Francis Galt, the Gold Fish, by Joseph Gollomb

Francis Galt, the Gold Fish, is one of the strangest characters in pulp and mystery fiction. And that’s saying something!

In the hell-bent, furious days of Pulp fiction’s golden age there were so many brilliant characters and strange stories that even avid readers of those early periods could not read them all. We all know about Doc and The Shadow, but there are so many other brilliant, but forgotten characters that are worthy of discovery. One of my favorite Pulp protagonists is one such lesser known but still brilliant and strange character who deserves our attention. The character’s name is Francis Galt, otherwise known as the Goldfish, and he is not a nice man.

Galt is the protagonist of several short stories in Dime Mystery Book magazine and three novels, The Portrait Invisible (1928), The Subtle Trail (1929) and The Curtain of Storm (1933).

Francis Galt was created by journalist and author Joseph Gollomb (1881-1950). Born in Russia, Gollomb’s family emigrated to the United States when he was a boy. Gollomb became a successful journalist and writer of fiction and non-fiction including a biography of Albert Schweitzer and a book about espionage titled Armies of Spies (1939).

Francis Galt, the Goldfish, was a strange and fascinating character, created by Gollomb to satisfy the reading public’s yearning for genius problem solvers. What makes the Goldfish stories so enjoyable is the nature of the character’s unique motivations and the hardboiled style of the prose. Galt wasn’t a detective interested in solving a crime, nor was he an adventurer intent on discovery or fortune. Instead, he was a twisted genius obsessively driven to investigate the perverse and pathological behaviors he witnessed in others.

In his excellent book The Encyclopedia of Pulp Characters Jess Nevins describes Galt as a “criminal psychologist”, and that description is true in every sense of that phrase. Not only is the Goldfish an expert in criminal psychology and human behavior, he commits every manner or crime himself in his investigations. Galt is obsessed with field research into abnormal psychology: the discovery of why the people he encounters behave in the strange ways that they do. Galt seeks out people who are experiencing extreme emotions and displaying aberrant behavior, usually because they are being victimized by a villain, or because of some hidden mystery.

This curiosity drives him like a demon. Every ounce of his being is focused on this pursuit of knowledge of human psychologies experiencing extreme feelings, and in his research he is not hampered by ethics, law, or empathy.

It is this motivation, and the way it molds Galt’s personality that makes his stories so fascinating and bizarre. Galt is a man of extraordinary physical and mental abilities. He is an expert in human psychology, a master of manipulation, and a formidable hand-to-hand fighter. He possesses an astonishing intellectual acuity and complete disregard for personal danger. The only thing he seems to fear is not having his curiosity satisfied. Like Sherlock Holmes, the Goldfish suffers from the trope of the exquisite pangs of boredom, but, unlike Holmes, Galt overcomes his boredom by seeking people to study and psychological problems to solve.

This obsession has led him down many strange paths, and his face and body are marked with the scars and stresses of his adventures. Despite his expertise in human psychology, he doesn’t really care about the people he is investigating, his only concern is to discover what drives them. Typically, the people he studies are victims of some criminal threat, which Galt unravels during his investigations, or the criminal themselves. He does not involve himself to help the innocent, his only goal is to satisfy his curiosity.

One further motivation for the character is a tragic romantic backstory common to pulp heroes in the early 20^th century, in his past he was rejected by a woman he loved because she believed that his career of unofficial psychological research was useless. At the end of each novel he sends her an anonymous gift, some souvenir of the adventure, which she receives with puzzlement. Talk about aberrant human behavior.

The nickname “Goldfish” was given to him when he was at university, where the other students referred to him as “…that queer Galt fish”, which became “Goldfish”. It’s appropriate that such a cold-blooded character wouldn’t have many friends, and, in fact, Galt doesn’t have any. In the stories his closest associate is a bizarre, bear-like character in a cloaked overcoat named Sadko. Sadko is a renegade doctor who performs illegal experiments on the human subjects that come his way, usually provided by Galt who captured some sadistic villain to use as a guinea pig.

It is a conceit of Galt’s  stories that the people he uses in his research are generally villains themselves, who deserve to come to a bad end. That these human guinea pigs are perpetrators of despicable crimes, doesn’t make the experimentation any less vile, but there we see the twisted justice of Galt’s world at work.

At the conclusion of the Goldfish stories, the hidden motivations of the mystery are revealed, the bad guys are punished, and the innocent or positive characters benefit from the Goldfish’s actions, even though Galt never intends to be a hero. And when I say that the bad guys are punished, I mean that they are really, really punished. They are usually jailed, physically beaten, or used by Galt to be the subject of some horrible, mind-bending experiment. At the moment the problem is solved, Galt loses interest in the situation and immediately goes in search of a new psychological mystery to explore, entirely abandoning the people he has helped.

The Galt stories are an interesting example of hardboiled fiction. The writing is spare and rigorous, and the plots move with a pleasing snap. The lean and evocative prose has a pace that reflects the nervous energy of Galt’s personality. Galt is obsessed with the tale’s main problem and the stories do not rest until the solution is revealed. The reader can feel Galt’s drive, and his insistent, indomitable will to attain his goal.

The world of the Goldfish stories is as bleak and tough as anything by Hammett or Cain. The story settings, like other hardboiled detective stories, range from the smoke-filled gambling dens of hard-eyed gangsters, to the luxurious penthouse homes of beautiful but troubled society dames. The stories look at the world with a clear-eyed and unsympathetic depictions of the motivations and reasons behind the behaviors of the characters.

There are characters who have what are ostensibly positive or “good” qualities, but in the end, they represent only moments of care and light in a cold world where no one’s motivations are clear, even to them. Throughout the stories there is a consistent vein of strangeness. While the characters move through recognizable environments like nightclubs and passenger trains, and generally behave as we’d expect people to behave, there is an underlying current of perversity that shows itself in the character’s inexplicable actions. It is these elements of perversity that the Goldfish is obsessed with ferreting out and understanding.

This is what separates the Galt stories from other hardboiled fiction. In other detective stories the protagonist is searching for the perpetrator of the crime or the black bird or some other McGuffin. The Goldfish stories, on the contrary, are driven by another purpose, a strange and subtle McGuffin. Galt’s obsession with discovering the psychological reason behind some strange behavior.

Note: My thanks to the FictionMags Index for information about publication history.