The Murderers, by Fredric Brown

Tags:  crime-fiction,

Fredric Brown’s 1962 crime novel, The Murderers, takes place in Los Angeles around 1960. Willy Griff, a twenty-seven year old struggling actor, lives in the basement of a boarding house known as the Zoo. Griff and his friend Charlie, who lives upstairs, eke out a living with bit parts on TV and in film, plus an occasional television commercial.

The other inmates of the house, as Griff calls them, are mostly beatniks and misfits who have no interest in making a traditional living. They drink, play music, read bad poetry aloud, have sex and generally live the kind of carefree, bohemian life that the squares of the suburbs would never approve of.

Brown doesn’t try to glamorize this life. The characters come off as aimless, ambitionless and adrift. Their party lifestyle actually looks tedious and unfulfilling. Griff himself quietly mocks the pointlessness of his friends’ lifestyle and pretensions, even as he ironically adopts and mocks their language. Chicks are either far out or square. Weed is best blasted in open air. And so on.

Griff does have ambition. He’s sick of living in a basement and struggling to pay his bills. He wants to make a living as an actor. He wants to be able to attend the Hollywood parties with the A-listers, wearing fine clothes to make a good impression, networking with producers to secure continuing work.

That part of his life just isn’t working out. Instead, he relies on Doris Seaton, the young wife of a wealthy businessman, for cash. The young and energetic Griff can give the passionate, dissatisfied wife what her flabby, boring husband cannot. She’s in love with him, though he’s not with her. “Women are to be used,” he says, “not loved.”

Griff and Doris have regular trysts, and she slips him plenty of spending money. Until her husband finds out. One day, Griff finds a detective at his door, who tells him Mr. Seaton would like to have a word.

Seaton, who is middle-aged, weak-willed and remarkably unattractive, tells Griff to stay away from his wife. Forever.

Griff, accurately judging Seaton as a weakling, thanks him for not settling the matter violently and asks to see Doris one more time, to say goodbye and to urge her to re-commit to her husband.

Seaton, a fool desperately in love with a woman who doesn’t care for him, thinks this is a good idea and agrees, but only if he can supervise Griff and Doris’ final meeting. The two men agree to hold the meeting at a local bar. Griff and Doris will talk in one of the rear booths. Seaton will watch from a barstool, where he can see the pair but not hear their conversation.

By this point early in the book, the reader has already begun to sense that Griff is a hollow, amoral character. He has no center, no real core. He simply becomes whatever role he needs to play in a given situation. In his acting parts, he’s often a bad guy who shoots someone and then gets shot himself. None of it is real. It’s just play acting. In his role with Doris, he’s the attentive lover she desires. At bottom though, he’s no one.

At what is supposed to be their final supervised meeting in the bar, Griff floats a proposition to Doris just to see how she’ll react. What if I kill your husband? Then we can be together forever.

To his surprise, she takes it in stride and asks how the plan would unfold. Now Griff finds himself doing improv for the role of a murderer. He lays out the beginning of a plan. Doris should act lovey-dovey with her husband, so he suspects nothing. Griff will case the couple’s house, after Doris slips him the key, and he’ll work out a plan from there.

He also tells her he’ll need six hundred dollars cash to carry out the plan. She agrees to give it to him.

Doris does her part by playing the loving wife. She does it so well, her husband takes her to Mexico for a second honeymoon. While they’re away, Griff studies the house and starts working on a plan. He’s clearly not yet committed to actually carrying out the murder. When he thinks it through, he’s not sure he’s capable of killing a man in cold blood. The thought that really chills him, though, is the fear of the police beating a confession out of him. Reflecting deeply on the matter, he realizes he is and always has been a coward, especially in regard to physical pain.

His fear of interrogation is so strong, he knows he’ll cave as soon as the cops start questioning him, and they will question him, because they’ll know that Mr. Seaton hired a private investigator who found that Griff and Doris were having an affair. That would make Griff suspect number one in the murder.

After these reflections, Griff is about to abandon the plan altogether, content to keep the six hundred dollars that Doris has given him and move on. He goes straight to bed with a new woman, Essie, and then thinks about how angry Doris would be if she found out. “Funny,” he thinks, “that a woman will tolerate murder but not infidelity.”

Just as Griff’s resolve to abandon the plan is firming up, he runs into his fellow actor, Charlie. The two of them get to talking over a bottle of whiskey, and Charlie confides the he has an enemy he’d like to get rid of. Charlie proposes a plan to take care of both murders and Griff decides to go along with it.

Most cops will tell you that most criminals aren’t very bright. They use poor reasoning, or no reasoning at all, to arrive at poor decisions. One of the biggest mistakes a criminal can make is to choose a partner who’s even stupider and more reckless than himself.

It dawns on us slowly that Charlie is this partner, and that Griff doesn’t have the intrinsic motivation to commit a truly awful crime on his own. Having no moral core, all Griff needs is the slightest nudge in the wrong direction, and Charlie is there to provide it at the critical moment.

The two plan everything out to the last detail. They even do a little rehearsal, a sort of practice run, to be sure they’re both ready. When the time comes, everything seems to go according to plan. But the reader, and even Griff himself, begins to wonder if it isn’t all going too smoothly. How long can Griff’s luck hold out? How long can each piece continue to fall perfectly into place?

The tension builds like the calm before the storm. Griff fears some nasty twist is coming, and the reader senses it too, but neither can guess where it will come from.

With two pages left in the book, the reader wonders how in the world the author is going to wrap this up. Everything is in the bag. Every loose end has been tied up. Until the final page. And when things go wrong, they go really wrong. The ending of this one is a doozy.