Gerald Kersh

• Born: August 6, 1911?
• Birthplace: Teddington-on-Thames, Middlesex, England
• Died: May 14, 1968
• Place of death: Middletown, New York

Types of Plot: Amateur sleuth; espionage; hard-boiled; historical; horror; police procedural; psychological; thriller

Contribution

Gerald Kersh wrote extensively about the underside of London society (the gamblers, hustlers, prostitutes, pimps, psychopathic killers, drug dealers, and bohemians), as well as about his military experience during World War II in the Coldstream Guards. Effective as some of his writing is in these areas, Kersh will most likely be remembered for his highly imaginative and very diverse mystery stories. His body of fiction—some twenty novels, approximately fifteen volumes of short stories, a number of uncollected fiction pieces—though quite uneven, contains many eloquent and highly polished passages and some that approach brilliance. In spite of a modest formal education, he was well-read and possessed of enormous curiosity about the world and its past history. At his best, Kersh suggests the verbal dexterity and aphoristic deftness of a variety of masters of English prose style: Oliver Goldsmith, Edgar Allan Poe, Robert Louis Stevenson, and O. Henry. Occasionally too, when Kersh is in particularly good literary form, a hilarious comic sequence may suddenly appear, calling attention to the wide range of his literary talents. Through a number of well-crafted short stories and at least one brilliantly wrought novel, The Great Wash (1953; published in the United States as The Secret Masters), Kersh brought new distinction to the tradition of the mystery story.

Biography

It is believed that Gerald Kersh was born in Teddington-on-Thames, Middlesex, England, on August 6, 1911, although some accounts give his birth date as June 8, 1909. His parents were Leon Kersh, a Russian, and Lea Miller Kersh, who was Jewish. He wrote his first story at the age of seven and succeeded in publishing his fourth literary effort, a novel—Jews Without Jehovah (1934)—while in his mid-twenties. An individual who always prided himself on his prodigious physical strength, Kersh almost died at the age of three from complications after a bout with measles; given up for dead by his parents, he spontaneously recovered.

Oddly, considering the broad reading background his fiction reveals, Kersh suspended formal education on leaving secondary school. Concerned with earning a living, he worked at many different jobs, as a salesperson, wrestler, baker, and bouncer—among others. During this time, the energetic Kersh resumed his education, at an extension school (the Regent Street Polytechnic), concurrently teaching himself to become a writer. He published several novels during the 1930’s. In late 1939, he joined the Coldstream Guards, remaining there until the early 1940’s; after a narrow escape from death in a bombing raid, he was removed from active duty. Kersh then joined the Ministry of Information’s Films Division and served as war correspondent for the United States War Department. He also wrote for a Labour Party newspaper and published ten books, including two about his beloved Coldstream Guards.

After the war, Kersh continued to publish: collections of mystery stories and novels of London’s sleazy underworld, lower class, and raffish social misfits. In 1958, he won the Mystery Writers of America’s Edgar Allan Poe Award for his short story “The Secret of the Bottle.” Kersh was married three times: to Alice Thompson Rostron in 1938, to Claire Alyne Pacaud in 1943, and to Florence Sochis in 1955. Resenting the British welfare state and what he considered its confiscatory taxation, Kersh lived in the United States between 1950 and 1952 and again in the last years of his life. He died of throat cancer in Middletown, New York, on November 5, 1968.

Analysis

It is regrettable that Gerald Kersh’s substantial output of novels and short stories is largely out of print. Most reference sources that include Kersh list only a smattering of his books, many of which were first published in England. Even Book Review Digest, during the years his books appeared (1934-1969), recognized only a modest number of them. Much may be said, however, regarding a few significant titles of works within the mystery and detective genre.

As a writer of whodunits, Kersh was generally not at his best. At home in the seamy pubs and low neighborhoods of London, Kersh often lost himself in detailing sordid slices of life. On occasion his vibrant sense of humor came to the fore; now and then readers saw his rare gift with language—accurate reproduction of vernacular speech, as well as a rich vocabulary and a wide range of appropriate literary allusions. Yet Kersh was not often granted the wonderful concentration of mind that makes for masterful chronicling of crime and sleuthing.

Prelude to a Certain Midnight and Clock Without Hands

Prelude to a Certain Midnight (1947) deals with the violation and murder of an eleven-year-old girl in a vile bohemian area of London. Despite a good bit of character delineation, there is a seeming pointlessness to the story; the killer is never brought to justice. Clock Without Hands (1949) is lacking in literary style, characterization, local color, suspense, and authorial imagination. A ruggedly virile man, separated from his wife and carrying on adulterously with a succession of women, is found murdered in his small rented room. His wife is the prime suspect. The real killer, tracked down by an amateur sleuth, who happens to be a newspaper reporter, is the murder victim’s landlord, a small, meek man trying to take on the strong, masculine qualities of his victim, trying in fact to make the authorities believe that he committed the murder. Yet no one believes this man, the most ordinary of persons, described in the story as “a clock without hands,” and before he can commit another such crime (the intended victim this time is a barmaid to whom the dead tenant had been attracted), he is run over by a truck and killed.

The significant Kershian theme in this flat tale is the strong male pitted against the weak male. Proud of his unusual physical strength, ferocious appearance, and fighting ability, Kersh had a penchant for describing fierce tough-guy types and powerful, aggressive individuals of either sex—as is evident in his novel The Weak and the Strong (1945) and his story about Potiphar’s wife (imaginatively adapted from the biblical account, in Genesis, of Joseph in Egypt), “Ladies or Clothes,” included in the story collection Men Without Bones, and Other Stories (1955).

The Great Wash

With The Great Wash, however, Kersh’s dormant detective-story talents emerged at last. The result was a psychological thriller combining horror, violence, and a redeeming expression of love for one’s fellow humans. Deeply fascinated by the atom bomb developed during World War II, and all the attendant technology, Kersh describes the ultimate global plot for the total domination of humankind. This is a mysterious plan of two British masterminds of an organization of so-called Sciocrats, Kadmeel and Chatterton. Working with certain heads of government throughout the world, they wish to use silicon bombs to blow up the deep underwater mountain barriers in strategic locations, thereby causing enormous tidal waves that will flood the major population centers. Only a select few from each nation with a participating leader will survive, sheltered in some high mountain sanctuary against the time when the cataclysmal floods will recede sufficiently for these chosen ones to come down and develop a new society in accordance with the Sciocrats’ elitist program.

The novel’s two central figures, a newspaper reporter named Albert Kemp and his close friend George Oaks, a mystery writer, are drawn into the swirl of this intrigue. They begin by trying to track down two missing atomic scientists who were brought into the Sciocrats’ sphere of influence. After a series of cloak-and-dagger adventures involving espionage, murder, mistaken identity, and police investigation, Kemp and Oaks become prisoners of Kadmeel and Chatterton in the Sciocrats’ secret Canadian stronghold. They escape, against nearly impossible odds, and at the cost of Oaks’s life blow up the central nuclear installation, destroying any chance the Sciocrats might have had for giving the world a “great wash” and controlling what was left.

To suggest the elevated literary level of this psychological and philosophical mystery (one of whose most puzzling secrets is the nature of the “unknown islands” in the drawings left by one of the missing scientists), an example or two of Kersh’s style must be given. In one passage, Kemp, the story’s narrator, reflects on a mothball he picked up from his hotel bed, in “one of those moments in which, looking away from the crushed husks of lives, you see the expressed wine, and, in a flash of sublime understanding, perceive the ultimate goodness of many little things. . . .” Kemp continues, describing the mothball as it “caught the light and threw its own shadows in such a way that I might have been holding in my hand the full moon in all its mystery. . . .” In a book with many such gems, however, the following seems to occupy its own place. George Oaks comments on Life:

I used to be passionately in love with Life when I was young and foolish, Albert, and then I was terribly jealous of her, and frightened to death of losing her. But after I had lived with her and given her everything I had—worn myself out trying to keep her—and she threatened to leave me, I found myself indifferent to her. Whereupon she grew jealous of me and clung to me, complaining that I’d die without her. She was trying to come it over me with pity, you understand. So I gave her a good smack in the face and told her that, much as I loved her, I’d see myself dead and damned before I let her humiliate me. So she blinked in a shocked kind of way, smiled again as she used to smile in the old days—only with more restraint, showing fewer teeth—and told me that without George Oaks she would be nothing at all, a mere wandering itch without direction. So we agreed to be faithful to each other until our dying day.

Kersh seemed much more at home with mystery short stories than with mystery novels; in his stories, he reaches further into the depths of the human imagination than most mystery writers would dare to go. Kersh’s work within this category reveals the strong and the weak sides of his writing talent, but his love of storytelling was such that even the less effective of his published tales (those pieces that seem to have been written hastily, for some undiscriminating magazine editor) show the rich potential of his creative faculty and his verbal legerdemain.

“The Crewel Needle”

Kersh’s affinity for working scientific principles and their implications into his fiction is evident in the detective story “The Crewel Needle” (in On an Odd Note, 1958). In this story, a police officer deduces from problematic evidence at a death scene, wherein an eight-year-old girl was alone with her aunt when the latter was killed by having a crewel needle driven into her brain, that the girl committed the murder. She had read, the officer learned, exactly how to drive the needle through her aunt’s skull, in a book of tricks that explained how to perform a comparable feat (though an innocent one) with the aid of a cork and a hammer.

“Whatever Happened to Corporal Cuckoo?”

A recurring theme in Kersh’s mystery stories is that of the individual who is taken for dead but is later “recalled to life”—so important to Kersh, apparently, because of his own similar experience at the age of three. (Note that “mystery” here is not limited to, in fact may not even involve, the solving of a perplexing crime.) Kersh seems to have asked a difficult question of his creative imagination: How can the dead quicken—by what miracle or natural process? In “Whatever Happened to Corporal Cuckoo?” (in Nightshade and Damnations, 1968), a French soldier in the 1530’s is mortally wounded on the battlefield—his head split open by a halberdier in the enemy army. The doctor applies a “digestive” made of naturally occurring substances to the wound, whereupon healing takes place and his head is made whole again. The recovered soldier lives on through four centuries of war and deadly injuries in battle, always using the same life-giving concoction, making it up himself from the original ingredients whenever his supply is exhausted.

“Frozen Beauty” and “The Epistle of Simple Simon”

“Frozen Beauty” (in the same story collection) concerns a young tribal girl frozen to death in a hut with other tribal members in Siberia’s Belt of Eternal Frost ten thousand years ago. The group is found by a doctor, whose fire, kindled in the hut, revives the girl; once she has recovered, he takes her away with him. Far more suggestive than this tale, whose main idea had been applied years earlier by Edgar Rice Burroughs, is “The Epistle of Simple Simon” (in Men Without Bones, and Other Stories). Drawing on his deep-seated curiosity about the mysterious lives of famous figures (Jesus Christ, Potiphar’s wife, Leonardo da Vinci, William Shakespeare, Ambrose Bierce, and the like), Kersh re-creates the events following the Crucifixion of Jesus. In this story, Christ does not die on the cross, but is carried away by his friend Joseph of Arimathea, laid in Joseph’s private tomb, and given clothing and ointment for his wounds. Almost fifty years later, Jesus, self-exiled in a cave, rescues from death one of the early Christians, Simon the Simpleton, who has been brutally attacked and left for dead by some barbarians he had sought to convert. Jesus does not understand Simon’s evangelizing and asks Simon which Jesus he is talking about, of all the numerous Jesuses who must have died on the Roman gallows—the cross—for some capital offense. After a week, he loses his temper with the persistent proselytizer Simon and sends Simon on his way because there is nothing to be done. One of Kersh’s most penetrating ironies remains with the reader, Jesus’ response to Simon’s earnest attempts to bring the Gospel to this “good heathen”: “My friend, the law has taken its course with me. I am betrayed, tried, captured, and executed.”

“The Ape and the Mystery”and “The Dancing Doll”

Two stories, in the collection Men Without Bones, and Other Stories, reveal unrecorded events in Leonardo’s life. There is a double irony in “The Ape and the Mystery.” Leonardo’s patron, the young duke, ignores his plans for, and request to build, a water purification system; he wants only to know more about the fascinating La Gioconda (Mona Lisa), who recently sat for a portrait. What caused her strange smile? She was hiding her rotten teeth, Leonardo answers. In “The Dancing Doll,” Leonardo, still in the duke’s service, is obliged to spend his time making a puppet for the duke’s gravely ill son, instead of inventing a submarine, plans for which are occupying his mind.

“The Madwoman” and “The Hack”

Kersh’s marvelous sense of humor comes out in some of his stories about Shakespeare, too. “The Madwoman” (in Men Without Bones, and Other Stories) explains the mystery behind the composition of King Lear. The bard was strongly moved by his observations of a poor, deranged gentlewoman, Mistress Leah, fallen on hard times and cast out by the wives of her three worthless sons. Her sad story suggests a subject for a new play. “The Hack” (in Men Without Bones, and Other Stories) presents a harried Shakespeare in a tavern with Ben Jonson, telling the younger man his troubles and revealing something about the mystery of literary art and its antithesis: hack writing. Monetary needs compelled him to set aside his important play, Belisarius, and produce such commercial junk as Hamlet and Macbeth. Worse, he has been driven by necessity to rewrite in proper prose the notes of a “slobbery, sly-looking, crafty little man” named Francis Bacon. A superb adventure yarn, “The Oxoxoco Bottle” (in the same collection) unravels the mystery of what happened to Ambrose Bierce when he disappeared for good in the interior of Mexico in 1914.

“The Brighton Monster” and “Prophet Without Honor”

Among Kersh’s mystery stories making use of science fiction or fantasy there are several significant examples. “The Brighton Monster” (in Nightshade and Damnations) is the strange tale of a Japanese man blown out of his house by the atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945 and deposited in Brighton, England, two hundred years in the past. “Note on Danger B” is about an experimental jet aircraft flying much faster than the speed of sound, which causes its pilots to grow ever younger as the velocity increases. Each of these two stories represents a riddle to be solved by observers of the phenomenon in question. Who or what was the Brighton Monster? How could a test pilot in a jet airplane regress in age in the course of his flight? “Prophet Without Honor” (in On an Odd Note) tells of a heavy-drinking newspaper editor with prophesying ability. This man, composing an important news story on his typewriter—whose keys, unbeknown to him, have had their letter tabs jumbled by a practical joker—produced a mysterious confusion of letters (as a drunk might be expected to do). Yet his typing reveals an amazing series of political prophecies, in phonetic Arabic with Roman characters. At their best, Kersh’s tales offer action, drama, suspense, and a sense of wonder.

Bibliography

Calcutt, Andrew, and Richard Shephard. Cult Fiction: A Reader’s Guide. Lincolnwood, Ill.: Contemporary Books, 1999. Kersh is one of the authors whose lives and careers are summarized in this dictionary of cult fiction.

Horsley, Lee. The Noir Thriller. New York: Palgrave, 2001. Scholarly, theoretically informed study of the thriller genre. Includes readings of Kersh’s Night and the City and Prelude to a Certain Midnight.

Moorcock, Michael. Introduction to Fowler’s End. London: Harvill, 2001. The famous science-fiction author of the Eternal Champion series discusses Kersh’s novel and his literary career.

Moore, Lewis D. Cracking the Hard-Boiled Detective: A Critical History from the 1920’s to the Present. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2006. Detailed study of both the American and the British versions of the hard-boiled detective; provides perspective on Kersh’s writing. Bibliographic references and index.

Symons, Julian. Bloody Murder: From the Detective Story to the Crime Novel—A History. 3d ed. New York: Mysterious Press, 1993. Symons, a successful mystery author in his own right, argues that mystery fiction evolved over time from being concerned with the figure of the detective and the methods of detection to a primary focus on the nature of crime and criminality. Sheds light on Kersh’s works.