100 Books I Keep Keeping... 47 Night of the Jabberwock
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Night of the Jabberwock by Fredric Brown (1950)
I bought it for the title, okay? such a great, classic, pulpish, slightly surreal title. Oh yes, and that cover, from my 1984 reprint.
It was the first Fredric Brown I read. Before the science fiction, before the brilliant short and short-short stories, there was this bizarre, noirish pulp novel about a hard-drinking, chess-playing, Carroll-loving editor of a small town paper who just wants something to happen on a Thursday night so he'll have something to fill the hole in the front page of his Friday edition... not my usual thing, no.
But it's great, as this Thursday night gives Doc Stoeger way more than he wished for. A scandalous divorce case, a bank robbery, murders (and he's the prime suspect), gangsters, an explosion at the local fireworks factory, an escapee from the local asylum... and a weird little man who is apparently from a secret society of Carroll enthusiasts with... well yes, a secret. And for various reasons he can't print any of it...
No, it's not precisely plausible, but while we're rushing along on a wild ride of words, who cares?
Short, fast (it's an epitome of what a 'page-turner' should be), and packing in virtuoso plotting, plenty of bizarre twists, good characters (yep, there's a lot of archetypes, but given real form and flesh - and lots of sparkle! - by the writing), lots of Carrollian quotes that actually do help and further the story, and simply good prose writing, it's from a time and genre that was less interested in true-to-life writing than in delivering a fast, damn good read.