SHORT STORY WEDNESDAY: THE MOON FOR A NICKEL

"The Moon for a Nickel" by Fredric Brown  (first published in Street & Smith's Detective Story Magazine, March 1938; reprinted in The Saint Detective Magazine, May 1954, and in the UK edition of that magazine, March 1956; collected in Brown's Homicide Sanitarium, 1984[ and in Brown's collection Murder Draws a Crowd, 2017)

Fredric Brown began his writing career penning short pieces for various trade journals such as The Michigan Well Driller, Excavating Engineer, Ford Dealer Service Bulletin, Feedstuffs, and Independent Salesman, among others.  In 1938 he began to concentrate on mystery and crime stories with mixed success.  The fist of these to be published was "The Moon for a Nickel," a short-short story about a robbery and its effect on one bystander who was in desperate need of money.  This was the only story in that loose genre to be published in 1938; two earlier written stories were published in 1939, and 1940 saw the beginning of a flood of mystery stories begin to appear.

The protagonist of "A Moon for a Nickel" was an unnamed man with straggly hair who ran a small concession off Lake Michigan, a telescope aimed at the moon with the sign "The Moon for a Nickel."  It was an extremely hot evening and few people were about, and those that were showed interest interest in viewing the moon through a telescope.  Then a stranger came up, shoved a dollar bill in in the man's hands, and said he wanted to look at the Milky Way in private.  The man had never had a request like this but a dollar was a dollar and his wife needed an operation that would cost fifty dollars, so he walked off, keeping an eye on his telescope from the corner of his eye in case the stranger decided to walk off with it.   He saw the stranger adjust the telescope lower and adjust the lens, watching something for a brief moment, then walked away to where a big car was parked.  Before readjusting the telescope back to a view of the moon, the man looked to see where the stranger had aimed the scope -- at a nearby building.  Two men came running out of the building toward the stranger's car...

Within seconds police cars arrived on the scene and officers emerged carryi6ng submachine guns.  A bloody battle ensued and the bad guys were killed.

The man went up to one of the officers, saying that he was a witness  to what had happened and was there a reward he could claim.  The policeman shooed him away.  An alarm had been set, alerting them to the robbery, and the man was lucky they did not arrest for being an accomplice.  Dejected, the m an went back to his telescope, which he then used to view the goings-on.  through the telescope, he could even see the damaged safe that had been broken into.  It was getting late and, aside from the one dollar the crook had given him, he had earned nothing else that evening.  He still needed forty-nine dollars for his wife's operation.

He was about to head home,  but a crowd was beginning to form, curious about the gunshots and the police activity.  He called out to the crowd, Come view the crime scene closeup for only fifty cents!  And the curious mob began to line up.  Before the evening was over he had made another sixty-one dollars.

A very minor, very gimmicky story that incorporated a number of tropes that Brown would use in his later crime fiction:  the unusual setting of a low-level concession which prefigured the carnivals that influenced much of his work, a down-on-his-luck protagonist who was in a difficult position, violent and unexpected crime, and a twist ending that resolves the protagonist's problems, as well as the Chicago-area locale.  Minor though the little tale might be, it is an important indication of where Fredric Brown would take the  mystery story.

The May 1954 issue of The Saint Detective Magazine is available online at Internet Archive.  Also included in the issue are stories by Leslie Charteris (featuring The Saint. of course). Arthur Somers Roche, Octavus Roy Cohen, Steve Fisher (featuring Tony Key), MacKinlay Kantor (featuring Nick & Dsve Glennan), Damon Runyon, Gilbert K. Chesterton (featuring Father Brown), Henry Morton Robinson, Bevis Winter (editor of the short-lived [9 issues] UK men's magazine Stag:  Man's Own Magazine), and one-and-dome author [and possibly a pseudonym] Jimmy Rizutto.