As crime and thriller writers acquired more and more in the course of the mid-century within the psychology of murderers, fictional slayers grew to become portrayed in more and more nuanced methods, not simply as ingenious chess puzzle plotting homicide fiends and slavering shocker maniacs. Fredric Brown’s The Lenient Beast (1956) seems to be on the seemingly paradoxical idea of the kindly killer and is harking back to novels like Helen Nielsen’s The Type Man and Dorothy Salisbury Davis’ A Mild Assassin, each of which revealed 5 years earlier.
The Lenient Beast obtained good evaluations when it was revealed, particularly from American thriller reviewing dean Anthony Boucher, who deemed the novel “terribly profitable.” Through the first Brown revival after the writer’s loss of life it was reprinted in paperback in 1988 for the primary time in English in three many years, in tandem with the better-known The Screaming Mimi. Some readers have discovered this Beast a bit too tame, however–dare I say that it is a tad too laid-back and gently ruminative for some tastes?
Beast is ready in Tucson, Arizona, the place the writer and his spouse had just lately settled. It issues the legal actions of John Medley, a mad “mercy killer” who when the novel opens has made one other killing, because it had been: this a person so guilt stricken over the deaths of his spouse and youngsters in a latest automobile accident for which he blames himself that he now not has left inside him a lot of a will to dwell, simply barely going by way of the each day motions to get by from to day.
A pair of investigating cops, Fern Cahan and Frank Ramos, first interviews Medley within the matter of this homicide. (Conveniently Medley left the person’s lifeless physique in his yard.) Solely Frank, a sensible, Mexican heritage cop who could be too smart–and too Mexican–for his personal good, senses one thing is quite off concerning the man.
The novel is instructed by way of multi-character chapter narratives: these of Ramos, Medley and Cahan, in addition to the cops’ superior officer, Walter Pettijohn, and Ramos’ spouse, Alice. Alice Ramos is Brown’s seemingly compulsory alcoholic character, an unpleasant drunk who has gone off Frank and is having an affair besides.
Since this isn’t a whodunit, the novel’s curiosity lies within the fates of those characters. Will Ramos’ inchoate suspicions focus firmly on Medley? Will Medley strike once more? Will Alice patch issues up together with her husband or depart him for good? Will confirmed women’ man Cahan calm down with a pleasant woman?
I assumed this was a really engrossing crime novel. It’s in fact Brown’s tackle the police procedural subgenre and it is extremely good certainly, far more convincing to me than Elizabeth Linington‘s seemingly limitless succession of Dell Shannon police procedurals that includes her extremely artificial and unbearable, ostensibly native Mexican cop Luis Mendoza. Brown truly offers with the matter of anti-Mexican racism frivolously however convincingly.
Brown underplays the finale in a approach that in all probability disappoints some readers. Personally I discovered it quite transferring and was happy that the writer prevented a “films” end. Beast is a considerate, certainly quite philosophical novel, as urged by the poem, by Beat poet Lawrence P. Spingarn, which Brown makes use of as an epigraph because the title of the guide.
The lenient beast is not any jabberwock, simply dispatched by the clear snicker-snack of a vorpal blade, however quite one thing altogether extra, properly, manxome: the loss of life we truly come to welcome. While you’re accomplished with Evening of the Jabberwock, do give Beast the outdated gyre and gimble.
Once I stated that mercy stood
Inside the borders of the wooden,
I meant the lenient beast with claws
And bloody, swift-dispatching jaws.
