The Pigskin Bag

by Bruno Fischer

It was an innocent leather suitcase, left by accident in Adam Breen's car ...
Innocent —
— until too many people claimed it...and one of them, seeking it at gunpoint, was murdered in Adam's garage ...
— until even the police refused to believe that Adam had not hidden it, or that he was not tied up with whatever its mysterious contents involved ...
— until the very security of Adam's wife and child was threatened, and he was forced to make a startling move to protect them ...
Here is a gripping story of a man who, suddenly and innocently, is caught up in a violent whirlpool of confused terrors ... What Adam Breen does — and what happens to him — will have you clutching the edge of your chair ...

Genres: Mystery

Paperback

First published January 1, 1946

About the author

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. He wrote also as Russell Gray and Harrison Storm.

Reviews

[Dave · Rating 5 out of 5]

Bruno Fischer’s 1946 novel, “The Pigskin Bag,” like several other of Fischer’s books, takes a suburban couple, Adam and Esther Breen, and thrusts them into the middle of a criminal caper. It all starts, as it does in so many of these paperbacks, with a bag of treasure. In these books, it’s a briefcase, a bowling bag, an indistinct package, or such with half the criminal world after it. Here it’s a “pigskin bag,” which may not be common anymore.

What really makes this novel work do well is how Fischer juxtaposes mundane suburban life with the wonderful world of thugs and criminal types. As Adam stands with his hands raised at gunpoint in his garage, he hears his wife and daughter in the house, the neighborhood kids bicycling around, the commuters coming home. No one suspects what he’s up against, the terror, the panic, the difficulties.

Adam Breen, Mr. car salesman himself, is the perfect ordinary chump. H is at a loss at his to deal with the thugs who keep coming around. He goes to the police and they don’t believe his story. He decides to go after the thugs on his own, but without a plan or tactical plan. He didn’t know what he’s doing, but thinks he will figure it out.

Fischer, once again, offers a well-written, easy to read, novel that showcases what happens when trouble comes and finds an ordinary guy for whom trouble really isn’t his normal business.

[Adam · Rating 4 out of 5]

Now THIS is how you write a thriller. Establish the reader's identification with your main character in the shortest time possible, create an intriguing MacGuffin, make your villains believable, craft a solution to the mystery that the reader can believe, and do it all with terse, careful language.

Bruno Fischer's The Pigskin Bag, written in 1946, is a quick read, and an excellent example of what a mystery/crime thriller should be. Each chapter has a title that hints at what is to come but doesn't really give anything away (e.g., "The Accident," "The Showdown," "The Boss," "The Execution"). The suspense mounts for nearly the entire narrative. And it gets the job done in fewer than 200 pages.

I picked up this book years ago outside of a junk shop in a three-for-$5 box. It's been sitting around for awhile, and I'm glad I finally got around to reading it. Fischer was once a very popular thriller writer, but is largely unknown today, which is too bad; today's writers of turgid, overlong thrillers could learn a lot from him. My Goodreads friend Jeff Vorzimmer kindly sent me a PDF copy of Fischer's novel The Lady Kills some time ago, and that's been sitting around for awhile, too. Now I'm itching to read it.

[RANGER · Rating 5 out of 5]

Tight Little Domestic Potboiler Nightmare With Multiple Plot Twists
Bruno Fischer was a journalist, a failed socialist politician, and a pulp writer who successfully transitioned to the world of paperback dime novels at the end of WWII. Although little known today, he was both prolific and popular in his heyday. He was a master of the psychological thriller, creating tension and suspense without resorting to gratuitous violence or implausible plot devices. The Pigskin Bag is a classic Bruno Fischer potboiler in which the lives of regular, domestic working-class Americans are interrupted by a criminal element that completely upturns their world.
The Pigskin Bag is the story of Adam and Esther Breen, a New York couple trying to create the American Dream in post-WWII America. Adam is a car salesmen and war veteran. Esther is a housewife. Their lives are changed when, during the circumstances of a traffic incident, Esther allows a stranger to place a large, locked pigskin bag into her car and then disappears. By the time Esther gets home and informs Adam, there are people hunting for the bag...and willing to do anything, even murder, to get their hands on it. The great mystery of the caper is that no one knows what is in the bag, who wants it, and why Adam Breen makes a bunch of knuckleheaded and awkward decisions to hunt down the people who have threatened his family. It's enough to say that hot cars, hard women, and sinister men move in and out of this novel until the surprising end.
A couple of unique things I liked about this:
This paints a little known picture of life immediately after WWII but before the economic boon period of the mid-50s.
The women in this story, as in all of Fischer's novels, are aggressive, hard, and dangerous.
This is a story full of many, many unexpected plot twists, but masterfully strung together. Modern suspense-thriller novelists could learn much from Bruno Fischer!
Many, if not most, of the characters here are unlikeable. Probably because they are so normal... because real heroics and Eagle-Scout quality character is not normal. Fischer foreshadows the clay-footed anti-heroes that would be the norm by the 1990s.
The Pigskin Bag is a great, tight little story that is highly recommended.

[Paul · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5*

[Bob · Rating 3 out of 5]

What's in the bag and where's the bag and why does everyone want the bag so much? These are the questions that propel this one from 1946. It's toward the bottom for me in terms of the other ones I've read from Fischer. While the beginning is a decent kind of breathless fun, it stumbles pretty hard as it goes, struggling to stay upright amidst its ceaselessly accumulating exposition through dialogue. I'll never say never, but this might be the last book I try from Fischer. It's been fun enough, but I'm getting a little bit of a case of the been-there-done-thats. If you're looking for a tale of an ordinary husband/father acquiring something valuable and getting over his head with a rough crowd all because he couldn't say no to a mysterious dame in the moment, he's a decent author from this era. This just isn't his best.

[Chris Stephens · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of the underrated writers of the Noir classics Imo,
High on plot(mystery) and suspense,
High on morals,
Tame levels of violence,
Low on sexism for the era,
Very reader friendly,
Not full of cheesy lines,
Great fast read.

[Andy Oerman · Rating 3 out of 5]

This started well but got much talkier and tougher to take seriously the longer it went on. The protagonist also gets harder to root for, then the book asks us to overlook all that with a twist ending. Meh. Socialist authors, amirite?

[Jeff · Rating 4 out of 5]

What little of Bruno Fischer I've read I've liked and this one was no exception. A fast-paced thriller about a regular guy, a car salesman, from Brooklyn who gets caught in a power struggle within a gang of car thieves.