Born in 1912, Kersh began to write at the age of eight. After leaving school, he worked as, amongst other things, a cinema manager, bodyguard, debt collector, fish and chip cook, travelling salesman, French teacher and all-in wrestler whilst attempting to succeed as a writer. Kersh's first novel, Jews Without Jehovah, an autobiographical tale of growing up poor and Jewish, was published in 1934. Kersh, however, had not sufficiently concealed the identities of some of the characters, and a member of his family sued for libel; as a result, the book was quickly withdrawn. Night and the City, was more successful and has been filmed twice, with Richard Widmark in 1950 and then in 1992 with Robert De Niro in the lead role. Kersh was drafted into the army during the Second World War, served in the Coldstream Guards and ended up writing for the Army Film Unit. Despite apparently deserting, Kersh ended up in France during the liberation, where he discovered that many of his French relatives had ended up in Hitler's extermination camps. After the war, Kersh continued to enjoy commercial success, mainly because of his short stories, in genres such as horror, science fiction, fantasy and the detective story. From about the mid-1950s onwards, he started to suffer from poor health and financial hardship. However, Kersh continued to publish novels and stories, some of which were commercially and critically successful. In 1958, his short story "The Secret of the Bottle", originally published in The Saturday Evening Post, received an Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America. The following year he became a U.S citizen.
Style
In the late 1930s, Kersh said that his novels published to that date "haven't really been fiction at all" and "contained an irreducible minimum of made-up-stuff". His novels typically depict the low life and eccentric characters of London, implying that they are written from Kersh's own experience and are semi-autobiographical. Night and the City has a plot involving professional wrestling, and in Fowler's End the protagonist is a cinema manager/chucker-out, both roles featuring in Kersh's non-writing career.
Critical reputation
As Kersh's popularity did not survive his death in 1968, it is not easy to find copies of most of his works. In recent years, however, he has received some critical attention, and SF author Harlan Ellison stated that Kersh is his favourite author. Writing to a fan, Ellison recommended Kersh, writing, "you will find yourself in the presence of a talent so immense and compelling, that you will understand how grateful and humble I felt merely to have been permitted to associate myself with his name as editor." The protagonist of his short story "Whatever Happened to Corporal Cuckoo?" appears in the third chapter of '. There, the character identifies himself as "Colonel Cuckoo". Kersh is one of eight writers commemorated in Compass Road, a watch design by Crispin Jones and writer Iain Sinclair. Kersh was listed #9 in ''Time Outs "Top 30 chart of London's most erotic writers".
Works
A prolific writer, he has been described as "hammering out twenty novels, twenty collections of short stories and thousands of articles in different publications, hacking pseudonymously as Piers England, Waldo Kellar, Mr Chickery, Joe Twist, George Munday, and others", some of his notable publications being:
