CLAIMING THAT HE WROTE mysteries for the money but science fiction for fun, Fredric William Brown (1906–1972) is equally revered in both genres. He was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, and attended the University of Cincinnati at night and then spent a year at Hanover College, Indiana. He was an office worker for a dozen years before becoming a proofreader for the Milwaukee Journal for a decade. He was not able to devote his full time to writing fiction until 1949. He had for several years, however, already been a prolific writer of short stories and in the form that he mastered and for which he is much loved today, the difficult-to-write short-short story (generally one to three pages).
Brown was never financially secure, which forced him to write at a prodigious pace, yet he seemed to be enjoying himself in spite of the work load. Many of his stories and novels are imbued with humor, including a devotion to puns and word play. A “writer’s writer,” he was highly regarded by his colleagues, including Mickey Spillane, who called him his favorite writer of all time; Robert Heinlein, who made him a dedicatee of Stranger in a Strange Land; and Ayn Rand, who in The Romantic Manifesto regarded him as ingenious. After more than three hundred short stories, he wrote his first novel, The Fabulous Clipjoint (1947), for which he won an Edgar. His best-known work is The Screaming Mimi (1949), which served as the basis for the 1957 Columbia Pictures film of the same title that starred Anita Ekberg, Philip Carey, and Gypsy Rose Lee.
“The Laughing Butcher” was first published in the Fall 1948 issue of Mystery Book; it was first collected in Mostly Murder (New York, Dutton, 1953).