Homicide Johnny

by Steve Fisher

a selection from the first chapter: AN EXQUISITE morbid strain ran through him like the too-high note of a violin, so that while its music was shivering cold, there was also something wickedly haunting in it. Yet the morbidness was fragile and could be dismissed; while the other thing that tormented his conscience was the raucous horror of a shouting voice, and this it was impossible to forget. Harry Waters' words came back to him again and again:

-Get out of here, Doctor Hale. You dirty up my office. Get out and don't come back!-

Hale walked on the narrow tar road, now remembering that, and gazed ahead at his sanitarium. He wanted very much for its sight to stir him and take away the ache and sickness that was in his heart. Yet it didn't and he walked slowly in the extravagant leisure of solitude, but to try and lift enthusiasm into his heart was a silly and futile job which only wearied him.

He thought of another day eight years ago when he had walked down this same road and had seen the sanitarium there though it had not actually been there then. There had been only the desolated wreckage of a real estate project gone sour and flat: unfinished stone houses, the jagged slope of their architecture blocked in silhouette against the blue of the sky; elegant and rusted gates, with a gateman's house, and beyond them patchy fields of weeds. He had not then identified that as someone else's dream ruined and dead, he had seen in the space only the fine structure of the sanitarium, and how it would look standing there with its vast screen porches facing the Long Island Sound, secluded and quiet; and on the inside, the pleasant routine, white clad nurses, and the dignity of a select New York clientele.

It was there now, just as he had pictured it. It had been there for seven years and five months and it still seemed bright and new. But through the windows the first and second floors shone vacantly with the glistening emptiness of rooms which had once been filled. Only on the third and top floor could one see the flicker that was activity. Last year there had been cars streaming in through the driveway one after the other, but now the sanitarium stood silently, and there seemed to be about it something bleak and cold; the wind that whipped across from the Sound was whiny, and the gleaming windows of the hospital were not unlike tragic and morbid eyes. You had the uncanny feeling that it did not want to be there; that it wished for an Aladdin's lamp to take it scurrying all the way across Orienta Point, and over to the other side of the Boston Post Road, so that it could settle in between the buildings on Mamaroneck Avenue, and shiver there, until the warmth of town places quieted it.

The unfinished structures that were to have been stone houses had never been removed, and though Hale hadn't before considered them in this light, it was as though they were tombs, waiting with cool and exasperating patience until the day when the sanitarium would take its place with them, broken and useless, in a graveyard where man had once planted dreams.

Hale kept walking and he could not quite diagnose the variety of emotions that surged within him; he wondered whether it was futile to go on hoping and fighting. Was it the end when you could see nothing ahead of you? When you looked back and remembered the past with a fleeting sadness because you could not catch time in your two bare hands and hold it?

128 pages, ebook

First published May 24, 2009

About the author

Born in 1912 in Marine City, Michigan, Stephen Gould Fisher was thirteen when he sold his first story to a magazine. At sixteen he joined the Marines. He was still in the service when he began to publish stories and articles in US Navy and Our Navy. Discharged from the Marines in Los Angeles in 1932, Fisher stayed in L.A., where he continued to write for US Navy, for which he was paid one cent a word. He was also, by this time, writing for a number of sex magazines.

In 1934 he moved to New York where, despite near destitution, he continued to pursue a career as a writer, and met, for the first time, his friend Frank Gruber.

Prior to his arrival in New York, Fisher had corresponded with Gruber, but the two had never met. It was in the Manhattan office of Ed Bodin, an agent who represented both authors, that the writers finally crossed paths.

They, of course, hit it off immediately, and left Bodin’s office on Fifth Avenue just below 23rd Street, on their way to Greenwich Village where, in Washington Square Park, they talked for three hours about their hopes, ambitions and their writing.

Over the years, the two men would remain close. Gruber, some fifteen years older than Fisher, was from a small farming town in Iowa. Already a prolific pulp writer, he counted amongst his friends the future father of Scientology, L. Ron Hubbard (the latter once told Gruber that his shift from science fiction to religious fiction occurred when he was shot in the neck with a poison dart while travelling up the Amazon). In 1941, the same year Fisher published I Wake Up Screaming, Gruber, under the name Charles K. Boston, published an all-but-forgotten Hollywood satire entitled The Silver Jackass. Much lighter, yet no less bitter than I Wake Up Screaming, Gruber’s whodunit was, in many ways, the other side of the coin from Fisher’s novel. At Warners, Gruber would go on to write the screenplay for Eric Ambler’s The Mask of Dimitrios (1946) and Bulldog Drummond. A.I. Bezzerides remembers Jack Warner walking into the writers’ building and finding Gruber, Fisher and himself not at their desks, but on the floor shooting craps. He looked at his three writers, turned and walked away, knowing there was little he could do about such recalcitrance.

Gruber and Fisher constituted something of a two-person mutual admiration society. At a party for the release of The Blue Dahlia, Gruber nearly came to blows with his hero Raymond Chandler when the latter said some unfavourable things about Fisher. The reason for the altercation was that Fisher and Chandler were in dispute over screen credits for The Lady in the Lake. Chandler was convinced that his name should have appeared on the screen as well. Though he defended his friend, Gruber would remain a life-long admirer of Chandler’s writing. Foreshadowing Gruber’s run-in with Chandler, Fisher, hearing someone unfairly criticise one of Gruber’s stories in the Black Mask office, launched such an attack on the unfortunate writer that the editor had to throw the Gruber-critic out of the office and declare him persona non grata at Black Mask.

Recounting his early days as a writer in The Pulp Jungle, Gruber attests to Fisher’s burning ambition to succeed as a writer, a quality which, at times, assumed humorous dimensions. Such as when Fisher wrote to the New York electricity company, which, because of an outstanding bill, was about to switch off his power, asking them how they would feel if they had turned off the electricity on Jack London. He told them that he too would become a famous writer and they would be ashamed of themselves for cutting off his electricity. But cut him off they did, after which Fisher was forced to write by candlelight. In that same book, Gruber goes on to say that Fisher was most adept at writing romance.

Reviews

[Claudette Gabbs · Rating 2 out of 5]

DNF at 11%. The story, as well as the characters just didn't grab me.

[Warren · Rating 2 out of 5]

This one was a little off-putting to me, the way it continually used character's first and last names repeatedly throughout the book.

It was ok at best.

[Ssgtwg · Rating 4 out of 5]

I originally gave the book a rating of 3 based on the story alone, then changed it to a 4 because while reading it I just had to read the next chapter. That is what makes a good book to me. There are problems I have with the story that are probably more "My Times" versus the "Book Times".

The story is about a Homicide Detective named Johnny, He worked for a small New York village Police Department but is leaving for a big California Department. Before he leaves he is asked to investigate one last case. The local Newspaper owner has been murdered, many of the towns best citizens are the suspects.

One wants to like Dr Hale, and hate the new Newspaper boss.

The story is well written and will keep ones attention. However, don't expect a story written to today's standard. If you like the type of Pulp stories that were popular form the 30s to 50s you will enjoy this.

[Dennis Miller]

Good, tight writing. A small band of fairly well-rounded characters. The love interest between detective Johnny West (Homicide Johnny) and his girlfriend, Penny Lane (Yes! Penny Lane!) is a bit trite and forced, but the writing, as I said, is tight with good dialogue and pushes the reader forward. I read this while at the same time listening to the audio version of "The Turn of the Screw" and have to say that I enjoyed "Homicide Johnny" more than the too proper, stilted language of Henry James.
Author Steve Fisher has a tight, dialogue-driven style that was a precursor to such masters as Elmore Leonard.