Mystery Club #3
Fredric Brown’s Night of the Jabberwock (1950)
vs. Michael Connelly’s The Poet (1996)
Reading Michael Connelly’s The Poet resurrected my experience of reading Fredric Brown’s Night of the Jabberwock, even though they are very different books. So of course I had to dig out my old copy of it, and re-read it – even before I finished with The Poet.
I’ll start with The Poet because I really want to talk about Jabberwock – I like both books, but Jabberwock remains a favorite. You’ll see.
Michael Connelly’s The Poet:
Last year, after years of hearing about him from others, I decided it was finally time for me to try a Michael Connelly novel. I started reading The Poet, and was feeling pretty lukewarm about it – but as soon as the literary element made itself known in the storyline, I was hooked.
The Poet is one of three novels Connelly has written featuring the main character Jack McEvoy, an investigative reporter. In discussing McEvoy, Connelly has mentioned that his character is somewhat autobiographical, but “what is autobiographical is his view of the business” – when Connelly is writing the character, he writes what he himself would do in each given situation, drawing from his own experience as a crime beat reporter throughout the 1980s. (see interview with Paul Davis here: https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2020/jul/16/michael-connelly-on-fair-warning-and-his-crime-rep/)
The Poet definitely feels personal, so I was pleased to find that verification in his own words. I say personal, but really it feels like it’s unpretentious, more specifically. McEvoy’s inner dialogue is raw and straightforward. It gives you the impression that you are hearing his thoughts as fast as he is – there’s no filter, no buffer to slow them down and sift them out. This also means there are moments in the story where McEvoy is just as in-the-dark as you, the reader (perhaps even more so).
McEvoy’s twin brother, a police officer, died shortly before the story starts -- a purported suicide. But something about the case bothers McEvoy, and when he latches onto some strange clues while digging into other similar cases, ostensibly in the process of researching police suicides as a whole, he knows he’s laid hold of a case much bigger, and more dangerous, than anything he could have imagined. At the end of Chapter Two, he lays treacherous groundwork for the story to come, telling us, “I thought I knew something about death then. I thought I knew about evil. But I didn’t know anything.”
Two sentences form the lynchpin of this story, written inside the fogged windshield of the brother’s car: “Out of time. Out of space.” A cryptic legacy of which no one knows what to make.
And from those two short sentences spin the rest of this tale, feathering pinions of tiny case details, cop by cop, that stand out on reinspection, that have bothered the investigating officers, sometimes for years after their fellow officers’ deaths.
Needless to say, things accelerate quickly. McEvoy finds himself first working against, then with, then against, then with a special FBI unit, and the creep of a killer piles horror upon horror as he hears the baying of the hounds getting closer. The elegant sentences stolen from an age-old poet to grace each incident cannot conceal the sordid dealings which lie at the root of this spreading evil. The only solution is a brutal cauterization of the elusive source. I won’t spoil the story for you, in case you have yet to read it yourself.
Several years ago, while I was attending ReaderCon in Burlington, MA, my friend and fellow bookdealer Bob Eldridge gave me a copy of Fredric Brown’s Night of the Jabberwock. I had never read Brown before, although I was familiar with him by reputation from his wild and absurd scifi work such as Martians, Go Home (1955). Brown was also an early originator of flash fiction (the two opening sentences of “Knock” 1948, which form a complete story themselves, and “Answer” 1954). But I hadn’t realized he also wrote mysteries. That evening, sitting in my hotel room, I began reading Night of the Jabberwock, and didn’t get to sleep until very late that night.
Where The Poet embeds a few choice lines in each of its cases, waiting to be found by McEvoy’s stubborn tenacity, Night of the Jabberwock opens each chapter with an epigraph drawn from Lewis Carroll’s poem "Jabberwocky." And like Connelly, Brown uses his experience as a newspaper proof-reader and reporter to build the backbone of this winding story.
The passage beginning with “’Twas brillig and the slithy toves,…” sets us out on our adventure, not quite knowing what we are up against, and feeling as ill-prepared as the forewarned son of Carroll’s rhymes.
Our guide and narrator is hardly better-off than we are. Doc Stoeger, regularly haphazard newspaperman, publisher of the weekly Carmel City Clarion, and Lewis Carroll afficionado, wakes from a dream of the Jabberwock coming for him on the dark streets of his small town, only to find he’s fallen asleep at work waiting for the next-to-final proof of his latest issue, due to come out on Friday morning. A few small tweaks to the type for the edition accomplished, he heads for Smiley’s across the street, looking forward to a drink to end the long day.
Smiley tells him, “Glad you got here early, Doc. It's damn dull this evening.” Doc commiserates with him. “It’s dull every evening in Carmel City, and most of the time I like it. But Lord, if only something would happen just once on a Thursday evening, I’d love it. Just once in my long career, I’d like to have one hot story to break to a panting public.”
Clearly, we readers know things are about to change. Instead of the usual Thursday night drill, Doc is about to find himself in the middle of what seems like a dozen different nightmare collusions, none of which he could have anticipated in a million years. This Thursday, he’s going to wish the evening’s brouhaha started and ended with having to figure out what to put in the paper now that the Tuesday rummage sale has been canceled at the last minute.
The evening starts off normally enough. Rummage sale kerfuffles (you thought I was kidding?), some booze, a chess game, rampant Carroll-quoting challenges, etc. A weaving walk home through the dark. A dite[1] more booze. Then Doc learns of the existence of the Roman Candle Department at the local fireworks factory (introducing him to a new lifegoal). Still, all fairly normal Thursday night events.
Next one Yehudi Smith arrives on Doc’s doorstep, a peculiar chap hailing from a Lewis Carroll-loving club, with a strange invitation for Doc to attend a secret meeting. More booze! More Carroll quoting! But these veer into some wonderful deepdives, introducing the lighter Carroll reader to such passages as:
I dreamt I dwelt in marble halls,
And each damp thing that creeps and crawls
Went wobble-wobble on the walls.
-- from “The Palace of Humbug”
Smith also brandishes a clipping from a nearby newspaper at Doc, titled “Man Slain by Unknown Beast,” and broaches the topic of risks associated with joining ranks with the Carroll-loving club. Attack by a real Jabberwock?!
And thus the night begins to turn its tail and reveal a sinister side.
Before dawn breaks, Doc will have lived a lifetime’s worth of insane and terrifying events, all by pure happenstance. All echoing back and forth from Carroll’s rhymes. All insensible, as most human things are.
It’s not in the book, but surely at some point Doc quoted Alice in Wonderland to himself: “Dear, dear! How queer everything is to-day! And yesterday things went on just as usual. I wonder if I’ve been changed in the night? Let me think: was I the same when I got up this morning?”
In closing:
Both Brown and Connelly are aces at writing a tale that lures you in quietly, then gets its hooks in you with all sorts of intriguing details, and then thrashes you mercilessly (but with great interest in your entertainment as a reader). Almost a half-century apart, but both highly skilled, and both well worth a read.
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Early dustjacket art for Jabberwock!
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[1] A “dite” is a Maine measurement, somewhere between a smidge and a bit. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/dite
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