A 1001 MIDNIGHTS Evaluation
by George Kelley
STEVE FISHER – Saxon’s Ghost. Sherbourne, hardcover, 1969. Pyramid, paperback, 1972.
Steve Fisher had an extended profession of writing thriller fiction. He wrote for the pulps — Black Masks, Journey, and Argosy, amongst many others – and for the main slick magazines: Esquire, Cosmopolitan, and the Saturday Night Submit. Fisher additionally wrote greater than thirty movement image screenplays, together with Woman within the Lake (1946), Johnny Angel (1945), The Huge Body (1953), I, Mobster (1959), Johnny Reno (1966), and Rogue’s Gallery (1968).
Steve Fisher’s writing fashion can finest be described as hardboiled laced with sentimentality: His characters are liable to sturdy feelings; his plots are action-packed and melodramatic. However Fisher’s strengths are his skilled fashion and trustworthy presentation of characters pushed to their limits.
The controversial better of Fisher’s twenty novels is Saxon’s Ghost. Joe Saxon. one of many world’s finest stage magicians, generally known as the Nice Saxon. finds himself concerned within the occult arts when his lovely younger assistant, Ellen Hayes, disappears. Saxon has to make use of all his arts of legerdemain to reach on the chilling reality: The ESP powers he and Ellen fooled audiences into believing in are actual. When Saxon learns Ellen has been murdered. he makes use of these ESP powers to succeed in out to her past the grave to ship a particular model of earthly justice.
Different really useful novels by Fisher embody The Evening Earlier than Homicide (1939) and his most well-known novel, Wake Up Screaming (1941; revised version, 1960), which was filmed in 1942 starring Victor Mature and Betty Grable.
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Reprinted with permission from 1001 Midnights, edited by Invoice Pronzini & Marcia Muller and revealed by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Field, 2007. Copyright © 1986, 2007 by the Pronzini-Muller Household Belief.
