Bill Crider opined:
> I like Bruno Fischer's work quite a bit. I've read
all his Gold Medal
> books, and I have a Lion Book by "Russell Gray"
called THE LUSTFUL APE.
> Many years back, I did a short interview with
Fischer for the late,
> lamented PAPERBACK QUARTERLY. He was a great guy. He
also did some
> hardcover books that aren't quite as hardboiled and
noirish as the Gold
> Medal novels, and his last book, THE EVIL DAYS, was
a hardcover reprinted
> by Ballantine in paper. If you find it, buy it.
Great stuff.
>
> Bill Crider
Hi Bill!
A minor addition to the discussion prompted by an earlier
(excellent) post on shudder pulps. I went to my shelf and
pulled down THE SHUDDER PULPS, a history of the sub-sub-genre
compiled by Robert Kenneth Jones that was published in 1975
by FAX . Checked out the index and found a huge discussion of
Russell Gray's "Burn -- Lovely Lady!"
According to the Jones, "Russell Gray's prose epitomizes the
new look of the late thirties. In some ways, he proved a
dominant force of the period..."
[and]
"In the forties, Gray began working the detective
markets. They proved tougher, he found, when his first five
stories bounced. Before long, though, he was producing and
selling consistently. He moved out of pulps into hardboiled
hardbacks, under his own name, Bruno Fischer, shortly after.
Recently, Fischer has been in the administrative end of book
publishing."
[and finally]
"We've seen how Bruno Fischer did not use his real name on
his mystery-terror fiction, preferring Russell Gray. When an
author had two stories in the same issue, the pseudonym
avoided the obvious repetitiousness of the real name. Thus,
Gray also used the name, Harrison Storm."
There's a bit more, but nothing substantive.
... Reed
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