(1908-1995) Also wrote as: Russell Gray, Harrison Storm
Bruno Fischer was the author of 25 novels and more than 300 short stories, a contributor to Black Mask and Manhunt magazines, and the uncrowned king of the notorious “weird menace” pulps. The first fiction he wrote was for the literary maga-zines—”which paid nothing,” he recalled for this author. Fischer got married and worked at newspapers for a living when he began selling to the pulps. “I was the editor of the Socialist Call, the official weekly of the Socialist Party. I was getting $25 a week—when I got it,” he said. A friend talked to him about the pulp stories the friend had recently sold. Fischer bought some of the magazines and decided pulp was for him. Among the hundreds of pulp titles available, Fischer was taken by the line of modern, “realistic” horror/terror titles, the so-called shudder pulps: A Dime Mystery, Terror Tales, Sinister Stories, and others— unashamedly depraved exercises in melodrama. Each story was an overheated brew of vicious, often deformed villains, voluptuous, abused heroines, and vile torture devices. Fischer said he thought the emphasis on description and atmosphere worked to his strengths as a writer. He sat down and wrote a story about a woman trapped in an elevator with a cat she believes is a witch. Within two weeks Fischer received a check for $60—real money in those dark depression days. Fischer excitedly sat down and wrote a 10,000-word story. A check for $125 followed.
Bruno Fischer, the uncrowned king of the notorious “weird menace” pulps (HS Media)
For his first pulp story, “The Cat Woman” (published in Dime Mystery, November 1936), Fischer took the pseudonym “Russell Gray,” a name he had used during his newspaper days when writing two pieces for the same edition. Other stories appeared under the pen name “Harrison Storm.” Although some members of Fischer’s family were shocked by his lurid stories, his father carried copies of Fischer’s weird-menace pulps in his back pocket, ready to show them off to friends. Fischer was also a significant contributor to another pulp subgenre, the so-called defective detective story. Growing out of the “weirds” in Popular’s Strange Detective Stories and Dime Mystery, the “defectives” featured protagonists, the hero crime-solvers themselves, who were handicapped by bizarre or deadly diseases and medical problems. Fischer, under his Russell Gray pseudonym, contributed tales of the deformed, crablike private eyes Calvin Kane and Ben Bryn.
Fischer was a reliable pulp writer who could turn out stories based on a title idea supplied by an editor or built around a cover illustration that had been commissioned before anyone had written anything to go with it. With a hectic work schedule, and with the notion that everything he was writing was ephemeral, Fischer learned to write it right the first time and not go back for much editing. While the pay averaged a penny a word or less, a steady producer like Fischer could make enough to live on in those years before World War II. He took his family to a small pleasant coastal town in Florida and worked from there for some years. The market for the terror/weird menace stories eventually dried up, the perverse magazines run out of business by censors. Fischer had done what many pulp pros advised against and tied too much on a single market. Now he had to work his way into the good graces of other pulp editors and learn how to craft a different sort of story. He began to crack the detective pulps at this time and soon became as prolific at writing crime and private eye stories as he was at the terror genre. His name appeared on the covers of all the leading detective magazines in the 1940s, of which there were many.
He published his first novel, So Much Blood, in 1939. The topic earned him $500. Considering Fischer’s lurid excesses in the weird-menace days, his crime fiction was remarkable for its low-key tone and frequent use of everyday settings and characters. When violence came it was not gaudy but mundane. The murderers used the weapons at hand—scissors, a straight razor, a cookie jar—and the blood flowed across an everyday kitchen floor. The kind of mystery stories Fischer wrote, he said, “weren’t really mystery stories, they were stories. They could have been printed in any magazine.”
Living in the New York commuter town of Croton-on-Hudson, Fischer remained a productive author for his hardcover developer, and in the early 1950s he became one of the earliest of the first generation of paperback-original writers, as the paperbacks took over the market from the dying pulps. Softcover reprints of such Fischer titles as More Deaths Than One and The Bleeding Scissors did well, and in 1950 Fischer agreed to write an original for one of the growing new paperback developers. He wrote the 65,000-word novel in 18 days. It was called The Lustful Ape, and he signed it with the pen name from his weird-menace days, Russell Gray.
That same year, Fischer began a more creditable relationship with another new developer of softcover originals, Gold Medal topics. John D. MacDonald recommended him to the Gold Medal editor. He wrote House of Flesh for Gold Medal. The lurid cover, with a beautiful woman and some snapping hounds, looked not so different from the old weird-menace covers. House of Flesh eventually sold 2 million copies.
Fischer wrote a topic or two a year through the 1950s and continued writing short fiction as well. He wrote as well for the new magazines that had replaced the old crime and detective pulps—magazines like Manhunt, which paid much better than the pulps ever did. Then, in 1960, Fischer’s experienced some form of writer’s block. Deciding he was done writing for the foreseeable future, he took a friend’s offer and became a paperback editor at Collier topics. He stayed at the job for a decade.
Fischer wrote only one other novel, The Evil Days, published in 1974. He spent his later years between a summer home in an old socialist cooperative community in New York’s Putnam County and in the Mexican town of San Miguel de Al-lende, where he sometimes gave lectures to the expatriate retirees about his adventures as a mystery writer. In his last years he lost his vision, but Fischer would still get the old itch from time to time and would let his fingers roam over the keys of his battered typewriter.
Works
STORIES
- “A Friend of Goebbels” (1943);
- “Anything But the Truth” (1944);
- “Ask a Body” (1945);
- “Call the Cops” (1943);
- “Case of the Handless Corpse” (1944);
- “Case of the Sleeping Doll” (1946);
- “City Under Fire” (1941);
- “Coney Island Incident” (1953);
- “Daughter of Murder” (1942);
- “Dead Don’t Die, The” (1949);
- “Dead Hand Horrors” (1939);
- “Dead Hang High, The” (1942);
- “Death HitchHikes South” (1942);
- “Death Lives on the Lake” (1943);
- “Death on the Beach” (1944);
- “Death Paints a Picture”
- (1945); “Death’s Black Bag” (1943);
- “Death’s Bright Red Lips” (1946);
- “Death’s Secret Agent” (1944);
- “Don’t Bury Him Deep” (1946);
- “Enemy, The” (1946);
- “Flesh for the Monster” (1939);
- “Girl Miss Murder, This” (1943);
- “Happy Death Day to You” (1942);
- “Homicide Can’t Happen Here” (1942);
- “Homicide Jest” (1942);
- “Hour of the Rat, The” (1948);
- “I Thought I’d Die” (1948);
- “Killer in the Crowd, A” (1947);
- “Killer Waits, The” (1943);
- “Killing the Goose” (1945);
- “Kiss the Dead Girl” (1952);
- “Lady in Distress” (1949);
- “Locket for a Lady” (1943);
- “Me, My Coffin, and My Killer” (1943);
- “Middleman for Murder” (1947);
- “Mind Your Own Murder” (1945);
- “Murder Begins at Midnight” (1943);
- “Murder Has Seven Guests” (1942);
- “Murder Mask” (1943);
- “My Problem Is Murder” (1944);
- “Night Is for Dying, The” (1943);
- “Pickup on Nightmare Road” (1948);
- “Scream Theme” (1945);
- “Seven Doorways to Death” (1943);
- “Silent as a Shiv” (1948);
- “Smile, Corpse, Smile” (1948);
- “Stop Him” (1953);
- “They Came with Guns” (1957);
- “They Can’t Kill Us” (1941);
- “They Knew Dolly” (1942);
- “Trap, The” (1948);
- “Twelfth Bottle, The” (1944);
- “Waldo Jones and the Killers” (1942);
- “Wrap Up the Corpse” (1945);
- “X Marks the Redhead” (1944)
As Russell Gray:
- “Beauty Butcher, The” (1937);
- “Beware the Blind Killer” (1941);
- “Beware You Loved Ones” (1938);
- “Blood Farm, The” (1940);
- “Body I Stole, The” (1940);
- “Burn Lovely Lady” (1938);
- “Cat Woman, The” (1936);
- “Commerce in Horror” (1939);
- “Corpse Wields the Lash, A” (1937);
- “Dance in Death’s Cabaret” (1939);
- “Darlings of the Black Master” (1937);
- “Death Came Calling” (1937);
- “Death Dolls, The” (1940);
- “Death Sends His Man-nikins” (1937);
- “Devil Is Our Landlord, The” (1938);
- “Flames for the Wicked” (1940);
- “Girls Enslaved in Glass” (1939);
- “Girls for the Pain Dance” (1937);
- “Girls Who Lust for Death” (1940);
- “Home of the Deadless Ones” (1941);
- “Hostess in Hell” (1939);
- “House of the Man Butcher” (1940);
- “House That Horror Built, The” (1937);
- “I Loved the Devil’s Daughter” (1938);
- “Inn of Shipwrecked Corpses” (1941);
- “Maid and the Mummy, The” (1937);
- “Man Who Loved a Zombie, The” (1939);
- “Mates for the Bat Man” (1939);
- “Mistress of the Dark Pool” (1940);
- “Models for the Pain Sculpture” (1940);
- “Monster of the Purple Mist” (1938);
- “Mummy Men, The” (1940);
- “Murder Truck, The” (1940);
- “My Touch Brings Death” (1940);
- “Plague of the Black Passion”
- (1938); “Prey for the Creeping Dead, The” (1939);
- “School Mistress of the Mad” (1939);
- “She-Devil of the Sea” (1938);
- “Singing Corpses, The” (1937);
- “Slaves for the Wine Goddess” (1939);
- “Song of Evil Love” (1940);
- “Thing that Darkness Spawned, The” (1938);
- “Venus of Laughing Death” (1937);
- “We Who Are Lost” (1941)
As Harrison Storm:
- “Bodies for Satan’s Broiler” (1940);
- “Books of Torment” (1940);
- “Dead Man’s Story, The” (1938);
- “House That Horror Built, The” (1937);
- “Monster’s Wedding Night” (1939);
- “Our Lovely Destroyer” (1940);
- “School for Satan’s Showgirls” (1939);
- “Valley of the Red Death” (1938);
- “White Flesh Must Rot” (1940)
BOOKS
- Angels Fell, The (1950), also published as The Flesh Was Cold;
- Bleeding Scissors, The (1948);
- Dead Men Grin, The (1945);
- Evil Days, The (1974);
- Fast Buck, The (1952);
- Fools Walk In (1951);
- Go Between, The (1960);
- Hornet’s Nest, The (1944);
- House of Flesh (1950);
- Kill to Fit (1946);
- Knee Deep in Death (1956);
- Lady Kills, The (1951);
- More Deaths Than One (1947);
- Murder in the Raw (1957);
- Paper Circle, The/Stripped for Murder (1951);
- Pigskin Bag, The (1946);
- Quoth the Raven (1944);
- Restland Hands, The (1949);
- Run for Your Life (1953);
- Second-Hand Nude (1959);
- Silent Dust, The (1950);
- So Much Blood (1939);
- So Wicked My Love (1954);
- Spider Lily, The (1946)
As Russell Gray:
- Lustful Ape, The (1950)
