Albert Frederick Nussbaum - Novelist

Novelist

While running from the FBI, Nussbaum needed to explain why he seldom left his room: He bought himself a portable typewriter and presented himself as a writer. He read The Name of The Game is Death, a mystery crime novel by Dan J. Marlowe, a popular pulp fiction writer of the day. Nussbaum, using the name "Carl Fisher," called Marlowe’s agent and sent Marlowe letters praising the realness of the book. Marlowe and Nussbaum remained friends while Nussbaum was imprisoned. Marlowe encouraged Nussbaum to write and the two often collaborated - Nussbaum providing Marlowe with professional criminal techniques that added even more realism to Marlowe’s body of work. While still in prison, Nussbaum wrote film reviews for the Montreal-based film magazine Take One. He was paroled in the early 1970s, and lived with Marlowe, serving as his caretaker when Marlowe took ill. Nussbaum wrote a lot. He published as Al Nussbaum and at least a half-dozen pseudonyms. Nussbaum published many short stories that appeared in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazines and Alfred Hitchcock’s anthologies of short stories. Nussbaum published several novels - "Gypsy," the most well known, was published by Scholastic Press under the title "Motorcycle Racer." In the mid-1970s, Nussbaum wrote television scripts for "Switch," a CBS crime series featuring Robert Wagner and Eddie Albert. In the 1980s, Nussbaum put on workshops for mystery writers at USC, and he was elected president of a Southern California Chapter of the Mystery Writer’s Association. Albert Fredrick Nussbaum died in 1996.