(1912-1997)
Best known as the writer-director of 23 eccentric and explosive motion pictures (including The Steel Helmet, Pickup on South Street, Run of the Arrow, and Shock Corridor), Sam Fuller’s combustible creative output also included novels and short fiction published throughout his career. At age 17 Fuller was New York City’s youngest crime reporter, working for the notorious New York Graphic. “It was the time of the bootleggers, gangsters, all that crap,” Fuller recalled for this author. “I covered everything. Murders, executions, leapers, race riots. Grisly things.”
Leaving Manhattan during the Great Depression, the young journalist wandered across the country, taking jobs at any paper that would have him. To supplement a meager income he sold pulp stories, mainly to the crime and detective pulps, some tales inspired by his own reporting on the underworld beat. By the mid-’30s he was writing full-length works for the cheap lending-library and mail-order exploitation houses like Phoenix and Godwin. topic editors would call up, said Fuller, “wire any newspaperman and ask for fifty- or seventy-five thousand words. They would pay a few hundred dollars. If you didn’t have a title they’d give you one, and let’s have the whole thing in three weeks.” His first topic, Burn, Baby, Burn! was startling in content, dealing with the execution of a pregnant woman. His next, Test Tube Baby, was based on an interview Fuller had done with Dr. Alexis Karral and centered on the then-outrageous concept of artificial insemination and the “ectogenetic child.” Make Up and Kiss continued the muckraking theme on a less explosive level, an expose of the cosmetics industry.
After some years in Hollywood as a screenwriter, Fuller wrote his most successful and widely acclaimed novel, The Dark Page, published in 1944, by which time he was in Europe, an infantryman fighting World War II. The Dark Page is a first-rate and flavorful mystery thriller set in the world Fuller knew so well, tabloid Park Row journalism and the lowlife byways of New York City, with a dazzlingly seedy cast of characters including killers, thieves, drunken reporters, Bowery bums, bigamists, and morgue workers. The novel was bought for the movies (eventually made as Scandal Sheet, starring Broderick Crawford and John Derek), and increased Fuller’s value as a screenwriter, eventually allowing him to direct his first film in 1949, I Shot Jesse James.
Most of Fuller’s subsequent published fiction was connected to his movie work, primarily the novelizations of screenplays, including screenplays of projects that were never to be filmed (Crown of India; Quint’s World). The single exception was 144 Piccadilly, an odd and partly autobiographical story about an American film director in 1960s London who becomes involved with a band of homeless young hippies and bohemian activists. The best and most important of these later publications was undoubtedly The Big Red One, a “paperback original” tied to the release of the 1980 film of the same name. Fuller had waited to make the film project—an idiosyncratic account of his experiences in World War II—for decades, but the released production was savagely edited down to a small portion of his original. The paperback novel, however, retained the epic scope of Fuller’s original cut of the film, and thus inadvertently became the best evidence of what Fuller’s four- or six-hour version of the film must have been like. The novel stands on its own merits as one of the great firsthand accounts of infantry combat in the literature of World War II, a sustained tour de force that fully captures the spectacle and glory and madness of that conflict.
Works
- Big Red One, The (1980);
- Burn, Baby, Burn! (1935);
- Crown of India (1966);
- Dark Page, The (1944);
- Dead Pigeon on Beethoven Street (1974);
- Make Up and Kiss (1938);
- Naked Kiss, The (1964);
- 144 Piccadilly (1971);
- Quint’s World (1988; first published in French as La Grande Melee in 1984);
- Test Tube Baby (1936)
