Night of the Jabberwock

By Fredric Brown

Doc Stoeger is the editor and owner of a smalltown weekly newspaper. It's Thursday night and Doc and his typesetter person are just finishing up the preparations for running this week's edition Friday morning. Doc is feeling rather disenchanted with running a smalltown newspaper as there never seems to be any news to put in the weekly. If there ever is any news, it seems to happen earlier in the week so by the time his paper prints it, it's old news. He wishes, just once, he could print breaking news. He's about to get his wish & then some.
At first it starts out badly, with two of his front pages stories being either reduced or cancelled altogether. Then things start to popping, first with a rumor that a close friend of Doc's was run over. He also hears about an accident at the fireworks factory. Next he finds out a lunatic has escaped from the asylum. Then Doc happens to run across two gangsters wanted by the police for a series of bank robberies. And next Doc actually foils a bank robber who was robbing the town's bank. He is going to have the best issue ever of his newspaper. But then...
He is asked not to print the story about his friend because his friend was drunk and fell down and it could damage the man's reputation if this was revealed to the public. He is asked to quash the escaped lunatic story to protect the family of the lunatic. He is told to not write about the gangsters by the police who are close to nabbing the rest of the gang. He decides not to print the bank robbing story because the thief was the bank owner's own 15 year old son. Doc's wonderful, news-breaking issue is kaput.
Until the police discover two dead bodies in the trunk of Doc's car, that is. Looks like someone is framing Doc for murder and he is on the run to prove his innocence and to avoid being gunned down by the local police chief, who is an old enemy of Doc's. And just maybe Doc will manage to produce that news-breaking edition he has been longing for.

This was a pretty good story. At first, it kind of hilarious how Doc keeps getting leads on great stories only to have them vanish. Also, Doc is a real boozer, and alcohol figures prominently on nearly every page in the story. Although, as one of the cops says, "Doc didn't drink that much. He'd get drunk, a little, a night or two a week, but he wasn't an alcoholic." Wrong. Doc is a real boozer, it is nothing to him to sit and drink 4, 5 shots of whiskey, neat, in a row. As he says, he doesn't like whiskey, but he likes its effect. A constant theme throughout the story is Doc's search for another drink of booze.
Anyway, the story starts out kind of funny and amusing but it gets less amusing as it progresses, with one of the gangsters being burned alive and then Doc being framed for murder and the police ordered to shoot him on sight.
But even with that somber turn, it's a really great story and despite the gruesome bits pretty much a lot of fun to read.