The Best of Fredric Brown

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I hope they don't misspell his name.

At the height of his acclaim, with more than two dozen books and over three hundred short stories to his credit, certain careless critics and reviewers were still referring to "Frederic" or even "Frederick" Brown.

While their comments were generally (and deservedly) laudatory, he resented the spelling errors. He was a stickler for accuracy, and he took justifiable pride in his correct byline—Fredric Brown.

To his friends, of course, he was always "Fred."

I first met him in Milwaukee, during the early forties. Born in Cincinnati in 1907, a graduate of Hanover College in Indiana, he'd knocked about—and been knocked about—in a variety of occupations, ranging from office boy to carnival worker.

At the time we became acquainted he was a proofreader for the Milwaukee Journal and had settled down in a modest home on Twenty-seventh Street with his first wife, Helen, and two bright young sons. The household also included a Siamese cat named Ming Tah, a wooden flutelike instrument called a recorder, a chess set, and a typewriter.

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