GET TO KNOW BRUCE ELLIOTT: DO YOU KNOW ME? & OTHER ABERRATIONS

Bruce Elliot was one of those workman writers who toiled away in postwar publishing. He got an early start writing stories for The Shadow under the Maxwell Grant pseudonym, worked as an editor for Playboy knock offs, and wrote under several different genres. He's best known for the noir One Is The Loneliest Number, a book I still haven't read . This month, Stark House Press shines a light on Elliot with a collection of his short work, Do You Know Me? & Other Aberrations,

The title story looks at the New York City of the time with a homeless man, compromised cop, ad exec, and automat girl who converge over a serial killers next attempt. We feel working class areas of the city and the loneliness in the crowd represented in its broken characters, It's like several Edward Hopper paintings strung together in thriller form.

My favorite story in the collection, "Death Lives In Brooklyn", also uses New York. It carries a a Cornell Woolrich vibe with a down on his luck guy witnessing a cop's murder in the burrough's Shooting Gallery. The dying man man tells him where to find a hidden document he needs to get to the D.A. and not to trust any police. Our hero runs across a nightmarescape of the city chased by thugs and crooked police. Elliot keeps up the pace as well the sense of dread. It's a shame RKO didn't snap it up for one of their crime flick programmers in the era.

Elliot was a practicing magician . He wrote several nonfiction books on the subject, including a Houdini biography, and applied it to his short fiction as well. "The Last Magician is an odd genre blend that feels like a fever dream with magicians and Martians, "So Sweet As Magic" starts ut a supernatural take on the the thriller with a stage magician discovering he has powers of sorcery and the threat connected to it. What starts with that Woolrich vibe falls into Richard Matheson existentialism as the tale expands The author grounds the story in the details of working magicians that allows the reader to follow him into the fantastic.

Possibly his best known short story is "Wolves Don't Cry", considered one of the first revisionist werewolf stories. It deals with the creature in a zoo, Elliot keeps him and the reader off balance as he struggles to realize if he is a man or beast and which one he wants to be. He skillfully delivers the answer,

Other tales include a sailor struggling to survive in a sleazy island town, a man out for revenge as others try to erase the memory of the event that drives him to it, and a wild yarn about writer's block that ends the book.Elliot's clean and direct prose creates an artful contrast to his often ambiguous plotting. His interests lie more in ideas than story, but they are engaging ideas for stories. Now I need to pick up One Is The Loneliest Number.