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.

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. In the meantime, something was happening. The Best of Fredric Brown, a great collection of Brown’s short stories, was published in 1976, and in 1984 the McMillan series of books began to appear. Another excellent short story collection, Carnival of Crime, appeared in 1985, and the McMillan series continued through 19 volumes, the last of which was published in 1991. A large number of Fred’s science fiction stories were published in the collection, And the Gods Laughed, in 1987. Since 1991, Brown’s books have continued to be reissued, from single novels to collections of novels and short stories. The most recent exciting news in Brown reprints came in the summer of 2017, when Haffner Press published two fat volumes of Brown’s earliest mystery short stories as the first entries in the Fredric Brown Mystery Library.

x Introduction

Why has there been a steady stream of interest in the work of a writer who started out in the pulps and ended up in—let’s admit it— less than prestigious hardcover mystery novels and men’s magazines such as Playboy? The best way to explain it is that Fredric Brown’s work is fun to read. His characters, not typically professional detectives, find themselves in unusual situations and do their best to sort them out. And did I mention alcohol? Brown’s characters are famous for their prodigious thirst and, reading Beth Brown’s book, one can see that she and her husband were fond of a drink now and then, with the emphasis on now. In fact, Linn Brown told me that his father was “the heaviest drinking person I’ve known.” A high tolerance for alcohol is nothing to brag about, but it surely was a major factor in the life of this author. Oh, for the Life of an Author’s Wife is a unique look at the life of a genre writer by the person who knew him best over the last decades of his life. Harry Altshuler had the manuscript after Beth died and sent me a copy in 1988. Dennis McMillan typeset about a third of it and waffled about publishing it, finally including a portion of the book in the limited-edition collection, Happy Ending, in 1990, but this volume is the first time that the entire book has been available. Chad Calkins has done a great service to Fred Brown fans everywhere by editing the typescript and publishing it, finally, nearly 60 years after it was written. Now sit back, turn the page, and join Elizabeth Brown as she and her husband Fredric set off on a new life together in 1948.

Jack Seabrook Hopewell, NJ 2017

Part One 1 We were all born in Wisconsin, my three sisters and I. We were all brought up in the country, among cows and horses and pigs and chickens. One of my sisters married a barber. Another married an undertaker. The third educated herself so she could thumb her nose at men if she wished. And did. And here I was, in the fabulous city of New York, waiting to answer the minister’s question, did I, Elizabeth Charlier, take this man, Fredric Brown, to be my lawfully— I did, naturally. We were just beginning to catch our breath after all the dashing around we’d had to do. There had been the Wasserman tests, which we’d passed with high grades. There had been the marriage licenses. But at the City Hall Fred found he had forgotten his divorce decree and we had to dash back to his room to get it. There was the wedding ring to select. There were announcements to send out. There were witnesses to get. We settled on Harry Altshuler, Fred’s agent, and Veronica Parker Johns, a friend. Words were coming out of the minister, but I wasn’t hearing what he was saying. Until: “I now pronounce you man and wife.” That snapped me out of my daydreams. I was now married to, of all things, an author. Fred was just as happy as I was. He was so happy that his spirits prompted him to suggest that the minister be the first to kiss the bride. That was me. My feelings weren’t hurt when the minister said he wasn’t permitted to indulge in such pleasures. The bride got kissed—right there in the little church, and later at the Fontainebleau where, through a surreptitious phone call Veronica made, Larry Blochman, then president of Mystery Writers of America, of which Fred was

1 Elizabeth Charlier Brown

already a member, and his wife, Gite, joined us for our wedding dinner. It was a merry, merry dinner. We all had champagne, and the bride got the cork from the bottle, to put among her souvenirs. Which she did. Where were we going on our honeymoon? The Blochmans wanted to know. Fred didn’t know, yet, he said. When we got to the station he would buy tickets to a town we could reach by about eleven o’clock. We would spend the night there and then go on, he wasn’t sure where. It didn’t matter to me because any place we went in the East would be new and exciting to me. The tickets he bought were for Providence. It was raining. Some people are superstitious about rain on their wedding day. On a day so special to us, we should worry about superstitions? We let it rain. Providence, Rhode Island. It was still raining. There wasn’t a cab in sight. It shouldn’t be far to some hotel. We walked in the rain. We walked until the water began to squish in my shoes. I made myself less uncomfortable by taking my shoes off and carrying them. By the time we’d found a hotel, picking up a bottle of liqueur en route, our spirits were almost as damp as our clothing. But it is surprising what a warm room, dry clothing, and a couple of drinks can do for damp spirits. I had bought an enticing black lace nightgown for this special occasion. Unlike a good many men, Fred isn’t one who often notices what a woman wears. And so, he does not often admire. I could wear a red shoe and a green one, and he wouldn’t notice it. I’d done worse than that, just to see if he would. He hadn’t. And it was extremely annoying.

2 Oh, for the Life of an Author’s Wife

But this was a nightgown, and an especially lovely one. If he was ever going to notice what I wore, and admire me, it would be when he saw me in it. With the happy anticipation of a new bride, I went to the bathroom and got ready for bed, brushing my hair vigorously and fluffing it out around my shoulders. I might as well have worn a calico gown three sizes too large. What did he care what kind of a gown I wore, if any? What did he care how I looked? Well, that could be an advantage, at times. Provincetown on Cape Cod is where we headed for by bus the next day. The sun had been shining all day, but it was late in the night when we arrived. So late that our echoing footsteps and the water slapping the shore were almost the only sounds. Almost the only sounds. The Ye Olde English signs hanging over the narrow, dimly lighted streets groaned eerily in the wind. It was so spooky that each groan sent me shying against Fred and banging the suitcase he was carrying against his legs. By the time we had found a room, and then a bar where we could relax with a drink, we were quite willing to call it a day. There was nothing eerie about the little town the next day. The sun shone brightly. The clean little white houses along the semicircle of blue water looked as lovely, almost, as dancing girls doing a ballet on the shore. We visited all the bars, and there were quite a few of them. We ate each meal at a different restaurant. I saw an ocean for the first time—I didn’t consider New York Harbor an ocean—took off my shoes, waded out into it and brought back a few starfish. We took a taxi to the sand dunes. The sand was so deep that the taxi, with special oversize tires for driving on sand, skidded and slithered every which way, scaring me half to death, until I realized we couldn’t skid into anything. We did all the things that tourists, or vacationists, do. I had known Fred long enough to be reasonably sure he was sane. But one day he gave me reason to wonder.

3 Elizabeth Charlier Brown

I had spent enough time with him to know him, if almost every evening for almost a year is enough time to know anyone. I had met all of his Milwaukee friends. I’d seen him in groups. He was mild, soft-spoken, witty at times. Sure, he did goofy things sometimes. Who doesn’t? But sane? I hadn’t doubted that he was. You never really know a person, though, until you live with him. And I was living with him now. The wharf attracted us particularly, and each day we went out to watch the fishermen unload their fish and take in their nets. There were always gulls hovering gracefully over the boats, sailing and drifting and dipping. Fred was fascinated by them, and he never tired watching them. There was nothing wrong with watching them. I loved to watch them too. But one day, after he’d watched them silently for a little while, he turned to me and spoke in all seriousness, and without having had a drink. “Bethie,” he said, “I want to be a sea gull.” He wanted to be a sea gull! What kind of a man had I married? Did writing make all authors goofy? Or did a person have to be goofy to be a writer? I had a sudden mental picture of him—a slight little man of a hundred and eighteen pounds, mustache, glasses—on a pair of large wings, swooping down to snatch a fish. I still had my doubts when we left for Boston to spend another day or two before going back to New York to find living quarters and settle down. Back in New York we began the hunt. Living quarters were at a premium, and so we weren’t fussy about neighborhoods. We could always keep our eyes open for something better later. The neighborhood was Puerto Rican. The living quarters were three tiny furnished rooms on the third floor of a walk-up apartment building near Central Park. The rental was one hundred and ten dollars a month—more than we could afford. But we were lucky to find anything at all.

4 Oh, for the Life of an Author’s Wife

We took our luggage over, setting it down on each landing while we rested. Fred unlocked the door, and walked in. I waited in the hallway. “Aren’t you coming in?” he said, when he noticed I hadn’t followed him. “It’s customary,” I told him, “for a man to carry his bride over the threshold.” I’m a couple of inches shorter than he, but weigh about five pounds more. He looked at me beseechingly. “Wouldn’t it be just as well if I put my arms around your waist and sort of bounce you in?” I bounced in. 2 I stopped whirling. Things had happened so fast that I thought I might wake up and find I’d been merely dreaming. I pinched myself to see. I hadn’t been. But being in New York to live wasn’t what we’d planned at all. We had planned to marry, after Fred’s divorce became final, in Milwaukee, where he was working as a proofreader for The Milwaukee Journal, and where I had a secretarial position. Fred was going to continue with his job, and do his writing on the side, for a year or two until he could afford to go back to full-time writing. He had been a full-time free-lance writer for some years, writing shorts and novelets for the pulps. He had had his ups and downs— mostly downs. There had been slumps in those markets and he had to go back to jobs at times. Besides, he had found that he was not prolific enough to make more than a bare living at the game when these markets were normal. He had wanted to switch over to novels, in the hope that he would do better in that field, but that had meant that he had to go back to a job for a few years, and write as a side line. By now, his first book, The Fabulous Clipjoint, had been published by E. P. Dutton & Company. The Unicorn Mystery Book

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.