Guess how excited I got when I stumbled across “The Ghost Breakers” by Fredric Brown in 5 Detective Novels (Summer 1952), a reprint Pulp. Originally in Thrilling Detective (July 1944), the story first appear four years after the Bob Hope movie based on the 1909 play that made the term “Ghostbreaker” popular. What a natural for me to read! I am a big Brown fan both as a Science Fiction and a Mystery reader. I knew he wrote The Screaming Mimi (1949) as well as a story called “The Spherical Ghoul” (Thrilling Mystery, January 1943). Did What supernatural mischief was he up to here? And did Bob Hope have a hand in it?
Brown’s tale stars George Rice, a detective hired to spend a night in a haunted house. What could be a more normal scenario for a ghostbreaker type tale? Where Brown differs is in his tone. He doesn’t spend pages building atmosphere like a Weird Tales author might. He gives a sketch of the house, adequate for audiences to recognize the set-up:
I took another gander at the house and didn’t particularly like it. It had a mottled, leprous look, because the dim light from the street lamp on the corner passed through the bars, and dead trees in the front yard made stripes and blotches of shadow.
The narrator’s tone is also not that of an H. P. Lovecraft. Far closer is later Robert Bloch with a tongue-in-cheek mockingness that can be funny but also oh-so-nasty.
…This was an easy way to earn twenty bucks, but if I ever took another assignment like this, I thought, I would bring a thermos bottle of java, extra flashlight batteries, and a good book. Or a blonde.
George is in for a surprise. A body comes rolling down the stairs outside his room. The dead man smells of booze and appears to be an old hobo. George leaves the house to call the cops. They show up before George gets back but there isn’t any body. The cops take George downtown where a Captain Nelson, an old enemy, is on duty. George tells all he knows but his reputation takes a hit.
George goes to see the man who hired him, Pollock, who is a member of the Psychic Research Society. George eventually meets all the members including the lawyer, Zenas Wegs, the millionaire, Waldo, who offers George five hundred dollars to go back to the haunted house, and Scollini, the magician.
George finds out the next day his business is in big trouble. Captain Nelson leaked to the press the goings on in the haunted house on Greene Street and George looks like a laughingstock. He commiserates with the man he shares his office with, Jan Sharpe, a mystic and writer.
George returns to the house on Greene Street and hears another body fall. This time it is a wax dummy and the man who did the stunt is Scollini. The Houdini-like magician is world famous for uncovering fake mediums. Scollini, while removing his dummy, notices talcum powder on the floor. He suspects the man who George saw was dressed up to look old by powdering his hair. Scollini is having a fake seance the following night, to show his colleagues in the Psychic Research Society how a famous medium did his false conjurings. George wouldn’t miss it.
That night the members of the Society and George are placed in an entirely dark room. Scollini is searched then tied firmly into his chair. Music is played. A faint glowing face is seen, then nothing. When the lights are turned on, Scollini is found strangled. One of those present got up while he was performing the trick and garrotted him with the gauze used to make ectoplasm. The villain behind this scheme is a member of the Society.
More time with cops. George is tired and ready to give up. Jan tells him to get some sleep, and he does. Awake, shaved and thinking better, George begins to see the light. He reasons it revolves around Waldo’s money. The wealthy man has lost faith in psychic research and offered George five hundred dollars for proof, yes or no, that the house was haunted. George reasons that Irene Steiner, who is supposed to be this gorgeous medium, is an accomplice. If Waldo buys her act, then the killer can fleece Waldo of his millions. George must have been originally hired to add credence to Irene’s fake predictions.
George thinks it is Pollock. He sets a trap to prove it, asking Jan to help. Jan is to get Scollini’s props and be in the attic room when the Society members come with George at eleven for his final proof. While shocked, George will press Pollock and get a confession. Only George is late getting to the house and doesn’t have time to talk to Jan. The trap is sprung and the body hits the floor below the stairs. But to George’s surprise, it starts to move, to crawl. Here Brown’s skill as a writer of the fantastic takes over:
It rolled over, face down, from the sprawl in which it lay, and then began crawling towards us. With awkward motions, its dead eyes wide open and staring, it crawled, foot after foot, as though in great agony.
Only it doesn’t go for Pollock. It goes for the lawyer, Wegs. Wegs screams: “Get back, curse you! You’re dead–I killed–” And the jig is up. The dead man is Jan, who didn’t have a chance to discuss with George his change in plans. Jan explains, over pancakes the next morning, that Wegs, as Waldo’s lawyer had an even easier way to soak the millionaire of his dough. Playing on the hunch, he was proven right. George offers to split the fifty-five hundred in rewards he got from Waldo but Jan makes another offer. “-could you use a partner?” George happily agrees. This ending only makes me wish there were a hundred Rice & Sharpe stories but there isn’t.
Which brings me back to Bob Hope. Were there any connections? Not really. Brown seems to be working from the night-in-a-haunted-house trope that dates back to the 1880s at least (Pliny the Younger not withstanding). The Hope movie had a rich heiress played by the beautiful Paulette Goddard inherit an island plantation reported haunted by zombies. Dames and voodoo are in short supply here…
In fact, the artwork for this story, both the first time and in reprint prominently feature a beautiful woman. This is a little false advertising. There is a knock-out named Irene Steiner but she is only mentioned, never steps on stage. Brown has Rice sum it up nicely: “George,” I told myself, “when there’s a crime, it’s because of money or women, and there aren’t any women in this case. But there’s money…” I am sure if the story was ever filmed it would be re-written to place Irene Steiner front-and-center.
