"It Would Have Been a Wow of a Practical Joke, If There Hadn't Been Three Corpses Cluttering Up the Scenery"

"The Jabberwocky Murders."

By Fredric Brown (1906-72; Wikipedia HERE; the ISFDb HERE; the SFE HERE; the IMDb HERE; and Michael Grost's megasite HERE).

First appearance: Thrilling Mystery, Summer 1944.

Reprints (FictionMags data):

  Thrilling Mystery (Canada), January 1945

  Triangle Quarterly, Fall 1945

  5 Detective Novels Magazine, Winter 1951

  A Treasury of American Mystery Stories, 1989

  Miss Darkness, 2012.

Reprints page (ISFDb HERE).

Novelette (19 pages).

Online at The Luminist Archives (HERE; go to text page 11).

   "I turned around and looked out the window, and a car with two dead men in it went by. But I didn't know that . . ."

Segments:

ORDINARILY, Thursday nights in small-town America are relatively peaceful, but not this one. The inebriated editor of a weekly newspaper finds himself smack in the middle of a criminal conspiracy involving grand theft and murder, but it's not your garden-variety conspiracy. This one is replete with weirdness: a haunted house, a self-driving car, a problematic key, a little man who wasn't there, a teleporting revolver, a bottle that says "DRINK ME"—more than enough, the police believe, to put our editor firmly in the "prime suspect" category. He knows he'll have to solve this thing tout suite or they'll be coming for his head, "snicker-snack!" . . .

Main characters:

~ Doc Bagden ("Like all cynics who don't believe in haunted houses, I have a good deal of respect for them"), Jerry Klosterman ("rarely poked a wrong key"), Miles Harrison ("I could almost see his mind work"), Big Smiley Wessen ("But there ain't no bullets"), Alvin Carey ("I think he's a sneak"), Barnaby Jones ("He's a stuffed shirt and a miser and a prig"), Yehudi Smith ("The dim light from the street lamp back on the corner showed me a strange, pudgy little man"), Pete Lane ("pulled his hand out slowly with a revolver in it"), Harry Bates ("His shoes weren't tied"), and Walter Hanswert ("I went through it fast, from attic to cellar").

Typos: "a [should be as] phoney as that calling card"; "don by his knees".

References:

- "in Jabberwocky" (HERE).

- "the channels of the linotype" (HERE).

- "The Carmel City Courier is a weekly" (HERE).

- "Bing Crosby" (HERE) - "Dorothy Lamour" (HERE) "at the Alhambra".

- "Yehudi Menuhim, the violinist" (HERE and HERE).

- "To Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, known as Lewis Carroll" (HERE) "when in Wonderland" (HERE).

- "possibly even a lion or panther, escaped from a circus". (You mean like HERE?)

- "Freud" (HERE) "and James Joyce" (HERE).

- "in Curiosa Mathematica" (online HERE; some pages missing).

- "Liebnitz and Winton" (No idea.)

- "nested Chinese boxes" (HERE).

- "sounded like Einstein on a binge" (HERE).

- "a blur of sines and cosines" (HERE).

- "We are not clairvoyant" (HERE).

- "You are old, Father William" (HERE).

- "the John Tenniel illustrations of Alice in Wonderland" (HERE).

- "find the March Hare" (HERE) "or the Mock Turtle" (HERE).

- "ten-point Garamond" (HERE).

- "the handle of the rumble seat" (HERE).

- "the Queen wouldn't order their heads chopped off" (HERE).

- "a pinochle game" (HERE).

- "a bughouse" (HERE) "or a hoosegow" (HERE).

- "the Red Queen" (HERE).

- "carbozol" (We're thinking Brown might have made this up.)

Resources:

- Fredric Brown worked today's story into novel length a few years later as Night of the Jabberwock (1950), online (HERE; borrow only) and reviewed (HERE).

- One of ONTOS's earliest encounters with Brown's fiction was "Beware of the Dog" (HERE).

  And our latest is "See No Murder" (HERE; 2nd story).

Unless otherwise noted, all bibliographical data are derived from The FictionMags Index created by William G. Contento & edited by Phil Stephensen-Payne.

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