By FREDRIC BROWN (Black Lizard Books; 1951/87)
A worthy, if unexceptional, addition to the late Fredric Brown’s retinue of innovative suspensers. Written for the mid-Twentieth Century American pulp market, this 1951 publication isn’t as strong as other Brown penned pulp inversions like THE SCREAMING MIMI (1949), HERE COMES A CANDLE (1950) and HIS NAME WAS DEATH (1954), nor the work of his major rivals Jim Thompson and David Goodis, but THE FAR CRY definitely has its virtues.
George Weaver is a businessman looking to lay low after a nervous breakdown and a stint in a sanitarium. He appears to have found the perfect refuge during a summer sojourn in New Mexico, where he gets in touch with Luke, a writer friend who makes George an offer he can’t refuse: a rent-free stay in the home of Jenny Ames, a young woman who was the victim of a lonely hearts murder eight months earlier.
Luke sweetens the deal by cutting George in on a book he’s writing about Jenny Ames’ murder. George initially declines the offer to work on the book but grows increasingly fascinated by the killing and mounts an investigation into its particulars. Before long the case becomes an all-consuming obsession as George learns that his initial assumptions about Ms. Ames’ final days were incorrect, with the truth being far more nuanced and complex than was initially apparent.
A wrinkle is introduced in the form of George’s wife Vi, who turns up at the house a couple weeks into his sojourn, and shows us precisely why he so enjoys being alone. There’s also the fact that George’s obsessive interest in the murder of Jenny Ames is wreaking considerable havoc on his psyche, which is growing increasingly fractured and dissociative (and so assuming the very state that previously landed him in a sanitorium).
There’s a last-act twist involving Jenny’s current state, and a “shock” ending whose particulars I foresaw early on. Any veteran pulp reader will be able to do the same, but I say we can still admire the relentlessly doom-laden atmosphere and ever-present sense of psychological disquiet, even if those things have admittedly been done better.