Fredric Brown (1906–1972)

It’s been said that if you want to learn about the social issues and existential dilemmas of a culture, you read the crime fiction it’s produced. Somehow learning about the worst possible action a person can commit and the way it can be the result of a network of influences can teach a reader how a person should and should not live their life. Frederic Brown’s Here Comes a Candle (1950) not only reflects the potential horrors of living in post WWII urban society, but it does so in a shockingly contemporary manner. It is unflinchingly grotesque and readable.
Brown’s protagonist, Joe Baily, is just trying to make his way through life in the city. He’s making next-to-no cash, and none of it legitimately. A series of bizarre and upsetting childhood events have left him reeling with traumas with incalculable consequences. The terrors of the nuclear age leave Baily and his acquaintances uncertain of life’s moral center. And yet, as a human with agency, what’s a guy to do?
Possibly the most fascinating element of Here Comes a Candle is its structure. Scattered throughout the work are flashbacks which alter the medium of the text. We have a play, a radio drama, a scientific description of a videotaped dream, a sportscast, and a newspaper article. Each of these serves to illuminate both Joe’s interior life and his past experiences. Though this framework is inventive, it never comes across as gimmicky. Here Comes a Candle was recently reissued by Centipede Press, but exhaustingly this release now appears to be OOP. One can only hope a different publisher puts it back out. Perhaps Valancourt, or Hard Case Crime?
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Written in 1949, but I read the 1951 published novel and if this is cheating a bit I am glad I did because this was a great read. Brown was a master of the short story form that was the backbone of the 1940's pulp fiction craze. This was one of his few novel length stories and his hero Keith WInton is a pulp fiction short story writer. He can knock out a story in a coupler of hours of hard pounding on his typewriter. He collects three or four stories and hocks them around the various magazine publishers, he is an established name in the business and so he has little difficulty in getting his stories accepted, counting on a 50-50 success rate. He writes mostly science fiction or mystery stories and so when the first rocket is sent to the moon he finds himself a good vantage point to witness the landing: the rocket will produce a tremendous flash of light which the scientists say will be visible to the naked eye. The flash of light is in fact a lightning strike caused by the rockets descent to earth and Winton is knocked unconscious.

When he wakes up things are different: the large estate belonging to the owner of his favourite publishing house no longer exists, he hails a passing motorist who takes him into town, credit notes are used instead of money. A shopkeeper claims to be a collector of coins willing to exchange a large amount of credit notes for one of Winton's coins, but he is reported to the police who have a shoot on sight policy, he escapes and finds his name and address in the phone book, there is space travel and planet earth is at war with the Arcturians. The first part of the novel finds Winton adapting to his new situation and then trying to figure out what has happened to him. He books in at a hotel buys a typewriter and starts working on new stories to sell to earn a living.

Brown has fun with his novel that manages to include plenty of the tropes and plotting that one might find in the short stories published by the pulp magazines. There is more however, as he includes tension and mystery as well as irony in the adventures of Keith Winton on this different planet. Pulp fiction it maybe, but I enjoyed the invention and the fast pace of this fantasy science fiction novel - 4 stars… (more)