No es plan eso de ir por la vida con el Apocalipsis como libro de cabecera. Pero si encima se está convencido de que el don de la muerte es el mayor regalo de Dios, la cosa empeora. Y se convierte en peligro público quien, con eseas ideas en la cabeza, crea encarnar la Bestia del Apocalipsis y, por lo tanto, se vea capaz de conceder esa máxima clemencia a quien le venga en gana. En plata: un loco homicida se dedica a quitar de en medio a quienes a su entender son desgraciados, y echarle el guante es asunto muy problemático.

review of
Fredric Brown's The Lenient Beast
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - July 17, 2018


I'm on a Fredric Brown roll. This was the 2nd novel I read by him. The 1st one was Night of the Jabberwock. That set expectations about what other work might be like. This wasn't really like that. It's more serious crime fiction, more psychological — it might even be as good as Patricia Highsmith in that dept & that's high priase from me.

When I was a teenager & just starting to listen to classical music I discovered Hector Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique early on. I liked it very much. Since the music was reputed to've been inspired by a state of opium intoxication I took it to mean that people who used such drugs cd still produce work of substance instead of just being burn-outs. That might seem like a duh moment but I was young.

""It's Berlioz," I said. "Hector Berlioz, one of the most underrated of the great composers. Because, I suppose, most people think of him as modern, whereas he was far ahead of his time. When he composed what we're listening to now, Symphonie Fantastique, in eighteen thirty, Beethoven had been dead only three years, and Wagner was only seventeen. And Richard Strauss was only five when Berlioz died in eighteen fifty-nine."" - p 17

This was written in 1956, a good 13 yrs or so before I discovered Berlioz. I never thought of him as "modern", I might've thought of him as 'early Romantic'.

The novel's most unique structural feature is that the detective hero meets the murderer right away & we soon learn that, yes, he is the murderer but no-one believes the detective. The novel basically just puts it all in place. The chapters are organized as 1st person accts from 5 of the characters, 1 of them being the murderer, John Medley. Hence we learn in the 1st chapter, the 1st of Medley's chapters, that Medley's the killer:

"Always there is such a reaction as this. But this time had been different from the others, because this time for the first time I had had to discover the body myself and face the police. And knowing from the moment of the kill that it would be that way, I had remained calm. Especially since arising this morning I had acted my role within my mind as well as in my physical actions. I had actually forgotten—almost—that the body was there until it was time for me to discover it. Everything had simply been in abeyance until then and until the police had come and gone.

"Now was the time for my suffering, and I suffered.

"When I was calm enough I prayed. Again, again I asked God why He asks so much of me. Although I know. He is right, and He is merciful. He asks much, but someday He will take away from me the mark of the beast and I shall be free. Someday He shall extend His mercy even unto me." - p 23

This has a copyright date of 1956. I was born in 1953. When I was a kid we only went out to eat at fast food burger places. I didn't even know what pizza was until I was a teenager in the 1960s. As an adult, I've usually attributed that to the lack of money of my family or to the lack of willingness on my family's part to spend money or to the lack of food variety in my family.

""Hell, we're going to eat first. It's after one. How'd you go for pizza?"

""Show me one," I said. That's one thing I owe Frank Ramos; he introduced me to pizza pie. I'd never heard of it until I teamed up with him." - p 25

So maybe pizza was a rarity in my area when I was a kid. I found this online:

"For years, what Baltimore knew about pizza, beyond delivery chains, was cornered by Matthew’s, which opened in 1943 and until recently claimed pretty much all the accolades and “best of” awards available here. The pizzeria’s customers included not only its Highlandtown neighbors, but well-heeled adventurers from the north, who chewed on the thick, airy crust before or after performances at the Creative Alliance across the street.

"In the early years, says Chris Maler, who purchased Matthew’s from a family friend 18 years ago, Matthew’s didn’t even call itself pizza. “It was tomato pie,” he says. “It was crust with tomato sauce. If people wanted cheese, they’d grate some on top.”" - http://baltimorestyle.com/life_of_pie/

& this:

"In 1950, at age 16, John Coruzzi, Pizza John’s founder, immigrated to America from his hometown of Abruzzi, Italy. His first job was as a baker in East Baltimore, but his dream was always to have his own Italian restaurant. In 1966, after 10 years working as a Pizza maker and learning his craft at Squire’s Italian Restaurant in Baltimore, John decided to go into business for himself and opened the original Pizza John’s Carryout in a storefront at 131 ½ Back River Neck Rd., in Essex, Md." - http://pizzajohns.info/a-part-of-maryland-history/

Highlandtown & Essex were both far from where I grew up so it's no wonder we never went there. It's interesting to imagine a time when pizza might've been a rarity in this country. Now it's so common Rump cd build the wall separating the US from Mexico w/ it & still have some left over to wall in the White House.

"The world was upside down for Alice. Maybe she was waiting for the White Rabbit to come along and take a gold watch out his pocket and look at it, and then show her the way down the rabbit hole into schizophrenia." - p 45

The reference to Lewis Carroll hence reminding me of the previous (& 1st) bk I read by Brown, Night of the Jabberwock. But it's not the references to Berlioz & Carroll that most get to me here, it's the reference to one of my favorite comedic songwriters & a 10" record that I have in my own collection:

"Most of what lighter music I have is on ten-inch LP's, so I turned on the phonograph to warm up and started looking through the stack of ten-inch records. Medley from South Pacific."

[A favorite of my mom's when I was a kid.]

"Songs by Tom Lehrer. That would do it, and I hadn't listened to them for a couple of months now. Macabre as a charnel house and funny as hell. I put the record on." - p 47

"Thank God Alice doesn't get in a state like that often. On second thought, why should I thank Him? Maybe if a true Christian gets one of his legs cut off he thanks God for leaving him the other leg, but I'm not that way. As Red would put it, I'm not that kind of hairpin." - p 68

I've never understood why Christians don't go into more situations where they're likely to be killed. That way they cd get to Heaven faster. It wdn't be suicide, wd it? Or is that a technicality? Moslems make it easier for their sheep to delude themselves that they'll ascend to Paradise by allowing suicide bombing. Maybe someone shd organize a Christian-Moslem dance where the Moslems are all suicide bombers. Anyway, I missed my chance by making the above quote so long, I cd've just written "Thank God Alice" & left the rest to our imaginations.

This bk is so fifties, I mean I was there, I remember. The police detectives don't even have a way to call back to their office other than using pay phones:

""Well," Red asked me, "should we save a dime and phone from here?"" - p 80

The autopsy reveals that the victim's health was poor:

"["]His general health and physical condition were really something. Raeburn says he should've been in a hospital; it was a wonder he managed to walk around."

""What all was wrong?"

""About everything. Enlarged heart. Anemia—extremely low red corpuscle count. Both lungs about half calcified—although t.b. didn't seem to have been active. Liver and kidneys both in bad shape.["]" - p 82

Even that reminds me of the '50s & early '60s b/c I got iron shots for anemia when I was about 9. Those were the days. I'm glad I'm old b/c I can remember when health care in the US wasn't mainly an opportunity for intermediaries to steal entire family fortunes:

""Got enough money left in that wallet to pay off for the ambulance ride and the hospital here?" Frank asked. "It's on the house if you're a pauper, but you sound solvent to me."

""Should have a hundred left." He managed to turn his eyes far enough to look at the intern, and the intern nodded and said, "Half of that ought to cover it, easy."" - p 129

$50 for an ambulance ride in 1956. Contrast that to 2018: "he got an ambulance bill for $2,400, for a ride of less than two miles." ( https://www.nbcnews.com/nightly-news/high-ambulance-costs-surprise-families-time... ) According to the "Inflation Calculator" from "Dollar Times": "$50.00 in 1956 had the same buying power as $459.93 in 2018" ( https://www.dollartimes.com/inflation/inflation.php?amount=2400&year=1956 ). $459.93 is approximately 1/5th of $2,400. So what accounts for the additional $2,000 if inflation doesn't? Some might say: 'the-cost-of-improved-health-care'. I say GREED.

Then again, maybe the intern in the story is wrong. I went to an Emergency Room in the last 20 yrs b/c of extreme pain from an absessed tooth. An intern who'd never dealt w/ such a problem before, gave me a local anesthetic injection that he sd wd last for days that might've lasted for 15 minutes. He sd "Don't worry about the cost, I don't care if I get pd for this." or something very close to that. The bill for just his services was around $1,000. It wasn't the intern who was GREEDY, it was the hospital adminstration.

Anyway, that's it, I've managed to review this bk w/o telling you much about it — as was my intention. It was great & it managed to remind me of my childhood — & if you read this bk, or have read it already, you'll realize that that's a deliberately loaded statement. ( )

Enjoyable story of a detective and a pyschopath, but no real mystery other than how it will end. Despite the subject matter (which I won't spoil), this isn't nearly as dark as some of Brown's other mysteries such as Knock Three-One-Two or The Screaming Mimi. But he remains one of these writers whose prose is completely engaging to the point where you almost feel like a friend is telling you the story. He handles multiple viewpoints well here so that the alternating chapters don't come off as gimmicks. And the Arizona setting is pretty well evoked, particularly the heat! ( )

No es plan eso de ir por la vida con el Apocalipsis como libro de cabecera. Pero si encima se está convencido de que el don de la muerte es el mayor regalo de Dios, la cosa empeora. Y se convierte en un peligro público quien, con esas ideas en la cabeza, crea encarnar la Bestia del Apocalipsis y, por lo tanto, se vea capaz de conceder esa máxima clemencia a quien le venga en gana. En plata: un loco homicida se dedica a quitar de en medio a quienes a su entender son desgraciados, y echarle el guante es asunto muy problemático.