It’s been said that if you want to learn about the social issues and existential dilemmas of a culture, you read the crime fiction it’s produced. Somehow learning about the worst possible action a person can commit and the way it can be the result of a network of influences can teach a reader how a person should and should not live their life. Frederic Brown’s Here Comes a Candle (1950) not only reflects the potential horrors of living in post WWII urban society, but it does so in a shockingly contemporary manner. It is unflinchingly grotesque and readable.
Brown’s protagonist, Joe Baily, is just trying to make his way through life in the city. He’s making next-to-no cash, and none of it legitimately. A series of bizarre and upsetting childhood events have left him reeling with traumas with incalculable consequences. The terrors of the nuclear age leave Baily and his acquaintances uncertain of life’s moral center. And yet, as a human with agency, what’s a guy to do?
Possibly the most fascinating element of Here Comes a Candle is its structure. Scattered throughout the work are flashbacks which alter the medium of the text. We have a play, a radio drama, a scientific description of a videotaped dream, a sportscast, and a newspaper article. Each of these serves to illuminate both Joe’s interior life and his past experiences. Though this framework is inventive, it never comes across as gimmicky. Here Comes a Candle was recently reissued by Centipede Press, but exhaustingly this release now appears to be OOP. One can only hope a different publisher puts it back out. Perhaps Valancourt, or Hard Case Crime?
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review of
Fredric Brown's Here Comes A Candle
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - July 18, 2018

This is the 3rd bk I've read by Brown, all mysteries. The 1st was Night of the Jabberwock (my review: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2452296089 ), the 2nd was The Lenient Beast (my review: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2461372607 ). They've all been different but this one shares psychological depth w/ The Lenient Beast while expanding it formally.

It's divided into chapters of "The Story" alternating w/ different formal treatments: "THE RADIO", 'THE SCREEN", "THE SPORTCAST", "THE VIDEO", "THE STAGE", & "THE NEWSPAPER". Each of these alternative treatments allow disclosure of viewpoints that wd be unrealistic in the general story flow. There's a very noir set-up:

"And that, in a general sort of way, is everything that had happened to Joe Bailey, up to August 26, 1948. That's as good a starting place as any. It's the day Joe met the girl he was going to kill." - p 1

Brown always shows insight.. or at least says things that I agree w/:

"And what you don't know doesn't hurt you. Or does it? A dentist puts you under gas and pulls a tooth; you come out of anesthesia and you have no memory of pain. But can you be sure you didn't feel it at the time?" - p 4

Exactly. It's my opinion that such anesthesia makes things 'workable' at the time but doesn't affect the underlying subconscious trauma. Brown seems to be pushing his realism envelope a little w/ this one, I wonder if it approached discomfort for his publisher (Dutton, 1950; Bantam, 1951):

"He reaches up and pushes the damp hair back from his forehead and then, eyes open now, rolls over onto his back and stares up at the celining. Don't let what you notice now startle you. It is natural for men, especially young men, to awaken so." - p 6

"Francy is back; she sits in the chair on whose arm you're sitting. If you could only drop your arm around her. Those breasts. Her dress cut low. You can almost see the aureoles around the nipples. To kiss them. To put your face between. Quit looking. Her hair brushing your hand on the back of the chair." - p 131

"Joe had brought a Journal with him so she could look at the theater ads and pick what show she wanted to see. He'd looked them over himself and rather wanted to see an exciting jungle picture, Man Eaters of Kumoan, at the Warner. They sat down in a booth to look over the ads together and he had no difficulty at all on selling her on the jungle picture. Just casual mention of a slight preference did it; she said she hadn't seen a good jungle picture in a long time and she'd like it." - pp 31-32

Do "jungle pictures' even exist as a genre anymore? There was a movie called "Man-Eater of Kumaon" made in 1948. Maybe he was referring to that. I tend to think of the Tarzan movies wch were probably very popular in their day. The "Man-Eater" one was set in India, the Tarzan ones were set in Africa. These days, the few jungle movies I can think of from the last 40 yrs have been mostly set in the Amazon. It's fun for me to think of a genre as having gone out of fashion. I'd go for a good jungle picture right now.

"He learned that she read quite a bit, mostly novels, but that she hadn't read any science fiction, which was Joe's favorite reading. That she smoked occasionally, drank a little beer or wine occasionally, but not too much. That she liked "good" music although she didn't really know anything about it, and liked good swing like Stan Kenton or Benny Goodman" - pp 32-33

I like the plug for SF. Brown also wrote SF & I'm reading one of those novels now. If he'd specifically mentioned Kenton's "City of Glass", wch he did in collaboration w/ Robert Graettinger, that wd've really made my day.

Joe, the fledgling criminal, has a 'Pinko' friend. These days, maybe his friend wd be a 'Greenie'.

"["]What's the moment of greatest ecstasy in a man's life? The culmination of intercourse, the orgasm. The moment when a part of him is returning to the body of a woman. That's the closest he ever gets to going back where he came from. His one moment of pure ecstasy."

""And besides, it's fun," Joe said. He thought of Francine.

""Don't you ever take anything seriously, Joe? Except making money, being a big-shot gambler? No, I guess I'm wrong; you do think some, or you wouldn't read the kind of stuff you read. It takes imagination, abstract imagination, to like science fiction and fantasy. Know what I think, Joe? That you're afraid to think, afraid to let yourself think." - p 38

Then there comes the 1st of the interpolations, "THE RADIO", where Brown throws away realist conventions in the presumed interest of making the perspectives on the story more entertaining & varied:

"MUSIC: Series theme (motif from Rachmaninoff's Isle of the Dead.)

"ANNOUNCER: Hold tightly to your chairs, folks. Today we bring you another thrilling episode in—

"MUSIC Eerie sting.

"ANNOUNCER: THE ADVENTURES OF JOE BAILEY!" - p 47

I don't know the Rachmaninoff piece (1908) but I know the painting (1880), & quite like it, by Arnold Böcklin. In "THE RADIO" there's an 'interview' w/ Joe about his childhood & its relevance to the title of the bk is revealed:

"JOE:" [..] ""Here comes a candle to light you to bed. And here comes a chopper to chop off your head."

"DOCTOR: And did it frighten you when you first heard it?

"JOE: I don't remember for sure. A little, I guess. I've often wondered why they put something like that in nursery rhymes for kids. It's silly, isn't it?" - p 50

An incident involving the nursery rhyme & the death of his father are revealed as 2 traumatically formative experiences in his childhood:

"JOE: (Sullenly.) I didn't hear it. I was there.

"MUSIC Eerie sting.

"JOE: I was there. I saw him get killed.

"DOCTOR: (Startled.) You mean he took you along, on a holdup?

"JOE: No. All right, if you've got to know! I took the cops there! It was my fault he got killed!" - p 59

The mood of doom so characteristic of post-WWII SF is here too in the mouth of a bar-tender:

"Krasno shrugged. "Joe, every war up to now has been a war, but the next one won't be; it'll be something you can't picture. It'll end up with the few of you who're left living in caves and fighting wild dogs—if all the dogs aren't eaten before it gets that far. And it's going to happen, Joe. It could happen next week. Just read the papers."" - p 74

I commented on the newness of pizza in my review of The Lenient Beast, here it's brunch:

"["]If you'll go shopping with me and help carry it back, I can make us a brunch."

""Brunch?"

""Cross between breakfast and lunch."

"Joe grinned at her. "Been eating 'em all my life and never knew what they were. Sure, Ellie. Why not?"" - p 78

"THE SCREEN" comes along & adds movie-making instructions:

"Again there is a sound effect instead of music; a kettledrum, tuned low, is being thumped to the exact rhythm of the ticking clock in the previous scene. Kettledrum continues at exactly the same tempo and volume throughout this scene. Camera lens should be slightly out of focus to give a blurred, unreal effect. Joe slowly sits up in bed and his eyes open, although he is obviously, from the glazed stare in them, not awake." - p 97

In "THE SPORTCAST" Rachmaninoff's "Isle of the Dead" is back. The 'sport' context is "Cops & Robbers":

"We're broadcasting a game that's always exciting, even when you played it when you were kids and it wasn't for keeps. The good old game of Cops & Robbers!" - p 147

This device allows even more 'impossible' & unrealistic Points-Of-View than before, as does "THE VIDEO":

"ANNOUNCER: For number eight in our science series, we bring you something truly unusual. Something that has never been attempted before on a television program. Ladies and gentlemen, we are going to telecast a dream." - p 176

"VOICE FROM OFF SCREEN: I am an electroencephalographist.

"ANNOUNCER: Ah, yes. Currently a practicing electronencephalographist of Adelaide, South Australia." - p 177

Having spent some quality time in Adelaide, this piques my interest.

"Here in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia, it is six P.M. It is, therefore, four o'clock in the morning in the American city, an excellent time to set our trap for shadows. We have chosen a point of origin almost halfway around the earth for two reasons. First, the time differential; second, to minimize to the vanishing point the possibility that any one of our audience might chance to know the dreamer and guess, from portions of the dream or characters in it, who the dreamer is. Thus we assure him the privacy that dreams deserve." - p 179

I don't know where dream research is at these days but I do know that I knew a guy as early as the beginning of the 1980s who was seriously working in such an area. Otherwise, these days, an 'ordinary citizen' such as myself can play a duet w/ someone 14 hours away in time zones as if there were nothing to it:

"2018.06.15 duet with Warren Burt — Australia — via Skype" - uploaded July 14, 2018 - 10:20
https://youtu.be/6DJRuxzjz8Q
https://archive.org/details/2018.06.15Warren

This bk is special. I'd never heard of it before finding it & deciding to read it. Its obscurity is even more proof that the best things in life often lay neglected. That's why you shd attend & support the UNDERAPPRECIATED MOVIEMAKERS FESTIVAL: http://idioideo.pleintekst.nl/UNDERAPPRECIATED.html . ( )

Ohhh... i have thoughts many thoughts :) . Firstly this is the cover [bc:Here comes a Candle|122551|Here Comes a Candle|Fredric Brown|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1348782735l/122551._SY75_.jpg|868241] that first attracted me to this book and its a complete lie, clearly someone just googled the word candle. This is the cover [bc:Here comes a Candle|8091876|Here Comes a Candle|Fredric Brown|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1272228736l/8091876._SY75_.jpg|868241] off the version i read and is much more appropriate.

So this is a fairly standard crime drama, on one level. It starts though with the narrator telling you that the protagonist is going to kill someone in a few days. It feels like a Twilight Zone episode or something.
The story itself is more adult than i expected at times. The 50’s films it reminds me of are obviously vary sanitized so whenever this was a bit more adult it always surprised me, it definitely wouldn't have gotten past the Hayes Code.

Plotwise its something like Baby Driver etc. young guy getting drawn deeper into crime. Definitely not my genre but there's some interesting characterization. The main characters friends and interests are unusual and there's background stuff about people worried about nuclear war.

However on to the really good stuff. So the author used every gimmick he can think of, some sections are done in Second Person and lots of chapters are done in the style of different forms of media. So the first time this happens its a flashback done in form of a Radio-Drama.
There are a lot more of these in both number and variety than i would have thought possible and some of them are quite funny.

So while i’m a little conflicted about the ending... and this is still not my genre by any means i have to say the author always managed to keep things interesting. A somewhat standard plot told in a very non-standard way.
( )

One of Brown's darkest works, which is saying a bit. There are no big surprises here--Brown tells you what is going to happen on page 1. The only question is how and why, and that is what the rest of this somewhat overlong story concentrates on. There is good characterization here and some memorable scenes as we hope against hope that disaster can be averted, that somehow 19-year-old Joe Bailey can outwit his gangster boss, preserve his own integrity (and life!), and win the girl he really wants. The book is notable for Brown's varied use of forms. Besides normal novel chapters, we have a radio play, stage play, sportscast, and even a broadcast of one of Joe's dreams. With Brown's engaging voice leading us, we just tend to follow along. He remains, along with Jack Finney, one of the most readable writers of all time. Bill Pronzini's introduction, in the Millipede edition I read, gives us a good sense of why Brown was the way he was, and Brown's own short essay about his atheism seals the case. By all means, dig up this book and anything else you can find by Fredric Brown. He has his flaws as a writer, but even his flaws endear him to you. ( )

This suspense/psychological thriller was the first of Brown's work that I've read, and yes, it wowed me. It's ostensibly the story of Joe, a young man, not even an adult by our standards, struggling with whether he should break into the rackets or go straight.

That, of course, is not the real story. Any book that begins by telling you today was the day Joe met the woman he was going to kill kind of has a natural hook. The real story is the mystery in Joe's past. His childhood trauma. How he deals with it, and what happens because of it.

"Here Comes a Candle" is still a bold book with a shocking ending. Brown divides his narrative up between different styles, and it completely works. The writing is without a single extra word. In some ways, it's almost painful to read it's so brutally written. I don't mean graphic, because it's not, just absolutely precise. I will never be that surgical. Likely I will read more, and I highly recommend it to see a master at work. ( )