rwheaton@btinternet.com wrote:
> I am trying to track down a title called 'The Santa
Claus Murders' by
> Frederic Brown - and I am slowly discovering
that
> it was published under different names at different
times. I belive a couple
> of the names are 'Murder Can Be Fun' and
'A
> Plot For Murder', and that one of them may be
condensed... Can anyone offer
> me a little information on the history of
this
> story?
Sure. "The Santa Claus Murders" was a novella of 25-30
thousand words published in the October 1942 edition of
*Street & Smith Detective Story Magazine* It was expanded
to novel length and published in hardcover by Dutton, Brown's
usual HC publisher, in 1948 as MURDER CAN BE FUN. In 1949
Bantam Books reprinted it in paperback under the title A PLOT
FOR MURDER. I believe this was the only paberback edition,
making it a pretty rare find. It was also reprinted by the
Unicorn Mystery Book Club in 1948 as MURDER CAN BE FUN along
with FOUNTAIN OF DEATH by Hugh Lawrence Nelson, UNEASY STREET
by Wade Miller, and ECHO MY TEARS by Jan Foster. The Miller
novel, a Max Thursday mystery, is more fun than FUN, which is
one of Brown's minor efforts. Under whichever title, the
novel starts off well with a cute impossible situation --
someone is committing murders based on a series of plots
dreamed up by the protagonist for a radio show that was never
broadcast; plots that nobody, in fact, but the protagonist
has seen. This probably worked better in the original
novella, which I haven't seen. The expansion adds nothing to
the situation and feels exactly like what it is -- padding.
Being by Fredric Brown, it's still worth reading, but it's no
masterpiece.
Hope this helps.
BobT
-- # To unsubscribe from the regular list, say "unsubscribe rara-avis" to # majordomo@icomm.ca. This will not work for the digest version. # The web pages for the list are at http://www.miskatonic.org/rara-avis/ .
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : 23 Nov 2000 EST