Ben Helm
Created by Bruno Fischer

A very popular P.I. of the late forties/early fifties. BEN HELM is rather unique, in that he's happily married, to Greta Murdock, an actress. Although licensed as a private investigator, Ben makes much of his living as a criminalogist, writing and lecturing in that filed. It's fortunate for us readers, then, that he believes in hands-on research. He's not your typical hardboiled, Hammeresque eye of the time, either, relying more on his wits than his fists, and he's more likely to reach for his pipe than his bottle, or his gun. Not that he packs heat, often, and when he does, it tends to be a small /32 automatic. Hell, Ben doesn't even like to be called a private eye, although that's exactly what he is, and a darn good one.

Writer Fischer wass one of the more prolific popular writers of the genre, starting out in the weird menace pulps back in the thirties (featuring "defective detectives" such as CALVIN KANE and BEN BRYN) and eventually moving into the paperback market of the fifties, where he wrote tons of great stand-alones, as well as several novels featuring detective RICK TRAIN, as well as Ben Helm.

NOVELS

• The Dead Men Grin (1945)
• More Deaths Than one (1947)
• The Restless Hands (1949)
• The Silent Dust (1950)
• The Paper Circle (1951; AKA Stripped for Murder)

SHORT STORIES

• "The Quiet Woman" (1954; also October 1962, MSMM as Death Attends Rehearsal)

Respectfully submitted by Kevin Burton Smith.

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