Lee Server has written that the "pulp writers were a disparate group". Certainly, Bruno Fischer, due a revival, is counted among that illustrious group. Interestingly, his socialist political leanings exerted influences over his body of fiction. He liked to use ordinary people (the common man) as the protagonists in his various writing projects.

Fischer was born in Berlin, Germany, on June 29, 1908, the son of a grocer. His family emigrated to the United States in 1913. Subsequent to high school, he graduated from the Rand School of Social Sciences. The Rand School was established by the American Socialist Party in 1906 and closed in 1956 during the McCarthy era. Fischer married Ruth Miller, a schoolteacher, on March 20, 1934.

Fischer broke in as a sports reporter for the Long Island Daily Press (1929-1931). Before his long career as a prolific fiction writer starting in 1936, Fischer worked at the Labor Voice (1931-32), a socialist newsletter. He went on to edit the Socialist Call (1934-36), the official weekly for the Socialist Party.

He also wrote for other socialist journals including an essay titled "The Old Guard" for Modern Monthly (June 1936). Leon Trotsky was a TOC mate. Ruth Fischer also contributed reviews to socialist journals as late as 1949. Always politically active, Fischer reported memberships in the Social Democrats and the Workmen’s Circle, the Jewish socialist fraternity.

Bruno Fischer ran as a Socialist candidate for the New York state senate (12^th district, Manhattan, NYC) in 1938. He also corresponded with Dr. Hannah Arendt, the famed political philosopher, on various Jewish relief organizations. Allegedly, Bruno Fischer claimed that one of his series characters (PI Ben Helm?) was based on Norman Thomas, the American socialist leader and three-time Presidential candidate (1940, 1944 and 1948).

Commentators of Bruno Fischer’s fiction have noted his placing regular guys in dilemmas and letting them find a solution, not always so tidy and clean. A strong Fischer enthusiast, Bill Pronzini has written that "one of his [Fischer’s] recurring themes is the morality play: ordinary people thrust into extraordinary situations in which their moral standards are tested and sometimes corrupted." The New York Times Book Review critic Anthony Boucher once wrote Fischer had "a fine sense of the impinging of crime and violence on ordinary life, a biting handling of the economic factors in human motivation".

One of Fischer’s better early crime novels was The Restless Hands, first appearing as a novella in Mystery Book Magazine (Summer 1949). It was brought out in hardback as a Red Badge mystery by Dodd, Mead (1949) and later in softcover by Dell Books (#910). This novel (the third title in a series of five) featured his ex-cop, PI Ben Helm, a New York City detective married to a Hollywood starlet. The Jerry Powell cover art and lurid teaser ("Sudden death reached out of the darkness, and plunged a town into darkness!") gave the paperback the look of the vintage horror pulps.

This compact, rapid tale is spun out in nineteen chapters, each told from a different character’s point of view. The setting is Hessian Valley, a stop "one hour and fifty-two minutes after the train left New York [City]." Rebecca Sprague, "the town beauty," is physically threatened. Three men -- Tony Bascomb, George Dentz, or Mark Kinard -- are suspects and the unassuming, low-keyed PI Ben Helm is hired to unmask her tormentor.

Bruno Fischer was a deft innovator as illustrated by The Restless Hands’ plot structure. Similarly, in his 1947 Ziff-Davis book, More Deaths Than One, Fischer presented a murder through eight sets of characters’ eyes. Jack Glick in the NYT thought the unusual plot structure was "both refreshing and successful". The Restless Hands as a detective story fared well with the critics. Elizabeth Bullock writing for the NYTBR found it had "depth and body and surprises other than those inherent in the plot." The New Yorker concluded Restless Hands was "solid, tough stuff, with a better-than-average background."

Bruno Fischer’s twenty-fifth, final, and perhaps most ambitious novel was titled The Evil Days (hardback, Random House, 1973; softcover, Ballantine Books, 1976/1993). It was his first novel in fourteen years since the publication of The Girl Between (Fawcett, 1960). The dustjacket copy attributed this lengthy hiatus due to Fischer’s editorial stints at Macmillan’s Collier Books (a paperback house) and Arco Publishing Company (a textbook house). Lee Server has suggested Fischer "experienced some sort of writer’s block" and his writing days were finished. The Evil Days dustjacket copy also reported on impressive metrics: Fischer had sold ten million book copies over his lifetime and seen his work translated into a dozen languages.

The Evil Days is a gem of a crime novel -- what a pity it was Fischer’s last. Fischer cited it as one of his favorites. His sense of pace, mastery of a multi-layered plot, and eye for detail adapted well to the thriller novel concept popularized in the 1970s. The Evil Days remains an old-fashioned, fair-play whodunit that even uses poems and acrostics for its clues.

Set in the fictitious New York City suburb of Mount Birch (population 8,000), the protagonist is Caleb Dawson, 36, an editor at Lakeview Press, "a venerable and respected book publishing house". No doubt, Bruno Fischer delved into his own career to portray the publishing world. The Evil Days running one week from Tuesday to Tuesday is subdivided into chapters covering that time span.

Sally Dawson, Caleb’s wife, finds a pouch of jewels worth a quarter million dollars (1973 value) in a shopping center parking lot. Caleb has a modest job, and they lust for a bigger, better life. They conspire to swap the jewels for a settlement from the owner’s insurance company. Things are complicated by Caleb’s elected position on the Village Board of Trustees charged with overseeing the local police department.

A juicy subplot is the cold-blooded murder of Gordon Tripp, a celebrated poet who just had his manuscript rejected by Caleb. At the last moment, Edward Martaine, the affluent business executive owning Lakeview Press, decides to green light the poetry manuscript’s publication. The decision raises some eyebrows at the publishing house. Caleb protests in vain that the poet had no talent and his volume will lose money.

The jewels actually belong to Edward Martaine’s wife, Norma, who has had her eye on Caleb Dawson. To solve Gordon Tripp’s homicide, Caleb focuses on a cryptic St. Valentine’s Day poem left in Tripps’ verse collection. Besides a sinuous plot, Bruno Fischer offers us a snapshot of the 1970s New York commuter-suburbs with such details as shadflies, Little League games, and marijuana.

Bruno Fischer didn’t disappoint his old pulpster fans -- he still had a lurid scene or two up his sleeve. Sally Dawson, early in the novel, vamps naked except for wearing the gaudy jewels. Caleb ogles her as a voyeur from outside their bedroom window.

"She looked at her image and I looked at her. The diamond earrings dangled a good three inches from her earlobes. The magnificent bracelet sparkled like fireworks on her tanned forearm. The huge emerald-cut diamond was like a brass knuckle on the middle finger of her right hand. The three-strand pearl necklace lay on her luscious breasts with her pale nipples caught between the strands. Only the thistle-shaped brooch was not on her because clearly there was nothing to pin it to.

"Or so I thought. The brooch was held between two fingers.Smiling down at it, she brought it to her navel, and I had a mad notion she was going to pin to her skin. Of course she didn’t; with a naughty giggle she tried to pin it to her pubic hair." (65-66).

At a further juncture, Fischer gives us a cynical view of the publishing world. Caleb Dawson goes to a luncheon to negotiate a book contract.

"High on gin, we haggled amiably over their demand of fifty thousand dollars’ advance on his novel and a sixty-forty split on the reprint rights. By two o’clock our only agreement was to meet again later in the week -- same place, same martinis -- with the addition of Harve Atkinson, decision-maker." (129)

Bill Pronzini has noted The Evil Days is "a mordant tale of thievery, kidnapping, murder, and adultery." NYTBR’s Newgate Callendar (a pseudonym used by Pulitzer Prize-winning music critic Harold Schonberg) commented on the "everyman" protagonist (Caleb Dawson) grappling with a thorny ethical problem.

"This one is about a woman who finds a bag of diamonds in a shopping center. Greed takes over, and her husband finds himself in a legal and moral impasse. That is the fundamental idea of the book. How can a basically decent man escape from these quicksands? Fischer handles the problem in a sensitive manner. He also has the ability to draw together a rather complicated series of events into a unit. And along the way he has planted a really ingenious clue. Much better than average."

Critic Jon L. Breen has commented, "If MWA gave a comeback of the year award [in 1973], it might go to Bruno Fischer for The Evil Days."

Bruno Fischer was one of the early members of Mystery Writers of America. Ed Hoch relates how he met Bruno Fischer at a MWA New York chapter meeting in 1949 at a 52nd Street restaurant. Fischer was the first real live mystery writer Ed Hoch ever met. Fischer still has his ardent champions, most notably such writers as Bill Pronzini, Bill Crider, Ed Gorman, and Gary Lovisi. Certainly in Fischer’s lifetime, he earned high praise from such critics such as Anthony Boucher who once wrote Fischer "displays a warm understanding of human relationships". Allen J. Hubin collected Fischer’s story "The Man Who Lost His Head" in the watershed PI fiction anthology, Best of the Best: Detective Stories 25th Anniversary Collection (E.P. Dutton, 1971).

Fisher used the "Russell Gray" pseudonym to publish his mystery-terror stories. In cases where multiple stories appeared in the same magazine issue, he adopted the "Harrison Storm" pen name. Perhaps less known was his "Jason K. Storm" pseudonym. It was used for at least one erotica title, Domination (Olympia/Ophelia Press, 1970), recently offered for auction at e-rauction.com. Olympia Press, operated by Maurice Girodias, first published The Ginger Man, by James Patrick Donleavy, Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs, and the British edition of Story of O by Pauline Reage. One has to wonder if the Jason K. Storm titles were much sleazier or kinkier than, say, a "shudder pulp" novelette like Fresh Fiancés for the Devil's Daughter (first appearing in Marvel Tales, May 1940) penned under the Russell Gray pseudonym.

Gryphon Publications published Fischer’s last work, A Mate for Murder and Other Tales from the Pulps, a six-story collection, in 1992, the year he died. His novel Silent Dust scored an entry in the seminal critical study of crime fiction, 1001 Midnights. Fischer’s stories exhibit a creative durability and have consistently placed in mystery anthologies over the decades, most recently "We’re All Dead" in The Mammoth Book of Pulp Fiction (Carroll & Graf, 1996) edited by Maxim Jakubowski. Director/producer Matthew Galkin (HBO’s "Family Bonds") is adapting the same story for film (Stick Figure Productions, NYC). More recently, David Bischoff selected Fischer’s House of Flesh for the book of essays on landmark horror titles, Horror: Another 100 Best Books (Carroll & Graf, 2005).

Apparently none of Fischer’s fiction was dramatized for the large or small screen until 1995, three years after his death. Showtime TV ran an episode of Fallen Angels, the neo-noir anthology TV series, based on his novella No Escape! (first published in Detective Tales, January 1949). It starred CSI’s own William Petersen. Bruno Fischer once summarized his approach to fiction writing in Contemporary Authors. "Though I’ve had my flings at editing and newspaper writing, I am essentially a free-lance writer -- setting my own pace, working at home, being pretty much independent. I’m a storyteller, in particular, a recounter of mysteries, dedicated wholly to the printed word."

Fischer spent his last few summers living in a bungalow at the bucolic Camp Three Arrows, a socialist cooperative in Putnam County, New York. He passed away while on his annual Mexico vacation on March 16, 1992. He was 84. Camp Three Arrows ceased their operations in 2002. Interestingly, among its archives is a document titled "Notes for a Master's Thesis on a Summer Housing Cooperative Called Three Arrows" written in 1967. Evidently, Fischer held his socialist beliefs passionately enough to attempt a scholarly treatment of them.

©copyright Ed Lynskey 2007

Acknowledgements: The author would like to thank Ed Hoch, Gary Lovisi, Jon L. Breen, and Alan Wald for sharing their insights and assistance in the writing of this article on Bruno Fischer.

References

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