Mon 22 May 2017
BRUNO FISCHER – The Fast Buck. Gold Medal #270, paperback original; 1st printing, November 1952. Cover art by Barye Phillips. Reprinted as Gold Medal s783. paperback, 1958.
As a rule, not a hard and fast one, I don’t read books about crime and criminals, gangsters and their molls, or hoodlums and crooked cops. I do read “heist” novels, though, and sometimes books about slick-talking con men. I also make exceptions for crime novels from Gold Medal, and I always exclude books by Bruno Fischer, no matter what genre they may fall into
Case in point, although there was one point at which I admit that was beginning to wonder. I’ll get back to that. Bert Peake is a two-bit hoodlum, his life is going nowhere, and he knows it. Desperate for a fresh break in life, he goes the wrong way and asks a childhood buddy for a job. The old buddy is now on top of the rackets in New York City.
And Bert does get a job, one that will pay him $5000, although not on any regular payroll. No, what Lumm wants him to do is to kill a guy, target to be named later. That’s the opening, and it may be enough to get a lot of readers through the occasional rough patches tht lie ahead.
To wit. Now that he’s in the money, he can have a girl move in with him, not an innocent my any means, but a nice girl, one he socks in the face when he loses his temper. At length she forgives him, but I don’t know as she would if she knew he was hanging out with a rich man’s daughter who thinks he is a brute, he proves it, and she is all the more attracted to him because of it.
Overshadowing these ominous overtones, though, is a mystery to be solved, who does Lumm want to have killed, and why is he encouraging the romance between Peake and the rich man’s daughter?
This is a complicated story, but at heart it’s also a simple one. Is the love of a good girl enough to pull a heel out of the morass he’s about to fall into? This is a book that doesn’t work on several levels, but Fischer somehow creates enough sympathy for Peake that the story manages to succeed in spite of itself. My opinion only, though, and I may change my mind tomorrow.
May 22nd, 2017 at 8:48 pm
Fischer was an exception to the rule for me as well. He never quite fulfilled the promise, but he was worth reading the majority of the time.
May 22nd, 2017 at 10:19 pm
After beginning his career in the pulps, Fischer had a scattering of novels in the 40s before doing a series of six books about PI Ben Helm between 1945 and 1951 To me, though, he didn’t hit his stride until Gold Medal came along. He did ten hard-boiled novels for them in the next ten years, along with a few others for other publishers. He more or less disappeared for 14 years, when The Evil Days came out from Random House in 1974. I may have known more at the time about why this last book and no more, but if so, I’ve forgotten now.