The Fredric Brown/El Segundo Mystery Solved! (Sort Of!)

About a year ago I blogged a little about Fredric Brown, one of my all-time favorite writers, and his short stints in Los Angeles. (For much of his career, he lived and wrote in New Mexico and Arizona.) In particular, I wondered about his time in Venice and El Segundo in the early 1950s. This is what nerds do in their spare time, you see. Wonder about stuff like this.

Well, a Marvel Comics retreat is bringing me to El Segundo next week, and a few days I started wondering again—specifically, what if Brown's house was still around? How could I find his address? According to Jack Seabrook's Martians and Misplaced Clues, El Segundo was where Brown wrote His Name Was Death, my favorite Brown. I tried Googling. I re-read Martians, as well as Newton Baird's A Key to Fredric Brown's Wonderland (Talisman Literary Research, 1981), which includes a helpful timeline, but no addresses for El Segundo. Finally, I tried the Fredric Brown Group at Yahoo! Groups, and within hours... an answer! Kind of.

Alex Verstegen, a fellow Brown junkie who lives in Amsterdam, forwarded me an excerpt from "Oh, For the Love of an Author's Wife," the unpublished memoir of Elizabeth Brown, Fredric's wife:

"We stopped at the Charcoal Broiler for a drink and to study our map before going on. A man sitting beside Fred, overhearing us mapping out our route, asked if he could be of help. He could, Fred told him, if he knew of a furnished house with a fenced-in yard for rent. He did! A three-room cottage with a high board fence around the yard. It was back maybe eight-ten blocks on Main Street at Imperial Highway. (....) We retraced our route, and there on the corner of Main and Imperial was the little cottage with the high board fence with the little white sign on the big yellow gate. Charming it looked from across the street where we parked. (...) We went next door. Mrs. Kelly [landlady] answered the bell."

So there was the answer: the corner of Main and Imperial.

A Google Maps search revealed, however, that Main and Imperial is on the southern edge of LAX. And clicking on satellite mode revealed nothing that looks like a little cottage. (I wonder what part time sf-writer Brown would think of that last sentence.) I know that back in the 1950s, LAX wasn't even the LAX we know today; prior to 1953, the whole dang thing was East of Sepulveda Boulevard.

But what the hell—I'm going to check the corner anyway and report back later this week. I'll also try to take some photos of the area before the Department of Homeland Security slips a hood over my head and pushes me into the back of a white van. This is LAX, after all. It does make me smile, though, to think of Brown sitting there 55 years ago, cranking out a nasty little mystery like His Name Was Death on the edge of what would become one of the busiest airports in the world.

(Of course, other Brown L.A. mysteries remain. Newton Baird's timeline lists Brown's Venice address as "1309 Alexandria Way," which doesn't seem to exist. And then in the early 1960s, Brown lived in Van Nuys while doing some TV work. But I'll save those searches for another trip...)

Huge thanks go to Alex Verstegen for breaking the case wide open.

El Lay: Remember the Paramount

"The Paramount recently underwent a multimillion-dollar renovation, with Disney picking up the check. Today, rechristened the El Capitan (its original name), it is very clean and stylish, with a presentation that brings applause even before the movie starts... The hitch is that only Disney films play there now—a far cry from the days when it took three of us to eject a barbiturate abuser who decided to dance in front of the screen while wearing a motorcycle helmet."

—from David J. Schow's essay, "Boulevard of Broken Screams." (This essay first appeared in the September 1993 issue of Fangoria, but was also reprinted in Schow's highly, highly recommended essay collection, Wild Hairs. Don't give me that look. Go track down a copy now.)

(Photo by The Bride.)

El Lay: The Big Gauche Baby

"For me, L.A. is like a big, gauche baby with a shotgun in its mouth. It'll do anything. And with more style, with more fire, with more Errol Flynn go-to-hell vivacity than any other city I've experienced."

—from Harlan Ellison's essay "Face-Down in Gloria Swanson's Swimming Pool," reprinted in The Essential Ellsion.

(Photo by The Bride, snapped on Hollywood Boulevard.)

Other Swierczynskis in the News: Robocalypse Edition

Like many writers I know, I have an automatic Google keyword search thingy to let me know when anyone's talking smack about me on the interwebs. A few days ago the name "Swerczynski" popped up as a character in a video game called Robocalypse: Beaver Defense. I thought, okay, this is a joke. But it isn't; shit's real. And one of the characters is named "David Swierczynski." Here's a summary from IGN.com:

DAVID SWIERCZYNSKI
The smoothest Environmental agent this side of the Love Canal, David Swazzu- ,Swizerr-- , er.. Swierczynski… is a man on a mission – to stop industrial polluters in their tracks! His finger-pointing is aimed directly at Thermidoom, and he could do his job if that pesky Beaver wasn′t always getting in the way...

That pesky Beaver, indeed.

(Fourth in an occasional series. Have you spotted another Swierczynski in the news? Let Secret Dead Blog know!)

El Lay: Sort of a Mirage

"I think of the city as a sort of mirage. If you look at pictures of the city a hundred years ago it’s just a bunch of weeds and desert dust. It's not really supposed to be here. I was always fascinated by the city it was meant to be. I guess it was a place created by developers. It’s not really like a city where some people roam around and then they find a good piece of land, and then they test it out for a while and make sure there is water so they don’t die, and then they decide to make a city."

—Beck on L.A., in conversation with Tom Waits.

(Photo by The Bride. Click on the image for a larger, tilt-shifty view.)

Legends of the Underwood #12: Erle Stanley Gardner

"Gardner slept as little as three hours a night, instead staying at his typewriter until he had produced the 4,000-word daily target he set for himself. Gardner was a writing machine, a story industrialist... in recent years he'd hammered out millions of words and sold hundreds of stories."

—Richard Rayner in his latest book, A Bright and Guilty Place: Murder Corruption, and L.A.'s Scandalous Coming of Age (Doubleday).

(Twelfth in a series. Here's the whole danged thing so far. )

"Did He Violate You?"

Here's the official trailer for Level 26: Dark Origins, the suspense novel I co-wrote with CSI creator Anthony Zuiker. There will be more Level 26 madness at San Diego Comic-Con. And yes, before you ask... that is indeed Marshall Flinkman (Kevin Weisman) of Alias fame, as well as legendary big screen badass Michael Ironside, of Scanners, Total Recall and Terminator Salvation fame. Michael Fucking Ironside! The cool, calm co-author in me takes it in stride; the fanboy in me wants to squeal with giddy delight.

Anyway, the novel is out in less than two months. Hope you'll check it out...

A Fistful of Cable (Interviews)

In case you missed it, I answered reader questions about Cable in this week's "X-Position" at CBR.com. Plus, you'll find some exclusive art from Gabriel Guzman, who joins the series with issue #18. Also, I talk about Cable #17 with Marc Strom over at Marvel.com, and there you'll find three cool preview pages from current artist Paul Gulacy.

And finally, some readers have mistaken the "Hope Summers" in the X-Men relationship chart (a few posts down) for the other "Hope Summers." I dedicate this 1960s cheeseball classic to those readers.

Girl Missing

The "Messiah War" may be over, but that doesn't mean it's all marshmallows and rainbows for Cable and Hope—as you'll see in these preview pages for Cable #16, out today. Joining Cable is legendary artist Paul Gulacy, and his stuff blew me away from the very first page. Here's hoping you'll check out a copy.