You'll Always Remember Me Read online

  You’ll Always Remember Me

  Steve Fisher

  Contents

  Introduction

  You’ll Always Remember Me

  Introduction

  By Keith Alan Deutsch

  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.

  You’ll Always Remember Me

  By Steve Fisher

  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 F
riday.”

  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.

  There wasn’t another school in the State that would have taken me, public or private, after looking at my record. But when old man Clark had dough-ray-me clutched in his right fist he was blind to records like that. Well, that’s the kind of a bunch we were.

  Well, as I say, I was watching this glutton stuff eggs down his gullet, which he thought was a smart thing to do even though he got a bellyache afterward, when the guy on my right said:

  “I see Tommy Smith is going to hang.”

  “Yeah,” I said, “that’s rotten, ain’t it?”

  “Rotten?” he replied. “It’s wonderful. It’s what that rat has coming to him.”

  “Listen,” said I, “one more crack like that and I’ll smack your stinking little face in.”

  “You and how many others?” he said.

  “Just me,” I said, “and if you want to come outside I’ll do it right now.”

  The kid who was table captain yelled: “Hey, you two pipe down. What’s the argument anyway?”

  “They’re going to hang Tommy Smith,” I said, “and I think it’s a dirty rotten shame. He’s as innocent as a babe in the woods.”

  “Ha-ha,” said the table captain, “you’re just bothered about Marie Smith.”

  “Skirt crazy! Skirt crazy!” mumbled the guy stuffing down the eggs.

  I threw my water in his face, then I got up, facing the table captain, and the guy on my right. “Listen,” I said, “Tommy Smith is innocent. I was there an hour before the murder happened, wasn’t I? What do you loud-mouthed half-wits think you know about it? All you morons know is what you read in the papers. Tommy didn’t do it. I should know, shouldn’t I? I was right there in the house before it happened. I’ve been around there plenty since. I’ve talked to the detectives.”

  I sat down, plenty mad. I sat down because I had seen a faculty officer coming into the dining room. We all kept still until he walked on through. Then the table captain sneered and said:

  “Tommy Smith is a dirty stinker. He’s the one that killed his father all right. He stuck a knife right through his back!”

  “A lie! A lie!” I screamed.

  “How do you know it’s a lie?”

  “Well, I—I know, that’s all,” I said.

  “Yeah, you know! Listen to him! You know! That’s hot. I think I’ll laugh!”

  “Damn it,” I said. “I do know!”

  “How? How? Tell us that!”

  “Well, maybe I did it. What do you think about that?”

  “You!” shouted the table captain. “A little fourteen-year-old wart like you killing anybody! Ha!”

  “Aw, go to hell,” I said, “that’s what you can do. Go straight to hell!”

  “A little wart like you killing anybody,” the table captain kept saying, and he was holding his sides and laughing.

  ALL THAT Monday I felt pretty bad thinking about Tommy, what a really swell guy he had been, always laughing, always having a pat on the back for you. I knew he must be in a cell up in San Quentin now, waiting, counting the hours, maybe hearing them build his scaffold.

  I imagine a guy doesn’t feel so hot waiting for a thing like that, pacing in a cell, smoking up cigarettes, wondering what it’s like when you’re dead. I’ve read some about it. I read about Two Gun Crowley, I think it was, who went to the chair with his head thrown back and his chest out like he was proud of it. But there must have been something underneath, and Crowley, at least, knew that he had it coming to him. The real thing must be different than what you read in the papers. It must be pretty awful.

  But in spite of all this I had sense enough to stay away from Marie all day. I could easily have gone to her house, which was across the street from the campus, but I knew that she and her sister, Ruth, and that Duff Ryan, the young detective who had made the arrest—because, as he said, he thought it was his duty—had counted on the commutation of sentence. They figured they’d have plenty of time to clear up some angles of the case which had been plenty shaky even in court. No, sir. Sweet Marie would be in no mood for my consolation and besides I was sick of saying the same things over and over and wa
tching her burst into tears every time I mentioned Tommy’s name.

  I sat in the study hall Monday evening thinking about the whole thing. Outside the window I could see the stars crystal clear; and though it was warm in the classroom I could feel the cold of the air in the smoky blue of the night, so that I shivered. When they marched us into the dormitory at eight-thirty Simmons, the mess captain, started razzing me about Tommy being innocent again, and I said:

  “Listen, putrid, you wanta get hurt?”

  “No,” he said, then he added: “Sore head.”

  “You’ll have one sore face,” I said, “if you don’t shut that big yap of yours.”

  There was no more said and when I went to bed and the lights went off I lay there squirming while that fat-cheeked Pushton staggered through taps with his bugle. I was glad that Myers had bugle duty tomorrow and I wouldn’t have to listen to Pushton.

  But long after taps I still couldn’t sleep for thinking of Tommy. What a damn thing that was—robbing me of my sleep! But I tell you, I did some real fretting, and honestly, if it hadn’t been for the fact that God and I parted company so long ago, I might have even been sap enough to pray for him. But I didn’t. I finally went to sleep. It must have been ten o’clock.

  I didn’t show around Marie’s Tuesday afternoon either, figuring it was best to keep away. But after chow, that is, supper, an orderly came beating it out to the study hall for me and told me I was wanted on the telephone. I chased up to the main building and got right on the wire. It was Duff Ryan, that young detective I told you about.

  “You’ve left me with quite a load, young man,” he said.

  “Explain,” I said. “I’ve no time for nonsense.” I guess I must have been nervous to say a thing like that to the law, but there was something about Duff Ryan’s cool gray eyes that upset me and I imagined I could see those eyes right through the telephone.

  “I mean about Ruth,” he said softly, “she feels pretty badly. Now I can take care of her all right, but little Marie is crying her eyes out and I can’t do anything with her.”