The Fabulous Clipjoint (An American Mystery Classic)
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
"Ingenious . . . Plunges the reader into a desperate, working-class America now better known through William Lindsay Gresham’s precisely contemporary novel Nightmare Alley and such film-noir classics as Out of the Past and The Postman Always Rings Twice."—Washington Post
In the rough edges of 1940s Chicago, the discovery of a corpse in an alleyway isn’t always enough to cause a big stir—especially when the victim is killed in the midst of a night-long bender, caught between barrooms in what appears to be a mugging gone awry. Which is why the police don’t take a huge interest in finding the murderer of Wallace Hunter, a linotype operator who turns up dead after a solitary drinking adventure that led through many of the Loop’s less reputable establishments.
But for his teenage son, Ed, and his carny brother, Am, something about Wallace’s death feels fishy, a fact that grows increasingly bothersome when it becomes clear that some of the witnesses aren’t telling the whole story. In order to get to the heart of the matter, they’ll need all the skills Am picked up in the circus life—skills that young Ed will have to pick up on fast. And in the process of discovering the killer, they make another discovery as well: Wallace was a much different man than the father Ed thought he knew.
The Edgar Award-winning novel that announced a legendary voice in crime fiction, The Fabulous Clipjoint is the first in Fredric Brown’s long-running Ed & Am Hunter series. The book’s memorable mixture of a hardboiled mystery with an urban coming of age narrative remains fresh to this day.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Brown's solid debut, which won the 1948 Best First Novel Edgar Award, offers a gritty riff on the plot of Hamlet. In Chicago, 19-year-old Ed Hunter works as an apprentice Linotype printer with his father, Wallace, who remarried after Ed's mother died. When Wallace is beaten to death by a robber who leaves his corpse in an alley, Ed is devastated. Skeptical the cops will invest meaningful resources in the case, Ed reaches out to his Uncle Ambrose, a carny he hasn't seen for a decade. Ambrose agrees to help, and the duo begin looking for motives beyond larceny for the killing. Their premise that Wallace wasn't the victim of a random encounter leads them to consider the possible guilt of Ed's stepmother, who's unusually placid about her loss. Ed encounters more violence as he starts transitioning to adulthood under Ambrose's guidance. Brown (1906–1972) firmly grounds his plot and characters in reality. Readers will be inspired to seek out the author's sequels to this worthy entry in the American Mystery Classics series.