Sun 28 Dec 2025
Archived Mystery Review: LAWRENCE FISHER – Death by the Day.
Posted by Steve under Reviews[3] Comments
LAWRENCE FISHER – Death by the Day. Berkley G520; paperback original; 1st printing, April 1961.
Bellboy Nick Paulson, a punk with big dreams, cuts himself in when he discovers that three new arrivals at the hotel (two men and a woman) have plans to snatch $75,000 in local jewels.
A paperback original, totally obscure. Pure pulp. Very little plot. Sometimes Paulson noses around for pages, doing nothing but feeling sorry for himself. He’s probably got that right. No one else would.
— Reprinted from Mystery.File.3, February 1988.
December 28th, 2025 at 11:55 pm
I mentioned that this was an obscure book. Very true. Here it is, almost 40 years after I wrote this review, and I could not find a single copy offered for sale on the Internet.
December 29th, 2025 at 12:01 am
I have found another blogger who has read and reviewed the book. He liked it a lot more than I did. Here’s the link: https://www.paperbackwarrior.com/2020/04/death-by-day.html
Please also read the comments there. Quite a bit of information about the author is revealed, including a note from his daughter.
January 4th, 2026 at 3:40 am
Thanks to movie typecasting we tend to think of bellboys (it’s in the name) as young men or middle age character actor types, but after the war it was a fairly decent job that often came with a room if not board and there is at least one Bellman tec in Dan J. Marlowe’s Johnny Killane who is sometimes inaccurately described as a Hotel Dick.
I knew an older friend who was a bellboy in a Texas oil town hotel in the 30’s and 40’s and he had some wild and hairy tales to recount.