Sweeney, as a crack newspaper reporter (like Brown was, for most of his life), has a bit of an esoteric drinking problem (like Brown did, apparently) which leads to him going on multi-week benders when the things he deals with get too much for him. The ripper in question has slashed and killed 3 girls, all good-looking and blonde, and has only been deterred from doing the same to Yolanda by Satan. The Screaming Mimi is a detective novel, following the investigative reporter Bill Sweeney, working for the Blade, as he follows the trail of The Ripper in a classic Chicago setting, and crosses path (and frequently more) with a number of classic characters whilst doing so - starting with the exceedingly good-looking (he’s seen her naked, accidentally) dancer Yolanda Lang, her agent/manager JJ ‘Doc’ Greene, her huge dog Satan (also part of her dance act. Most of his output is in print, or has a tendency to be re-printed occasionally, the edition of the book at hand comes from Blackmask, who, as far as I can establish, are a Project Gutenberg Self-Publishing Press, and most likely POD (nothing wrong with that for such a large back-catalogue!) He wrote Science Fiction, Mysteries, Farces, Detective stories, and, as a pulp writer frequently paid by volume and frequency, at a fantastic rate, which means that a full bibliography of novels, collections, never mind short publications is longer than mine and your arm together! And, just to go back to this, if you really have not heard of him before, then you really should have a look, now you know of him! He was a master of the short story, frequently holding up a mirror to humanity through his fantastic settings, and just as frequently leading his readers down the garden path, reversing everything with the final paragraph (or even sentence at times) and sending them back to the beginning, to re-read the story with the correct mind set this time. And I don’t know if/as/when I might have come across his oeuvre if I had not been given a copy of the marvellous short story collection Honeymoon in Hell to read. Or maybe because of it - he might simply have been before your time, just as he was before mine.
Yes, it might have happened, even if he is, in my eyes, one of the great classic SF writers. Let’s talk about Fredric Brown for a minute, just in case you have not heard of him before.
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