuring Ed and Ambrose Hunter, a nephew-uncle team who solve a mystery in more ways than one. It is a bit short on violence for me, but the matter-of-fact way narrator Ed describes a killing he accomplished is classic.

There is drinking, murder, inadequate police investigation, relationship issues, and a suggestion of sex. Barely an adult, Ed is schooled by his carney uncle, in human nature and life in general. There are some great hard-boiled type lines like, “They were nice arms for a sleeveless dress, and she was wearing a sleeveless dress,” or “She came back looking like a million bucks in crisp new currency.” Lines that make me think of Humphrey Bogart.

The book is also a father-son story and a rite of passage story. Ed transitions from boyhood to manhood and discovers things about his father’s life he never knew while his father was alive. Although filled with regrets, they are never dwelled on, as Ed plows forward in life and learning.

The story is well-developed, consistent, and clever. I did not expect the ending. The author hit the mark on several levels. I am looking forward to reading the other books in this series.


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The Fabulous Clipjoint Fredric Brown 9781596541191 Books Reviews

Edward Hunter, 18, works as an apprentice linotype operator at Elwood Press, Chicago. He works with his Dad, Wallace, who is a mean drunk. Maybe because Ed's stepmother and her daughter, Gardie, are shrill and demanding.

Then one night, Wallace doesn't come home. He always comes home. He may be drunk. He may be violent, but he always comes home. The next morning the cops arrive. Ed's dad is dead, and it wasn't from natural causes. Ed and his uncle Ambrose decide to find his killers and make them pay.

"The Fabulous Clipjoint" won an Edgar Award in 1948. It's kind of a hybrid noir. It has the energy and snap of that genre, but the mystery part of the story takes equal billing with Wallace's growing up. The telling is deceptively simple. It's the narration of a young man, not dumb, just young.

The best part of the writing is the fabulous characterizations. After finding out about his dad's death, Ed realizes he didn't know his father that well "I thought, you sit at a linotype 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 bitch and who's been drinking most of the afternoon and wants to quarrel, and a stepdaughter who's an apprentice bitch.
And a son who thinks he's a little bit better than you are because he's a smart-aleck 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."

That is great writing. In real life, there are few teenagers who have the ability to understand a parent like that. Usually it takes til their 30's!

Happy Reader
The Mean Streets THE FABULOUS CLIPJOINT by Frederic Brown
August 3, 2016 no comments 75 crime novels, Mystery Novels, Noir Fiction
The Fabulous Clipjoint by Frederic Brown (1947, Dutton)

fabulous_clipjoint
From ABE
In The Fabulous Clipjoint, we see why Frederic Brown was one of the greatest short story writers and novelists of the 20th century. Brown wrote hundreds of short stories, some of the best were collected in Honeymoon in Hell. He’s the author of Martians Go Home, one of the first science fiction novels to explore the loss of privacy in the modern world. He also appeared twice on Karl Edward Wagner’s famous “Best” lists in the early 80’s. Clipjoint is the first of seven novels to feature the investigative team of Ed and Am Hunter. It also won an Edgar Award by the Mystery writers of America when it published in 1947 (The novel was initially published as “Dead Man’s Indemnity” in 1946 by Mystery Book Magazine).

Ed Hunter is a young man who is busy learning the printing trade in Chicago. He lives with his father, a Linotype operator, his stepmother and stepsister in an apartment in the working class section of Chicago, Illinois. One night his father is killed on his way home in an apparent bungled robbery attempt. Ed’s life is thrown into a spiral as his mother will now have to begin working and his younger stepsister may not need the adult supervision she needs. Ed can only think of one thing to do. Since the police don’t want to spend too much time in the murder investigation, he must go see his uncle Ambrose Hunter who works just outside Chicago.

Ed’s Uncle Am turns out to be a carnie, or carnival operator, who works the circuit all over the United States. He’s had little to do with the family, but Ed feels he’s the only one who can find out who really killed his father and why. Along the way, he learns a lot about life and has a chance to view the world outside the city of Chicago, although most of the action takes place in the city. This is a tightly crafted piece of writing and premium example of Brown at the mastery of his game.

One of the things I enjoyed about this book is that it gives you a sense of what it was like to live in a working class household right after WW2. All the big economic expansions of the post war years had yet to take off and most people still lived in rental property. The big boom in home ownership, which characterized the 50’s, was yet to take place. Ed is just out of school and has no more ambition than to become a printer. So much has been digitalized that the entire printing industry is on its way to becoming a relic. For instance, his father’s profession who the heck even remembers what a Linotype machine does?

Brown shines when he shows the difference in the world of cozy mysteries as opposed to the noir crime fiction, which became vogue in the next few years

“I went in the living room and picked up a magazine. It was starting to rain outside, a slow steady drizzle.

It was a detective magazine. I started a story and it was about a rich man who was found dead in his hotel suite, with a noose of yellow silk rope around his neck, but he’d been poisoned. There were lots of suspects, all with motives. His secretary at whom he’d been making passes, a nephew who inherited, a racketeer who owed him money, the secretary’s fiancé. In the third chapter they’d just about pinned it on the racketeer and then he’s murdered. There’s a yellow silk cord around his neck and he’s been strangled, but not with the silk cord.

I put down the book. Nuts, I thought, murder isn’t like that.”

This is an excellent book and the plot makes me want to read more in this series.

[...]
In The Fabulous Clipjoint, Fredric Brown spins a great story with most of the elements of noir fiction as written in the 1940’s. This is the first in what became a series featuring Ed and Ambrose Hunter, a nephew-uncle team who solve a mystery in more ways than one. It is a bit short on violence for me, but the matter-of-fact way narrator Ed describes a killing he accomplished is classic.

There is drinking, murder, inadequate police investigation, relationship issues, and a suggestion of sex. Barely an adult, Ed is schooled by his carney uncle, in human nature and life in general. There are some great hard-boiled type lines like, “They were nice arms for a sleeveless dress, and she was wearing a sleeveless dress,” or “She came back looking like a million bucks in crisp new currency.” Lines that make me think of Humphrey Bogart.

The book is also a father-son story and a rite of passage story. Ed transitions from boyhood to manhood and discovers things about his father’s life he never knew while his father was alive. Although filled with regrets, they are never dwelled on, as Ed plows forward in life and learning.

The story is well-developed, consistent, and clever. I did not expect the ending. The author hit the mark on several levels. I am looking forward to reading the other books in this series.