On an Odd Note

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Can there be a more ridiculous thing in the world than an introduction to a volume of Gerald Kersh’s fiction? There cannot. These are the first pages of On an Odd Note and you, reader, have already climbed the summit of the insane. If this book is in your hands, you know of the glory of Kersh’s prose, and so nothing I say matters. If this book isn’t in your hands then you’re not reading about Gerald Kersh, or your hands, right now, and I may as well stop typing.

Gerald Kersh was once famous. Now he’s not even obscure. One novel, Night and the City, remains fairly widely circulated, and that mostly on the strength of the first of its two film adaptations, which regularly makes various Best Film Noir lists in print and on the Internet. It’s a great film, but its greatness comes only from removing virtually everything of Kersh—his humor, his endless asides that lead the reader down primrose paths to the darkest of alleys, his hard-won close knowledge of the sport of wrestling (and the faux techniques of professional wrestling), the self-destructive interiority of his characters—and replacing it with neo-expressionist cinematography.

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