The following year he became a U.S citizen. In 1958, his short story 'The Secret of the Bottle', originally published in The Saturday Evening Post, received an Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America. However, Kersh continued to publish novels and stories, some of which were commercially and critically successful. From about the mid-1950s onwards, he started to suffer from poor health and financial hardship (specifically relating to his failure to pay income tax). After the war, Kersh continued to enjoy commercial success, mainly because of his short stories, in genres such as horror, science fiction, fantasy and the detective story. Despite apparently deserting, Kersh ended up in France during the liberation, where he discovered that many of his French relatives had ended up in Hitler's extermination camps. Kersh was drafted into the army during the Second World War, served in the Coldstream Guards and ended up writing for the Army Film Unit. Night and the City (1938), was more successful and has been filmed twice, with Richard Widmark in 1950 and then in 1992 with Robert De Niro in the lead role (this version transposed the setting from London to New York). Kersh, however, had not sufficiently concealed the identities of some of the characters, and a member of his family sued for libel as a result, the book was quickly withdrawn. Kersh's first novel, Jews Without Jehovah, an autobiographical tale of growing up poor and Jewish, was published in 1934. After leaving school, he worked as, amongst other things, a cinema manager, bodyguard, debt collector, fish and chip cook, travelling salesman, French teacher and all-in wrestler whilst attempting to succeed as a writer.

Gerald Kersh (26 August 1912 – 5 November 1968) was a British and later also American writer of novels and short stories.īorn in 1912, Kersh began to write at the age of eight. Mystery, horror, science fiction, fantasy, literary fiction

Guttersnipe by Gerald Kersh