Oliver Quade, the Human Encyclopedia

Frank Gruber, Hardboiled Humor, & the Noir Revolution

Frank Gruber (1902–1969) was one of the most successful and prolific writers of the pulp era. At his peak he produced three or four full-length novels a year, many about series characters Johnny Fletcher and his sidekick Sam Cragg. Each year Gruber also wrote numerous short stories, many featuring Oliver Quade, “The Human Encyclopedia,” that is arguably his most warmly remembered series character.

By the late 1930s Gruber had visited Hollywood, and sold the screen rights to Oliver Quade with hopes that a regular series of films would be made (see Gruber’s essay on writing Oliver Quade mysteries in our Behind the Mask feature following the last story in this collection). Unfortunately only one lackluster Quade film was made. However, within a few years, Gruber was writing successful screenplays almost every year, including such major features as The Mask of Dimitrios, Terror by Night (one of two superior Sherlock Holmes scripts for Basil Rathbone), and with his companion and fellow Black Mask contributor, Steve Fisher, the classic noir thriller Johnny Angel. This last film was based on the novel Mr. Angel Comes Aboard by fellow Black Mask writer Charles G. Booth.

Although Gruber had a light touch, and successfully combined humorous characters with authentic hard-boiled milieus, a technique that was a major influence on later mystery writers like Craig Rice, Gruber claimed that he, Steve Fisher, and Cornell Woolrich became great friends at Black Mask and together developed the noir thriller under the brilliant hand of editor Fanny Ellsworth. Ellsworth was the great woman editor of the pulps who took over Black Mask from Captain Joseph Shaw in 1936 and promoted a kind of dark, psychologically centered emotional tale in Black Mask, often of innocent men trapped by fate. Gruber describes his writing friendships in his colorful autobiography, The Pulp Jungle, which is also an informal history of pulp magazines, and the era in which they flourished.

Gruber wrote more than three hundred stories, sixty novels, and more than two hundred television and film scripts, mostly mystery and western tales. Perhaps his most beloved character is Oliver Quade, the Human encyclopedia, whose seemingly infinite knowledge of even the most arcane subjects helps him solve crimes in a long series of pulp stories.

According to an early reminiscence called The Starving Writer, published in The Writer (July 1948), Gruber arrived in New York in 1934 one month after Steve Fisher. They had been corresponding and met up in Ed Bodin’s office; Bodin was literary agent for both friends at the time. Gruber, like Fisher, arrived alone with
a typewriter, a suitcase, and a few dollars. As Gruber noted in many reminiscences, “I had one thing else… the will to succeed.” Both Gruber and Fisher shared this powerful desire.

After a few dry months, Fisher and Gruber began to sell the occasional story. In 1936, Fisher married Edythe (Edie) Syme, an editor at Popular Publications, Inc. Gruber and his wife often went to dinner with Fisher and Edie.

By then, Fisher and Gruber had become close friends with Cornell Woolrich with whom they occasionally had dinner on those rare occasions when they were able to sidestep Woolrich’s restrictive, overbearing mother.

Fisher, Gruber, and Woolrich all started to sell to Black Mask after Fanny Ellsworth took over editorial reign. In The Life and Times of the Pulp Story in Brass Knuckles (1966) Gruber claims that he and Fisher managed to take the reclusive Woolrich to a party where they
all got drunk. The next day Fanny Ellsworth called Gruber and reported that Woolrich had come tearing into the Black Mask offices threatening never to write for the magazine again because Fisher and Gruber had told him that they were getting three times the word rate for their stories than Fanny was giving Woolrich. Fisher and Gruber had been too drunk to remember the hoax!

Gruber knew Ellsworth well from selling lead rangeland novels to her during the years she ran the very successful, Ranch Romances. Gruber thought Ellsworth an extremely erudite and perceptive editor who could have run The Atlantic Monthly or Harpers. In The Life and Times of the Pulp Story Gruber claims that he introduced Fisher to Ellsworth and helped him break into Black Mask. Both Gruber and Fisher credit Ellsworth with deliberately and perceptively changing the course of the magazine.

It is difficult to remember seventy-five years after the revolution, but Steve Fisher, Cornell Woolrich, and Frank Gruber lead the second wave of Black Mask boys in the late 1930s and ushered in a sea change in crime fiction narration. Fanny Ellsworth, who became editor at Black Mask with a new strategy, favored a change from the objective, hard-boiled writing promoted by Joseph Shaw and the earlier editors of Black Mask to the subjective, psychologically and emotionally heightened writing that came in vogue under her guidance.

This little-noticed shift in style in Black Mask fiction, “The Ellsworth Shift,” led to the creation of the film genre we now know as noir through the writings of Steve Fisher, particularly in his film scripts, and through the novels and short fiction of Cornell Woolrich, whose writings we now also call noir, although the term was originally applied only to film.

This dark new style and psychology in crime fiction narration jumped from magazine and book publications into screenplays, and led in the 1940s to the emergence in Hollywood of the classic age of the noir film thriller.

The obsessive, dreamlike narration favored by Fisher and Woolrich in their tense crime tales was a perfect match for the dark shadows, and frightening, expressive camera angles developed in German and Hollywood horror cinema. Narrative fiction style, and camera photography styles, played against and enriched each other in the development of this new film genre.

In his seminal essay, Pulp Literature: Subculture Revolution in the Late 1930s, from the Armchair Detective published in the 1970s, Fisher was the first to note this paradigm shift in Black Mask fiction. The gifted new woman editor, Fanny Ellsworth, used Fisher, Woolrich, and occasionally Gruber, who also supplied humor to the emotional new mix.

Humor was another taboo under the old Shaw regime. Most effectively through the art of Woolrich and Fisher, Fanny Ellsworth turned the emphasis in Black Mask fiction away from the objective, unemotional, hard-boiled writing style Hammett and the first wave of Black Mask writers introduced to the magazine, and for which Black Mask is celebrated.

Black Mask author William Brandon provides us with the most revealing portrait I know of Joseph Shaw discussing the art of objective writing in the early 1930s when he was at the height of his influence. Brandon recounts many conversations he had with Shaw in his little-known memoir, “Back in the Old Black Mask” (The Massachusetts Review, Winter 1987):

“Shaw wanted action, naturally, as did any right-thinking pulp, but what Shaw wanted most of all was style.

“Objectivity was part of what Shaw meant by style — a clean page, a clean line, an uncluttered phrase.

“Even the illustrations — Shaw called them ‘end pieces’—that Shaw liked were of a certain elegance and were meant to excite the imagination rather than a surface emotion. But traditionally the pulps left nothing to the imagination and the cruder the emotion the better. I think Shaw would have argued for hard and cruel emotion too but I think he felt it was better effected by clean and plausible and objective subtlety.”

Brandon makes it very clear that Shaw was not interested in character expressed through psychology, but only as it was expressed through external action.

Shaw didn’t buy any of Brandon’s detective stories, but he introduced him to “Fanny Ellsworth across the hall, a pretty and witty and red-haired young woman who edited Ranch Romances (“Love Stories of the Real West”), and Fanny started buying — at rare intervals — western stories I wrote in what I thought was a humorous vein.”

Fanny was comfortable with complexity in the stories she edited. She liked strong emotion and humor in a story, regardless of its genre.

Shaw was uncomfortable with humor and he mistrusted complexity in his narratives, whether in plot or in psychological states.

By all contemporary accounts, Fanny Ellsworth was one of the great fiction editors of all time. Frank Gruber describes her as one of the brightest, most urbane people he met in New York. Gruber and Steve Fisher both assert that when Fanny Ellsworth took over control of Black Mask she came with a well-mapped vision for a change in the kind of crime fiction the famous magazine would feature.

Ellsworth immediately started to buy stories from Frank Gruber, who wrote lead stories for her Ranch Romances pulp, and also Steve Fisher, who she recognized had a natural talent for expressing strong and complex emotions. She also increased the number of stories she purchased from Cornell Woolrich, who also had a natural way with twisted, pathological emotional states presented in strange, dark, haunted plots.

Ellsworth quickly established a much more subjective, emotionally driven style of crime writing than Shaw. Commentators on Black Mask’s influence on film and popular culture have not often noticed these changes in style and direction.

Certainly, Curt Siodmak’s science fiction noir masterpiece, Donovan’s Brain, the darkest of obsessive, subjective, first person narratives, serialized in Black Mask in 1942, years after Fanny Ellsworth had left, would not have made it into Black Mask if the talents of Fisher (nine stories from August 1937 to April 1939) and of Woolrich (twenty-two original stories from January of 1937 to June of 1944) had not first been let loose on its pages.

Black Mask writers and genres influenced Hollywood in more ways than hard-boiled dialogue and tough-guy detection of films based on Hammett, Chandler, and similar writers.

The late Curt Siodmak’s work on horror films, especially at Universal scripting and creating The Wolf Man (1941), and with Val Lewton at RKO scripting I Walked with a Zombie (1943), is of interest, particularly with regard to the emergence of a noir film esthetic from out of the shadows of the “horror” films of the 1930s and 1940s Hollywood (See my interview with Siodmak about his film experiences, particularly with Val Lewton: http://www.blackmaskmagazine.com/siodmak.html).

Once the noir film emerged at the beginning of the 1940s with the production of Steve Fisher’s novel, I Wake Up Screaming (1941), Fisher’s and Woolrich’s noir work flooded Hollywood:

In 1943 the great run of more than two-dozen noir films based on works by Cornell Woolrich, the genius of the dark thriller, began when Val Lewton produced The Leopard Man (1943); Robert Siodmak (Curt’s brother) directed Phantom Lady (1944); The Mark of the Whistler (1944) followed; Clifford Odets scripted Deadline at Dawn (1946); then came Black Angel (1946); and The Chase (1946); followed by The Guilty (1947); and Fear in the Night (1947).

Steve Fisher scripted Cornell Woolrich’s I Wouldn’t Be in Your Shoes (1948) with a telephone call assist from his pal Woolrich. When Fisher couldn’t come up with an appropriate ending for I Wouldn’t Be in Your Shoes, Woolrich suggested that Fisher resurrect the sexually obsessive, psychotic cop from I Wake Up Screaming and turn him into the culprit, motivated by his lust for the framed man’s wife. Ironically, Fisher originally had based that haunting and haunted police detective, Ed Cornell, on his friend Cornell Woolrich.

The most famous Woolrich inspired film, of course, is Alfred Hitchcock’s 1954 classic, Rear Window.

Frank Gruber and Steve Fisher always remarked on this change in the esthetic of the crime thriller that started to take place in pulp fiction (and some would argue in American cinema) in the late 1930s, and which came of age in Hollywood films in the 1940s; and to note Black Mask’s and Fanny Ellsworth’s role in that change.

In Black Mask, Fisher and Woolrich shared a talent for presenting aberrant mental states, and for casting suspenseful plots with inventive, obsessive incidents.

Frank Gruber, who more than any other Black Mask writer encouraged Fanny Ellsworth’s influence among his writing peers, had a flair for introducing humor into classic hardboiled and noir thriller situations. And so even though he did not have the dark, obsessive, natural noir talents his best friends Fisher and Woolrich possessed, Gruber was still able to make significant and influential contributions during Ellsworth’s heightened emotional reign over Black Mask’s narratives.

Gruber’s natural sense of humor heightened and relieved the tension in hardboiled and noir thrillers and influenced many writers to follow him. Craig Rice even adopted character duos of a sharp, super smart and fast-talking detective partnered with a slow-witted, always hungry, funny foil of a sidekick. One of Rice’s characters even had a photographic memory.

More modern stylists who owe much to Gruber’s sense of comic complications, and humorous dialogue are Donald E. Westlake, and the much more sinister Elmore Leonard. Gruber credits Fanny Ellsworth with allowing Black Mask authors to relax and explore their sense of narrative humor.

Under Captain Shaw, brilliantly funny narrators like Norbert Davis had to sneak their more zany sides into more traditional tough guy stories. We can see the long distance result of Gruber’s influence in the movement toward screwball mysteries in the films of the late 1930s and the 1940s, especially in the better film work of Bob Hope and Red Skeleton.

Even the great Dashiell Hammett in his late career brought the genre its greatest recipe for mixing humor with mystery in the Thin Man films. Nick and Nora Charles were presented on screen as a classic screwball loving couple as they romped through an iconic tough guy crime universe of cops, criminals, and corpses with a charming élan that became Hammett’s most enduring commercial creation.

Even more important than Ellsworth’s encouragement of humorous turns in classic Black Mask mysteries, Fanny Ellsworth was the inspiration for the full emergence of the psychologically heightened noir genre that has had an enduring and thrilling impact on film and fiction in popular American and world-wide entertainment.

— Keith Alan Deutsch