IT IS IMPOSSIBLE to slot Gerald Kersh (1911–1968) into any category of fiction, as his strange and powerful stories and novels run the gamut from crime to fantasy to literary fiction, with many of the works straddling more than one genre. A somewhat bizarre young life—he was pronounced dead at four, only to sit up in his coffin at the funeral—in which he described himself as being “a morose and tearful child,” continued through the early years of adulthood, in which he worked as a baker, nightclub bouncer, salesman, and professional wrestler. He served in the Coldstream Guards in World War II until an injury forced him out; he became a war correspondent and was buried alive during bombing raids on three separate occasions. Although a successful writer, he moved to the United States after the war to escape what he regarded as confiscatory taxation and became a naturalized citizen.
His most famous novel is Night and the City (1938), set in the London underworld of professional wrestling, which was the basis for the classic 1950 film noir directed by Jules Dassin and starring Richard Widmark; it was remade in 1992 with Robert De Niro and Jessica Lange. Most critics regard the 1957 novel Fowler’s End to be Kersh’s masterpiece and one of the great novels of the twentieth century, but it remains largely unknown. He wrote more than a thousand magazine pieces and more than a thousand short stories, the best known in the crime field being those about Karmesin, a rogue who narrates his own adventures and was described by Ellery Queen as “either the greatest criminal or the greatest liar of all time.” Typical of these stories is “Karmesin and the Crown Jewels,” in which the thief may have stolen the jewels from the Tower of London.
“The Crewel Needle” was first published in Lilliput in 1953; it was first collected in Guttersnipe (London, Heinemann, 1954). It was reprinted in the October 1959 issue of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine as “Open Verdict.”