Bruno Fischer

Bruno Fischer (29 June 1908 – 16 March 1992) was a German-born American author of weird and crime fiction.

Biography Early career The son of a grocer, Fischer was born in Berlin, Germany, on 29 June 1908. Bruno immigrated to the United States with his family in 1913, attending high school in Long Island. He later attended the Rand School of Social Science and married Ruth Miller, a secretary, in 1934. Fischer became a sports reporter and then police reporter for the Long Island Daily Press (1929–31), following this with stints of writing and editing at the Labor Voice (1931–32), Socialist Call (1934–36), and Modern Monthly.

In the 1936 election he ran as a candidate for New York's 14th district, and in 1938 he ran for the New York State Senate (12th district, Manhattan), both times under the Socialist banner.

Writing career With journalism providing an unreliable income, at a friend's recommendation Fischer tried his hand at writing for the pulps. Among the hundreds of pulp titles available at that time, Fischer was taken by the horror/terror titles, the so-called "shudder pulps:" Dime Mystery, Terror Tales, Sinister Stories, and others. He sold his first story immediately, a horror tale ("The Cat Woman", Dime Mystery, November 1936). While he often wrote under his own name, this first story and others came out under the pseudonym "Russell Gray", a name he had used during his newspaper days when writing two pieces for the same edition. Other pulp stories appeared under the pen name Harrison Storm, but he no longer used this pseudonym after 1943. Initially Fischer became known as a purveyor of stories within the "weird menace" and "defective detective" subgenres, the latter being detectives with distinctive physical flaws. However, as Fischer recalled, these markets ended quite suddenly:In 1940 I was living in Florida with my family when the whole terror-horror market collapsed.... I got a letter saying the magazines had folded, and all my unpublished stories were returned. They just stopped, just like that. It was a shock. Just one day the market was gone. With his original markets gone, he moved to more general detective and crime fiction, with stories appearing in Dime Detective, Black Mask, and others.

Fischer published his first novel, So Much Blood, in 1939. Several of his books were published by Dell and Lion Books, including the popular Ben Helm series of P. I. novels. Paperback-original publishing house Gold Medal Books took on Fischer on the recommendation of John D. MacDonald. An early member of the Mystery Writers of America, he was the editor of one of their annual short story collections, 1953's Crooks' Tour, and author Ed Lynskey states that Fischer wrote at least one erotic novel in 1970 (Domination, Olympia/Ophelia Press) under the pen name "Jason F. Storm". His last novel was 1973's The Evil Days, written after the demands of his job and a lengthy writer's block had greatly reduced his output. Following this he spent his later years between a summer home in a socialist cooperative community in New York's Putnam County (the Three Arrows Cooperative Society) and the Mexican town of San Miguel de Allende, where he sometimes gave lectures to the expatriate retirees about his adventures as a mystery writer. His novels sold some 10 million copies and his works were translated into 12 languages, but by the time of his death he had largely faded into obscurity like many crime writers of his era. while two volumes of his short story work as Russell Gray have been released by Ramble House.