Oh, for the Life of an Author's Wife by Elizabeth Charlier Brown, Edited by Chad Calkins, Introduction by Jack Seabrook

Memoir by Elizabeth Charlier Brown (1902-1986), chronicling the first ten years of her marriage to Fredric Brown (1906-1972), author of many classic mystery and science fiction short stories and novels, such as The Fabulous Clipjoint, The Screaming Mimi, Night of the Jabberwock, and What Mad Universe. Oh, for the Life of an Author's Wife by Elizabeth Charlier Brown, Edited by Chad Calkins, Introduction by Jack Seabrook Order the complete book from the publisher Booklocker.com http://www.booklocker.com/p/books/9568.html?s=pdf or from your favorite neighborhood or online bookstore. Copyright © 2018 The Estate of Fredric Brown Introduction copyright © 2018 by Jack Seabrook Paperback ISBN: 978-1-63492-700-0 Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-63492-701-7 All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review or scholarly journal. Published by BookLocker.com, Inc., St. Petersburg, Florida, U.S.A. Printed on acid-free paper. Chad Calkins [email protected] 2018 First Edition Introduction The fact that you’re reading this introduction probably means that you know that the author referred to in the title of this book is Fredric Brown, one of the best mystery writers of the 1940s and 1950s. He also wrote some great science fiction short stories and novels. A bit of background on Mr. Brown is in order before you start to read his second wife’s memoir, just to help you get your bearings. Born on October 29, 1906, Brown had an unremarkable childhood. He began to write when he was a teenager in high school and tried his hand at some poetry as a young man, but he didn’t start writing for publication until 1936, in the middle of the Great Depression, when he was living in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He had a wife, Helen Brown, with whom he had carried on a courtship by correspondence, and they had two sons, James and Linn, born in 1930 and 1932. Work in those days was hard to come by and, though Brown had a job as a proofreader, he started to earn extra money writing short, humorous stories for trade magazines such as Excavating Engineer. He found he had a knack for telling stories and, by 1938, he was starting to crack the market for detective pulp magazines. Pulps were sold on every newsstand at that time, and before long Brown was supplementing his income nicely by writing more and more stories for these publications, which were gobbled up hungrily by working men who loved the tough-talking, gun-toting heroes and scantily clad women portrayed on the often lurid covers. Fred Brown was a small, frail man who had severe allergies and was never terribly healthy. At some point in the early 1940s, he lived for a couple of years in Albuquerque, New Mexico, hoping that the clear air of the Southwest would improve his health, but soon enough he was back in Milwaukee as the country threw itself into the Second World War. After becoming a regular contributor to the pulps, the natural next step was to try writing a novel and, in 1947, The Fabulous Clipjoint vii Jack Seabrook was published by Dutton. The book, the first to feature Brown’s detective team of Ed and Am Hunter, is a mystery classic that went on to win the Edgar Award for best first novel of that year. Although his career as a writer was taking off, his marriage had been deteriorating for some time. Brown and his first wife divorced and he met and married his second wife, Elizabeth Charlier, on October 11, 1948. And that’s where this book starts. Elizabeth, or Beth as she was known, was almost five years older than Fred, having been born in 1902 into a farm family. She was working as a secretary in Milwaukee when she met the author who would become her husband, and they were a perfect match. For the next twenty-five years or so, until his death, they would live a Bohemian life, moving from place to place in the late 1940s and early 1950s until settling in Tucson, Arizona, where they would each spend most of the rest of their lives. Reading her memoir, which covers her life with Fred from about 1948 to about 1956, one can see how the author who had been a hard-working husband and father for two decades must have been thrilled at the opportunity to break loose. Brown’s younger son, Linn, wrote that his father always paid his dues to his ex-wife and children, sending alimony and child support on time and helping to pay for his sons’ higher education. But sending money is one thing, and living life free and easy is quite another, as Beth Brown’s book demonstrates. In the first of a series of moves, the Browns start out in Milwaukee, then move to New York City in 1948, where they live in a cheap flat in Upper Manhattan and Brown meets and befriends other New York-based writers through the Hydra Club, a group of like-minded authors. At the same time, Beth tried her hand at becoming an author and had a brief career writing love stories for the pulps; Brown’s long-time agent, Harry Altshuler, managed to place some of her work in Thrilling Love, among others. Brown kept writing novels and the occasional short story, finishing one of his best books, The Screaming Mimi, in the latter part of 1948. In early 1949 the travel bug hit the couple again and they were off, moving first to Chicago to be closer to both of their viii Introduction families, but they soon pulled up stakes and moved to Taos, New Mexico, where they discovered the joys of frontier living. It was here that Brown made a new friend in mystery writer Walt Sheldon. Brown wrote some great novels while he and Beth lived in Taos: Here Comes a Candle, Night of the Jabberwock, and The Far Cry among them. He met Mack Reynolds and collaborated on several stories with him, and Brown even began to write for the fledgling medium of television. At one point, Beth relates the story of how Brown, Reynolds, and Sheldon wrote a few stories together and planned to publish them under the hybrid pen name of Walt MacFredric. Many years later, Walt Sheldon told me that some of Beth’s memories were inaccurate, although he did admit that the trio wrote at least one story together. I have never been able to decide whether Beth Brown’s recollections (written in 1958) are more reliable that those of Walt Sheldon from 1990-91, but it’s a fun anecdote either way. After about three years in Taos, the Browns moved to Venice, California, where Brown wrote Madball and The Lights in the Sky Are Stars. He and Beth bought a house and became homeowners for the first time, with all of the difficulties that entails, and Brown began to attend monthly meetings of the Mystery Writers of America and joined another writers’ group called the Fictioneers. Beth writes of her husband’s meeting with writers such as Reginald Bretnor, Lenore Glen Offord, and even Mickey Spillane in California, and he eventually became the Regional Vice President of the MWA. Tired of being homeowners, they sold the house in Venice and rented another home in El Segundo, where Brown wrote His Name Was Death and started The Wench Is Dead. He also began to see his stories adapted for television. Brown’s old health problems returned and he and Beth moved to Tucson in 1954. Here he wrote, over a period of two years, Martians, Go Home; The Lenient Beast; Rogue in Space; and began revising The Office, a straight novel he had begun years before. This is where Beth’s book comes to an end, in 1956. She penned her memoir in 1958, so her memory was fresh and the stories she tells are unexpectedly entertaining (even if she does devote a little too much ix Jack Seabrook time explaining an obscure party game and following the exploits of a beloved pooch). Harry Altshuler shopped the book to several publishers, but failed to find a taker. Dennis McMillan, who later published a series of limited edition books reprinting Brown’s mystery stories, told me the publishers found Beth’s book “too Pollyannaish.” According to Brown’s son, Linn, the author and his wife remained in Tucson from 1956 until their respective deaths, except for “his adventure in Hollywood”: Brown commuted to Los Angeles from Tucson in 1960 to write for the Alfred Hitchcock Presents television show and moved to Van Nuys in 1961, but he was back in Tucson by 1963 and never left again. His last great novel, Knock Three-One-Two, was published in 1959. He wrote a few more books, ending with Mrs. Murphy’s Underpants in 1963, and a handful of stories, the last of which came out in 1965. His health deteriorated and Brown did little or no writing in the last seven years of his life, while he and Beth lived off of his royalties; he died on March 12, 1972. Beth became the caretaker of Fred’s reputation and oversaw reprints until her own death on April 30, 1986, at age 84. The Browns’ old agent, Harry Altshuler, moved in with Beth and took care of her in the latter years of her life; when she died he inherited the job of keeping interest in Fred Brown alive.

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