The Screaming Mimi by Fredric Brown

The Screaming Mimi by Fredric Brown

published 1949

 

 

I recently did a post on Fredric Brown’s The Far Cry, and had high praise for it, and for its alarming but satisfying ending.

This one is from a few years earlier, and also very gripping and compelling, with a similar feel of deep noir and inevitability.

Here we have a Chicago news reporter, Sweeney, who is very good at his job except for his tendency to go on drunken benders. As the story opens he is just coming out of one, and worried that he no longer has a job. As he walks around the night-time city, he witnesses an extraordinary scene, the aftermath of a crime, with Brown describing it in detail. A nightclub entertainer, Yolanda, has been attacked in the entrance to her apartment building. She is always accompanied by a large, fierce dog, who is part of her act, and the dog has defended her and chased off the attacker – she is lying on the floor in shock and the dog is growling at anyone who tries to come in and help. A crowd has gathered, and Sweeney is watching everything. Eventually she manages to stagger to her feet, and at this point the dog takes the back zipper of her dress in his mouth, and pulls it down (this, it becomes apparent, is part of her act too). She is now naked in the lobby. The police arrive and start moving everyone along.

As an opening sequence it is astonishing, intriguing, mysterious, lascivious and intensely visual.

The woman, Yolanda, has narrowly avoided the fate of some other young women in the city, who have been knifed by a ‘Ripper’ in the previous months: they died. Sweeney has his eyewitness story and still has a job – and he decides to investigate what is going on here. Obviously he has instantly fallen for the unhidden charms of Yolanda.

He looks at what happened to the previous victims, and comes across a major clue: the Screaming Mimi statuette that one of them sold just before she died. It’s a figure of a terrified and defensive young woman, and it must have some significance.

Sweeney also mixes it with the police and other reporters, keeps an eye on Yolanda, and becomes very mistrustful of her manager, Doc Greene.

There are scenes in a nightclub, in bars, in dark back offices, on the streets, among the homeless. It is true noir, yet somehow quite cheerful. I never doubted that Sweeney would solve the crime and catch the Ripper…

The book has an interesting way of looking at women, but that is not the troublesome aspect: there IS a problem with the portrayal of gay characters, which is a shame.

The all-important statuette is intriguing – this is the description:

Definitely there was a virginal quality about the slim nude figure, but that you saw afterward. “Fear, horror, loathing,” Reynarde had said, and all of that was there, not only in the face but in the _ twisted rigidity of the body. The mouth was wide open in a soundless scream. The arms were thrust out, palms forward, to hold off some approaching horror.

I thought perhaps I could find a representation of this on a cover of the book, say, but it was difficult to find any image of it at all, except in shadow. 

In the book there is some discussion as to why Yolanda wasn’t wearing any underwear when she was attacked.

“Say, Nick, how come she wasn’t wearing a net bra and a G-string under that dress? I never thought to ask, but unless the police rules here have changed, she’d have been wearing them for the show.”

This is an awkward question: Brown was being authentic here, as there were strict rules for what we are going to politely call exotic dancers: it’s discussed in my blogpost here on Gypsy Rose Lee. There is a vague suggestion that it was hot and she’d had a shower then only put the dress back on at the club? I’m going to suggest that Brown was conflicted: he had this amazing scene where the woman is wearing a stage costume, a white dress, and is then naked in an apartment building. He does not want us to ask questions, like, where did the net bra go, or – even more so – would a dancer really put her stage costume back on to go home in? Practical women are saying; ‘it is white and precious and attention-seeking and probably not easily cleaned…’ But we’ll let him have his scene.

Two showgirls getting ready for a show, from NYPL.

Later there is this in the nightclub: Yolanda is right back on stage shortly after the attack, so that everyone can make money out of her new notoriety.

She was incredibly beautiful despite—Sweeney thought— the fact that she was overdressed. Overdressed in a narrow, transparent bra of wide-mesh net, diaphanous as dew and confiding as air, that seemed to accentuate rather than conceal the beauty of her voluptuous breasts; and in a G-string which, in the slowly fading light, might not have been there at all, which needed to be taken on faith in the integrity of Chicago’s vice squad; and one more garment: a six-inch strip of black adhesive tape, slightly slanting, across her white belly just below the navel. And somehow the contrast of that black on white made her seem even more naked than she had seemed when—two nights ago—Sweeney had seen her actually so.

ie the strip of tape is drawing attention to where she was stabbed.

Some of the book can be startling to modern eyes... but still well worth reading.

Top picture from NYPL: Blaze Starr in publicity for a production called Burlesque on Parade.

There was a film made in 1958, starring Anita Eckberg and Gypsy Rose Lee – IKR? But it sounds pretty terrible, and approaches the book from the opposite direction in such a way that even reading the summary of the film plot would completely SPOILER the book. The second picture is a still from it.