Ed & Am Hunter Mysteries

The Fabulous Clipjoint Summary

Brought to you by Penguin.

Winner of the 1948 Edgar Award for Best First Novel, this gripping murder mystery is a much-loved classic.

In 1940s Chicago, a man is killed in the midst of a night-long bender, caught between barrooms in what appears to be a mugging gone awry.

The police aren’t interested in finding Wallace’s murderer, but his teenage son, Ed, thinks there’s more to this than meets the eye. The witnesses aren’t telling the whole story, and in the process of finding the killer, Ed makes another discovery: Wallace was a very different man to the father he thought he knew.

The Edgar Award-winning novel that announced a legendary voice in crime fiction, The Fabulous Clipjoint is the first in Fredric Brown’s long-running Ed & Am Hunter series. The book’s memorable mixture of a hardboiled mystery with an urban coming of age narrative remains fresh to this day.

'Ingenious . . . Plunges the reader into a desperate, working-class America' Washington Post

‘Brown deserves the same acclaim as Raymond Chandler.’ Booklist

‘The first of seven cases for Ed and Am will leave readers hungry for more.’ Kirkus

© Fredric Brown 1947 (P) Penguin Audio 2026