Bruno Fischer was born in Germany in 1908, the son of a grocer. His family emigrated to the United States in 1913. After high school, he attended the Rand School of Social Sciences, which was established by the American Socialist Party. Fischer married in 1934. He was a sports reporter, rewrite man and police reporter for the Long Island Daily Press from 1929-1931. He began writing fiction full-time in 1936, and went on to write hundreds of mystery, detective, and weird menace stories for just about every magazine under the sun, using both his own name and the pseudonymous Russell Gray. Fischer’s first hardcover mystery novel, So Much Blood, was published by Greystone Press in 1939. His primary series character, private investigator Ben Helm, first appeared in 1945 in The Dead Men Grin. Fischer left the pulps and hardcover fiction behind in the early 1950s, and in 1969 he gave up writing to assume the positions of executive editor of Macmillan's Collier Books and education editor of the Arco Publishing Company, both of which he held for over a decade.