FRANK GRUBER – Brass Knuckles. Sherbourne, gardcover, 1966.

   Frank Gruber’s first novel, The French Key (1940), so moved critic William Lyon Phelps that he rhapsodized: “[It] is the best of 8,000 murder stories I have read.” One wonders (a) what sort of godawful mysteries Phelps had been reading all his life; and (b) if he was senile at the time he made this statement.

   The fact is, while The French Key may be an entertaining novel. it falls woefully short of being a masterpiece. Like all of Gruber’s novels, its prose shows the author’s pulp-magazine origins, the plot has some dubious motivation and other weak elements, and the whole thing suffers (as opposed to the works of many of Gruber’ s counterparts) from underwriting — scenes chopped off short of their potential, either through haste or lack of ability.

   Still and all, Gruber had a pulpster’s knack for telling a lightning-fast story, and for creating oddball characters and integrating them into unusual backgrounds; for those reasons his work remains readable today. This is especially true of his short stories: his short fiction shows much more facility than his novels, as the ten novelettes in Brass Knuckles testify.

   All ten of these stories feature Oliver Quade, the “Human Encyclopedia,” hawker of the 1200-page Compendium of Human Knowledge (every page of which he has memorized) and accomplished amateur sleuth. The Quade adventures began in Thrilling Detective in 1936; the following year Gruber moved the series to Black Mask, where all hut one of the entries in Brass Knuckles were first published.

<    Quade is an amusing character, as is his sidekick, Charlie Boston (a name Gruber borrowed for use as a pseudonym on a 1941 novel, The Silver Jackass ). He and Charlie travel around the country looking for likely places to set up their spiel and getting into trouble as a result of their choices. In “Ask Me Another,” their appearance at the Great Chicago Auditorium Poultry Show has them up to their ears in murder, mayhem, and chickens.

   Other creatures plague them as well-canines in “Dog Show Murder,” bangtails in “Oliver Quade at the Races,” and fighting cocks in “Death at the Main.” In “State Fair Murder,” it is the midway at the Minnesota State Fair and Confederate colonel William Clarke Quantrill that combine to land our heroes in hot water.

   These stories are lightweight and pulpy, but pleasant diversions nonetheless — and representative examples of the state of the art in such magazines as Black Mask in the late Thirties and early Forties.

  Despite factual errors and distortions, a thirty-nine-page introductory essay by Gruber entitled “The Life and Times of the Pulp Story” (which he later expanded into his 1967 memoir The Pulp Jungle) is compulsive reading and makes Brass Knuckles particularly commendable to anyone interested in the pulp era.

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   Reprinted with permission from 1001 Midnights, edited by Bill Pronzini & Marcia Muller and published by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 2007.   Copyright © 1986, 2007 by the Pronzini-Muller Family Trust.