Steve (Gould) Fisher (August 29, 1912 to March 27, 1980) is the Black Mask Magazine writer who pioneered the noir thriller in film and fiction.
Fisher successfully sold stories, novels, and film and TV scripts for fifty years, from the 1930s through the 1970s, an impressive record few twentieth century writers can claim.
He never stopped writing and publishing novels. Most of Fisher’s pulp writing appeared under the name Steve Fisher, but he used the pen names Stephen Gould and Grant Lane, particularly for early novels.
He wrote for magazines, including the pulps, long after he had to for income. He remained active in film after the height of his prestige as a screenwriter in the 1940s and 1950s. He became very active in television work from the 1950s to the end of his life.
Fisher grew up around Los Angeles, where his mother was an actress. He was a teen when he sold his first tale to a magazine. He wrote stories for US Navy at a penny a word. His earliest pulp writing is “Panama Passion,” Zippy (September 1933), and “Shanghai Sue” for the first issue of Spicy Mystery (July 1934). Despite the name Spicy Mystery, Fisher’s Shanghai Sue was actually a romance tale, a genre Fisher would perfect in just three or four years so he could publish them at will in the highest paying slick markets like Cosmopolitan, Liberty, and Esquire.
According to Walter Gibson, author of many of the Shadow novels, Fisher was so good at presenting love, and other more complex emotions and human relations in pulp formula plots like spy, detective, and romance tales, that his peers called him “Somerset Maugham at a penny a word.”
Once Fisher started writing for money, he never stopped, and his last writings were scripts for television only a few years before he died: Fantasy Island (1978), Starsky and Hutch (1976), and Kolchak: The Night Stalker (1975).
In 1934 Fisher moved to New York where he immediately met up with Frank Gruber who became his best friend, fellow writers determined to make it in magazine fiction. By 1936 the pair had become established pulp writers and had become close friends with Cornell Woolrich.
Fisher, Gruber, and Woolrich all started to sell to Black Mask after Fanny Ellsworth took over editorial reign in 1936.
Gruber knew Ellsworth well from selling Western “love” novels to her at the very successful, Ranch Romances. Gruber thought Ellsworth “an extremely erudite and perceptive editor who could have run The Atlantic Monthly or Harpers”; See “The Life and Times of The Pulp Story” (in Brass Knuckles, 1966). 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 Black Mask Magazine fiction after 1936. Unlike the unemotional, hard-boiled and “objective” stories her predecessor as editor, Joseph Shaw (1926 to 1936), demanded and made famous, Fanny Ellsworth called for stories with heightened emotion that explored the interior life of the characters.
In Black Mask Magazine, Fisher and Cornell Woolrich shared a talent for presenting aberrant mental states, and for casting suspenseful plots with inventive incidents. This dark new style and psychology of crime narration jumped from magazine and book publications into screenplays, and led in the 1940s to the emergence in Hollywood 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 of film noir.
No writer was more influential in both fiction and in film scripts than Steve Fisher in ushering in the classic age of Hollywood film noir.
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; see my Introduction to I Wake Up Screaming (Centipede Press 2009).
As noir historian Woody Haut observes: “Steve Fisher was one of the hardest working script writers in Hollywood, with over fifty film credits to his name. But, on the basis of one novel, I Wake Up Screaming, and films like Dead Reckoning and The Lady in the Lake, Fisher deserves a place on the short list of influential innovators of the noir thriller.”
One of Fisher’s most memorable achievements is his greatest short story, “You’ll Always Remember Me” from Black Mask (March 1938). It is a story so rare in quality that its first person narrative still shocks us with the impact of real psychopathology.
This vivid tale also looks forward to William March’s 1954 novel, The Bad Seed, and anticipates the pervasive 1950s theme of juvenile delinquency, particularly as raised to the level of social pathology in the short crime fiction of Evan Hunter/Ed McBain, and in his iconic novel of 1953, The Blackboard Jungle.
“You’ll Always Remember Me” is as chilling a first person presentation of psychological derangement as any that ever appeared in an American magazine in the last century.