Reviews for The fabulous clipjoint

Publishers Weekly
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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. (Nov.)


Book list
From Booklist, Copyright © American Library Association. Used with permission.

Otto Penzler's American Mystery Classics series has been turning out gem after gem, but here we have the jewel in the crown. Brown (1906–72) is little read today, but he deserves the same acclaim as Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, and the other greats in the vanguard of hard-boiled crime fiction (Jim Thompson, Cornell Woolrich, David Goodis, et al.). Brown's Ed and Ambrose Hunter novels, seven in all, star a nephew (Ed) and an uncle (Am) who begin, in The Fabulous Clipjoint (1947), as amateur sleuths trying to solve the murder of Ed's father (eventually they become actual detectives). The novel, Brown's first, which won an Edgar for Best Novel, captures postwar Chicago in all its hallmark seediness. Like Hammett, Brown relishes specificity of place as he tracks 18-year-old Ed and itinerant carny Am’s peregrinations across the city’s North Side slum (later the trendy River North district). Brown’s streets are mean, but his characters are amiable ('dishonest in an honest way"), and his prose is almost jaunty. His work is not nearly as dark as that of, say, Thompson, and his style is far more polished. In many ways, Brown anticipated the hordes of contemporary detective writers who combine grit with wit. As a tasty bonus, this delicious reissue includes a charmingly anecdotal introduction by the inimitable Lawrence Block.


Kirkus
Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Brown’s Edgar-winning first novel, originally published in 1947, sets Ed and Am Hunter to solve a case that couldn’t possibly cut closer. Chicago apprentice printer Ed Hunter suspects the worst as soon as he realizes that his father, Wallace, a linotype setter at Elwood Press, hasn’t come home all night. Sure enough, Wally’s been robbed and beaten to death in a nearby alley. Overriding his stepmother Madge’s dislike of Ambrose Hunter, the uncle he hasn’t seen for 10 years, Ed takes a train to Janesville, where the traveling carnival Am works at has come, and breaks the news about his dead brother. Am immediately announces that they’re not going to leave the investigation up to Detective Bassett, of Chicago Homicide, because even though Bassett’s already reconstructed Wally’s movements from bar to bar the night he died, the clues won’t take him any further; and although they lack Bassett’s official resources, “we’re the Hunters.” Returning to the Windy City, Ed and Am begin poking around in Wally’s private life in the hope of uncovering a motive beyond simple robbery. Along the way, Ed realizes that he’s getting to know Wally better and feel closer to him than he ever did while his father was alive. Brown expertly evokes a tawdry big-city atmosphere, persuasively roots Ed’s ideas about where to look next in his natural grieving process, doles out come-ons from gangster’s moll Claire Raymond and Gardie Hunter, Ed’s 14-year-old stepsister, and introduces a decisive turn in the case with the discovery that Wally had taken out a $5,000 life insurance policy, giving Madge a powerful motive for murder and indicating that he may have been keeping even more secrets. The first of seven cases for Ed and Am will leave readers hungry for more. Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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