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.