A 1001 Midnights Review: FRANK GRUBER – Brass Knuckles.

A 1001 MIDNIGHTS Review by Bill Pronzini FRANK GRUBER – Brass Knuckles. Sherbourne, gardcover, 1966. Frank Gruber’s first novel, The French Key (1940), so moved critic William Lyon Phelps that he rhapsodized: “[It] is the best of 8,000 murder stories I have read.” One wonders (a) what sort of godawful mysteries Phelps had been reading all his life; and (b) if he was senile at the time he made this statement. The fact is, while The French Key may be an entertaining novel. it falls woefully short of being a masterpiece. Like all of Gruber’s novels, its prose shows the author’s pulp-magazine origins, the plot has some dubious motivation and other weak elements, and the whole thing suffers (as opposed to the works of many of Gruber’ s counterparts) from underwriting — scenes chopped off short of their potential, either through haste or lack of ability. Still and all, Gruber had a pulpster’s knack for telling a lightning-fast story, and for creating oddball characters and integrating them…