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a fellow Brown junkie who lives in Amsterdam, forwarded me an excerpt from "Oh, For the Love of an Author's Wife," the unpublished memoir of Elizabeth Brown, Fredric's wife: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