Editor“Fredric Brown, who died in 1972 at age 65, was an accomplished American mystery and science fiction author of more than 30 books and 300 short stories and vignettes.
His debut novel, The Fabulous Clipjoint, won the Edgar Award, and a number of his stories were adapted for the screen, including Martians, Go Home, Madman’s Holiday (filmed as Crack-Up), and The Screaming Mimi, which was the basis of a 1958 movie by Columbia Pictures and also an enormously successful Italian film titled The Bird With The Crystal Plumage.
Brown also wrote television plays for Alfred Hitchcock Presents, and his story Arena, which became one of the original episodes of Star Trek, was selected by the Science Fiction Writers of America for inclusion in the anthology The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume One, 1929–1964, edited by Robert Silverberg.
Madball, reissued this month as a mass-market paperback by Black Gat Books, a division of Stark House Press, was originally published in 1953 by Dell Books and in condensed form, earlier that same year, under the title The Pickled Punks in The Saint Detective Magazine.
It was the novel that began the pocket-size paperback revolution by Dell Publications – a project that revolutionized the publishing industry by offering, without a prior hardcover edition, original paperback novels for 25 cents.”
Nicholas Litchfield’s review of the fun and extremely enjoyable screwball story Madball is published today in the Lancashire Post and syndicated to 20 newspapers in the UK. You can read the full book review here.
