"In my dream I was reaching right through the glass of the window of a hock shop. It was the hock shop on North Clark Street, the west side of the street, half a block north of Grand Avenue. I was reaching out a hand through the glass to touch a silver trombone..." So begins The Fabulous Clipjoint, winner of the 1948 Edgar Award for best first mystery novel.

In that and more than 20 other novels, Fredric Brown spun a web of intrigue and imagination that has made him one of the most popular and respected authors of mystery and science fiction of the middle decades of the twentieth century.

In Martians and Misplaced Clues, the first full-length book devoted to the work and life of Fredric Brown, Jack Seabrook discusses The Fabulous Clipjoint in depth, as well as Martians, Go Home, The Screaming Mimi and all of the other classic Brown novels.

He also provides careful analysis of the author's many short stories and poems, tracking his work from the early days as a writer for trade magazines, through the years of the pulp magazines and science fiction digests, up to and including the final years of increasingly respectable slick magazines.

Along with the discussion of the work are details of the author's unusual life, from his early years in Cincinnati through the Depression years in Milwaukee, then to a bohemian life living in various towns in the Southwest. Brown's career as a writer was colorful and varied, and Martians and Misplaced Clues places him squarely in the middle of the most irresistible and consistently enjoyable writers of his time.