You'll Always Remember Me

Introduction

You’ll Always Remember Me

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.

WATCH OUT! HE MAY BE AFTER YOU!

As chilling a masterpiece of psychological derangement as any story published in America in the 20th century

I
COULD TELL
it was Pushton blowing the bugle and I got out of bed tearing half of the bed clothes with me. I ran to the door and yelled, “Drown it! Drown it! Drown it!” and then I slammed the door and went along the row of beds and pulled the covers off the rest of the guys and said:

“Come on, get up. Get up! Don't you hear Pushton out there blowing his stinky lungs out?” I hate bugles anyway, but the way this guy Pushton all but murders reveille kills me. I hadn't slept very well, thinking of the news I was going to hear this morning, one way or the other, and then to be jarred out of what sleep I could get by Pushton climaxed everything.

I went back to my bed and grabbed my shoes and puttees and slammed them on the floor in front of me, then I began unbuttoning my pajamas. I knew it wouldn't do any good to ask the guys in this wing. They wouldn't know anything. When they did see a paper all they read was the funnies. That's the trouble with Clark's. I know it's one of the best military academies in the West and that it costs my old man plenty of dough to keep me here, but they sure have some dopy ideas on how to handle kids. Like dividing the dormitories according to ages. Anybody with any sense knows that it should be according to grades because just take for instance this wing. I swear there isn't a fourteen-year-old-punk in it that I could talk to without wanting to push in his face. And I have to live with the little pukes.

So I kept my mouth shut and got dressed, then I beat it out into the company street before the battalion got lined up for the flag raising. That's a silly thing, isn't it? Making us stand around with empty stomachs, shivering goose pimples while they pull up the flag and Pushton blows the bugle again. But at that I guess I'd have been in a worse place than Clark's Military Academy if my pop hadn't had a lot of influence and plenty of dollars. I'd be in a big school where they knock you around and don't ask you whether you like it or not. I know. I was there a month. So I guess the best thing for me to do was to let the academy have their Simple Simon flag-waving fun and not kick about it.

I was running around among the older guys now, collaring each one and asking the same question: “Were you on home-going yesterday? Did you see a paper last night? What about Tommy Smith?” That was what I wanted to know. What about Tommy Smith.

“He didn't get it,” a senior told me.

“You mean the governor turned him down?”

“Yeah. He hangs Friday.”

That hit me like a sledge on the back of my head and I felt words rushing to the tip of my tongue and then sliding back down my throat. I felt weak, like my stomach was all tied up in a knot. I'd thought sure Tommy Smith would have had his sentence changed to life. I didn't think they really had enough evidence to swing him. Not that I cared, particularly, only he had lived across the street and when they took him in for putting a knife through his old man's back—that was what they charged him with—it had left his two sisters minus both father and brother and feeling pretty badly.

Where I come in is that I got a crush on Marie, the youngest sister. She's fifteen. A year older than me. But as I explained, I'm not any little dumb dope still in grammar school. I'm what you'd call bright.

So that was it; they were going to swing Tommy after all, and Marie would be bawling on my shoulder for six months. Maybe I'd drop the little dame. I certainly wasn't going to go over and take that for the rest of my life.

I got lined up in the twelve-year-old company, at the right end because I was line sergeant. We did squads right and started marching toward the flag pole. I felt like hell. We swung to a company front and halted.

Pushton started in on the bugle. I watched him with my eyes burning. Gee, I hate buglers, and Pushton is easy to hate anyway. He's fat and wears horn-rimmed glasses. He's got a body like a bowling ball and a head like a pimple. His face looks like yesterday's oatmeal. And does he think being bugler is an important job! The little runt struts around like he was Gabriel, and he walks with his buttocks sticking out one way and his chest the other.

I watched him now, but I was thinking more about Tommy Smith. Earlier that night of the murder I had been there seeing Marie and I had heard part of Tommy's argument with his old man. Some silly thing. A girl Tommy wanted to marry and the old man couldn't see it that way. I will say he deserved killing, the old grouch. He used to chase me with his cane. Marie says he used to get up at night and wander around stomping that cane as he walked.

Tommy's defense was that the old boy lifted the cane to bean him. At least that was the defense the lawyer wanted to present. He wanted to present that, with Tommy pleading guilty, and hope for an acquittal. But Tommy stuck to straight denials on everything. Said he hadn't killed his father. The way everything shaped up the State proved he was a drunken liar and the jury saw it that way.

Tommy was a nice enough sort. He played football at his university, was a big guy with blond hair and a ruddy face, and blue eyes. He had a nice smile, white and clean like he scrubbed his teeth a lot. I guess his old man had been right about that girl, though, because when all this trouble started she dropped right out of the picture, went to New York or somewhere with her folks.

I was thinking about this when we began marching again; and I was still thinking about it when we came in for breakfast about forty minutes later, after having had our arms thrown out of joint in some more silly stuff called setting-up exercises. What they won't think of! As though we didn't get enough exercise running around all day!

Then we all trooped in to eat.

I sat at the breakfast table cracking my egg and watching the guy across from me hog six of them. I wanted to laugh. People think big private schools are the ritz and that their sons, when they go there, mix with the cream of young America. Bushwa! There are a few kids whose last names you might see across the front of a department store like Harker Bros., and there are some movie stars' sons, but most of us are a tough, outcast bunch that couldn't get along in public school and weren't wanted at home. Tutors wouldn't handle most of us for love or money. So they put us here.

Clark's will handle any kid and you can leave the love out of it so long as you lay the money on the line. Then the brat is taken care of so far as his parents are concerned, and he has the prestige of a fancy Clark uniform.