Kersh’s great novels include the offbeat murder mystery Prelude to a Certain Midnight (1947) and his epic account of London, Fowlers End (1957).

Other great, unusual short works include the time-traveling fantasy “The Brighton Monster” and “The Queen of Pig Island,” a grotesque love story of shipwrecked sideshow attractions, with ardent midgets fighting over a beautiful multiple amputee. His most famous short story-again, due to a subsequent transfer to the screen-first collected in 1942, was “The Extraordinarily Horrible Dummy,” the tale of a tawdry ventriloquist’s unsettling relationship with his evil wooden partner (the unforgettable segment in the 1945 film Dead of Night). His first of many short story collections, I Got References (1939), featured a selection of weird tales with sharp psychological insight. The novel’s grubby antiheroics and dark worldview anticipated the burgeoning style of crime fiction and film known as noir. Kersh’s most famous work (due in part to a famous film adaptation) was one of his earliest, a novel, Night and the City (1938), the story of a hustling loser looking for success in the corrupt wrestling business run by the London underworld. The Ker-shian world was a bizarre place filled with a flotsam and jetsam of freaks and lowlifes-wrestlers, ventriloquists, gangsters, hustlers, chess masters, cannibals, famous authors, and Siamese twins. Although many of the author’s works were published in conventional categories- thriller, horror, ghost story-Kersh was seldom constrained by such labels, and his typical work shifted about in the most unexpected directions. Whoever one ranks as his peers, Kersh certainly has his place among pulp lit’s great oddballs, surrealists, and genre experimenters.

If compelled to make comparisons, one might call Gerald Kersh Britain’s Charles willeford or Jim thompson, or to get very grand, a modern Edgar Allan Poe, for his originality, mordant humor, vibrant sense of the awful, and talent for evoking the world’s seediest corners and humanity’s least likable specimens.

Guttersnipe by Gerald Kersh