Fredric Brown (1906-1972) was an American writer of science fiction and crime fiction.
There’s a brief prologue, in a tiny town in New Mexico. A young woman named Jenny Ames is pursued by a man with a knife. He catches her and kills her.
Eight years later George Weaver arrives in the same town. Weaver has no connection whatsoever with the murder, at least not yet. Weaver is still recovering from a breakdown brought up by overwork, alcohol and an unsatisfactory marriage. He wants peace and quiet, and a really cheap place to live for the summer. He finds a place that is incredibly cheap. It’s the house from which Jenny Ames was pursued to her death eight years earlier. No-one wants to live there, partly because of the murder.
Weaver’s pal Luke is a true crime writer. He’d tried to do a story on the Jenny Ames murder but there just wasn’t enough evidence to make for a good story. Luke suggests that if George gets really bored he might try digging up some details on the Jenny Ames case. If he comes up with enough for a story Luke will write it up and split the fee with him.
Weaver isn’t interested at first but then he really does get bored. And the Jenny Ames case is fascinating precisely because there was so little evidence. The sheriff was never able to find out if Jenny Ames really was the victim’s name. She was a mystery woman. No-one in town or in the nearby larger town of Taos knew anything about her. There was a suspect, a man named Nelson, but Nelson wasn’t his real name and he disappeared and was never traced. Nobody has any idea what the motive for the crime might have been.
One of the few things that is known is that it was a Lonely Hearts murder - the victim met her killer through a Lonely Hearts column in a magazine. That’s why Luke is hoping Weaver can can find out enough to justify a story. True crime magazines are eager for stories with a Lonely Hearts angle.
Weaver eventually decides he’d prefer to write the story himself.
Weaver becomes more and more obsessed by the Jenny Ames case. He thinks there’s a major piece of the puzzle missing, and the missing piece is Jenny herself. No-one knows what her real name was. No-one even knows what she looked like (her body wasn’t found until months after the murder). No-one knows where she came from. Or why she was murdered. Weaver feels that he has to find out who Jenny Ames really was and what she was like.
He does uncover a couple of angles that were overlooked at the time. They’re not exactly red-hot pieces of evidence, but they could lead somewhere. They’re tantalising hints.
Everyone assumes that the guy who called himself Nelson was the killer but Nelson is as much of a mystery as Jenny Ames. All that is known about him is that he wasn’t interested in women. His interests lay in another direction.
The entire focus of the novel is on George Weaver. He is not a particularly happy man. His marriage is a failure and he has no idea what he really wants to do with his life. He doesn’t want to go back to real estate. He drinks too much. He can’t concentrate enough to read a book. He tries painting but it fails to ignite his enthusiasm. He is a man looking for something without knowing what it is that he’s looking for. Maybe his interest in an eight-year-old murder is an attempt to find some meaning in his own life.
In that sense it can be seen as psychological crime novel, but with the focus on the psychology of the amateur detective rather than the killer.
There is certainly a puzzle to be solved, but it’s primarily a psychological puzzle.
And then we get the ending. It’s clever but rather contrived. It’s satisfying in some ways and unsatisfying in others. I wasn’t totally sold on the ending but I suspect that others will be more satisfied by it.
Psychological crime novels are not really my thing but there is a lot to be admired in this book. Recommended.
The Far Cry has been reprinted by Bruin in a two-novel paperback edition, paired with his excellent 1949 novel The Screaming Mimi.
No comments:
Post a Comment