Frederick Nebel

• Born: November 3, 1903
• Birthplace: Staten Island, New York
• Died: May 3, 1967
• Place of death: Laguna Beach, California

Type of Plot: Hard-boiled

Principal Series: Captain Steve MacBride and reporter Kennedy, 1928-1936; Donny Donahue, 1930-1935; Jack Cardigan, 1931-1937

Contribution

Although Frederick Nebel published three novels, two of which have to do with crime, his major contribution was the large number of hard-boiled short stories he wrote between 1926 and 1937. Along with Dashiell Hammett, Carroll John Daly, Raoul Whitfield, Erle Stanley Gardner, and a few others, he was one of the writers closely associated with the magazine Black Mask under the editorship of Joseph Shaw. Although his later decision to abandon crime fiction in favor of slicker, mass-market journalism has led to his being almost completely forgotten, Nebel should be considered one of the seminal figures in the development of the hard-boiled style. Grimy, realistic, graphically violent, and often pitiless in their contempt for human frailty, his best stories merit the same serious literary consideration given to those of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler.

Biography

Frederick Nebel was born Louis Frederick Nebel on November 3, 1903, in Staten Island, New York. He dropped out of school at the age of fifteen to work on the New York waterfront. In 1920, he traveled to northern Canada, where he helped his granduncle operate a farm. In 1922, he returned to New York, found a job as a railroad brakeman, and began to write about some of the things he had seen in his travels.

Having sold several tales of life in the Canadian backwoods to Northwest Stories in 1925, a year later Nebel sold his first story to Black Mask. Thus began an association that during the next ten years would make him one of the major influences on the development of hard-boiled detective fiction and would result in a close friendship with Dashiell Hammett. In 1930, he married Dorothy Blank, whom he had first met during a visit to Paris two years earlier, and settled down in their Ridgefield, Connecticut, home to write steadily for Black Mask and other pulp magazines such as Action Stories, Danger Trail, and Sea Stories.

In 1933, his first novel, Sleepers East, was published, and its brisk sales and lucrative screen-rights optioning alerted Nebel to the possibilities of other markets. He obtained a literary agent, wrote two more popular novels in the next three years, and began to submit his work to such slick periodicals as Cosmopolitan and McCall’s. During the 1940’s and 1950’s, he also penned a number of television scripts, and he made a brief return to mystery fiction with the ten stories he wrote for Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine between 1956 and 1962.

In 1958, Nebel’s failing health necessitated a move to California, and in the following year he and his wife settled in Laguna Beach. His last story was published in 1962, although during the remaining five years of his life he worked intermittently on a novel that he was unable to finish. On May 3, 1967, three days after a severe cerebral hemorrhage, he died at the age of sixty-three, an obscure yet significant figure in the development of the classic hard-boiled detective story.

Analysis

Frederick Nebel sold his first mystery tale to Black Mask in 1926, and during the next two years eleven other stories of his appeared in the magazine. In 1928, editor Joseph Shaw encouraged him to develop a series character to whose adventures readers could regularly look forward, and Nebel obliged by creating the team of Captain Steve MacBride and reporter Kennedy.

“Winter Kill”

Richmond City is the mythical community in which MacBride and Kennedy operate, and like Dashiell Hammett’s Poisonville or Raymond Chandler’s Bay City, it is scarred by political corruption and police graft. MacBride is an honest cop who copes as best he can with this situation, but it is the hard-drinking Kennedy whose irreverence toward authority allows him to think and act in ways that help solve MacBride’s most difficult cases.

Although the atmosphere of impending violence and general social decay that characterizes the hard-boiled idiom is an important element in the MacBride-Kennedy stories, the stories also feature a sophisticated humor rarely found in the genre. Kennedy’s shenanigans often transcend mere wisecracking and approach the surreal zaniness of the Marx Brothers’ films. Thus, in the story “Winter Kill,” Kennedy wanders into a bereaved man’s den, becomes interested in a pair of snowshoes, and astounds everyone by asking if they are for sale. At the conclusion of the narrative, after having solved the case by following a hunch, Kennedy gets drunk and is arrested for trying to snowshoe down a busy street. As MacBride listens to this latest exploit with stolid calm, the arresting officer supplies a downbeat punch line by adding that Kennedy “can’t snowshoe worth a damn.”

“Take It and Like It”

Nebel’s } clever blending of suspense, action, and comedy make the MacBride-Kennedy stories models of their kind. In “Take It and Like It,” the plot begins in medias res, as Kennedy’s drunken quest for a highly recommended “chili joint” is interrupted by an encounter with an even more intoxicated young woman. He takes her to his room, puts her to bed, resumes his search for the restaurant, and eventually returns home to find her murdered. As the prime suspect, he must avoid the police at the same time that he pursues the murderer, and the ensuing multiple-chase narrative is hilariously punctuated with such comic set pieces as this bizarre mock confession:

“What,” said Flannery, “was your real reason for killing her? I mean the one thing that finally drove you to it?”

Kennedy sighed. “She did not know how to make a Martini.”

“Hell, he’s completely screwy!” Rube Wilson said.

Kennedy cried: “I killed her because she was too beautiful for this world. This world is so crass and designing, and so full of filth and tragedy. I killed her because—well, because she was a flower, a fair flower.”

If the MacBride-Kennedy stories emphasize the humorous possibilities of hard-boiled fiction’s general irreverence toward authority and convention, Nebel’s Donny Donahue tales are squarely in the tough-guy tradition. Donahue is a law unto himself, and he pursues his prey with a relentless concentration that recognizes neither physical obstacles nor ethical constraints.

“Rough Justice”

“Rough Justice” offers a typical example of Donahue’s modus operandi. Assigned to recover a stolen ring, he treats the world of cops and criminals as a hornet’s nest that when vigorously shaken will yield up his quarry. Donahue’s attitude toward the series of murders and maimings that results is strictly pragmatic: Whatever helps him find the ring is good, and anything else—even the shooting of a police officer—is irrelevant. At the conclusion of the story, with his task accomplished, Donahue lets the man who stole the ring escape in a characteristic display of his contempt for the letter of the law. As he has explained earlier in the story, “My job is to get the ring, and not the killer of a cop that didn’t watch his tricks.”

“Red Pavement”

If Donahue often operates outside the law, he does, however, have his own peculiar kind of sentimental morality. In “Red Pavement,” his initial involvement in a case of murder among thieves occurs when he helps a drunk into a taxi. When the drunk is gunned down, Donahue feels compelled to help the victim’s naïve girlfriend. After ensuring that the killers receive their just deserts, however, the girlfriend double-crosses everyone in a way that only confirms Donahue’s misanthropic view of human nature: “When you got right down to it, the girl as a personality meant nothing to him; she was significant only for the fact that her death would bring the cops down on him.”

The sardonic wit of reporter Kennedy and the cynical ruthlessness of Donny Donahue are perhaps reflected in the personality of Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe; it is quite possible that Nebel provided Chandler with some of his inspiration. Although Chandler made no formal acknowledgment of any debt to Nebel’s example, he did state that he read Black Mask’s hard-boiled fiction with a scholar’s thoroughness. Thus, it is likely that Nebel exerted some degree of influence on one of the most famous characters spawned by the genre.

Nebel, for his part, had been impressed by Dashiell Hammett’s Continental Op, whose combination of intelligence and toughness set him apart from such essentially thuglike Black Mask detectives as Carroll John Daly’s Race Williams. Hammett and Nebel were close friends and drinking companions who respected each other’s work, and both would eventually abandon the hard-boiled idiom for greener commercial pastures. Nebel and Hammett expanded the conventions of hard-boiled fiction by demonstrating that a lone wolf had better be a very intelligent wolf, although they also served up enough action and violence to keep even the dimmest pulp-magazine readers satisfied.

When writing for other pulp periodicals, Nebel was forced to adhere more closely to the genre’s norms. The forty-three Jack Cardigan stories he wrote for Dime Detective are much more conventional and much less interesting than his work for Black Mask, as “Murder by Mail” all too effectively demonstrates.

Dime Detective wanted Nebel to write at novelette length, which meant an approximately fifteen-thousand-word manuscript divided into five chapters. That was about half again as long as his usual Black Mask story, and he made up the difference by padding the narrative with superfluous verbiage: Each new character receives a full paragraph of description rather than a few concise but telling details, and events to date are periodically summarized in speeches by Cardigan. Things also tend to happen in multiples, so that if Cardigan takes a gun out of a suspect’s right hand, it is more than likely that the latter’s left hand will shortly be holding some variety of weaponry.

“Murder by Mail”

“Murder by Mail” exhibits all of these qualities while putting Cardigan through a complicated and not very believable plot concerning a murder and a postal swindle. Even his wisecracks about the police, one of the staple topics of hard-boiled humor, seem less than inspired: “Well, I always wondered what happened to cops when they became lieutenants, and now I know: they put their brains away in mothballs.” The Cardigan stories do permit their female characters a greater degree of action and independence than is usually the case in the genre, but this is virtually the only positive quality of a series that seldom exhibits anything more than Nebel’s professional competence as a prolific producer for the pulps.

Sleepers East and Fifty Roads to Town

Nebel’s first novel, Sleepers East, is a smoothly constructed thriller set on a passenger train, with political conflict rather than criminal intent the dramatic spring of the narrative. Both here and in his next novel, the diffuse family saga But Not the End (1934), private detectives play minor roles as sleazy, immoral underlings; the contrast with his pulp series heroes accurately represents the difference between his magazine and his book-length fiction. His final novel, Fifty Roads to Town (1936), concerns a small town’s reaction to a mysterious disappearance, but Nebel undercuts the possibility of suspense by dwelling at inordinate length on the problems of minor characters. Nebel’s novels are written in a polite, chatty, and often glibly superficial style that bears little resemblance to his hard-boiled fiction, although it does demonstrate how easy it was for him to switch markets and write for the slick magazines.

In assessing Nebel’s role in the development of the hard-boiled idiom, it is probably best to view him as a necessary but by no means sufficient force in the transition from the suburban gardens of genteel British sleuths to the mean streets of the American private eye. He was a significant member of that small group of Black Mask writers who made its 1926-1936 issues a gold mine of evocative hard-boiled writing. His abandonment of the genre for more lucrative markets, however, and the fact that only one book of selections from his pulp fiction was ever published ensured that he would always be one of the more obscure figures in the development of the vivid, violent, and still-vital world of the hard-boiled detective story.

Principal Series Characters:

• Captain Steve MacBride , a police officer, and
• Kennedy , a newspaper reporter, form an unlikely but effective team of crime fighters. MacBride is the tough but intelligent cop who supplies the muscle, and Kennedy is the heavy-drinking, irreverent, and intuitive oddball who usually sets the investigation on the right trail.
• Donny Donahue , an investigator with the Inter-State Detective Agency, is a former cop who was kicked off the force when he refused to sanction bribery and corruption. He is an extremely tough and cynical man, capable of both quixotic acts of altruism and savage retributive violence. He dispenses his own brand of justice without worrying about legal technicalities.
• Jack Cardigan , a private investigator for the Cosmo Agency in St. Louis, is a somewhat more conventional version of Donny Donahue. Where the latter makes his own rules and fights his way through to the truth, Cardigan’s cases tend to emphasize the causal chain in the process of detection, though with plenty of action and abrasive dialogue.

Bibliography

Breu, Christopher. Hard-Boiled Masculinities. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005. Study of the representation of masculinity in hard-boiled detective fiction that sheds light on Nebel’s works.

Goulart, Ron. Cheap Thrills: An Informal History of the Pulp Magazine. New Rochelle, N.Y.: Arlington House, 1972. Discusses the success and evolution of pulp fiction, focusing on the most famous characters to come from the genre, as well as such great pulp magazines as Black Mask. Provides perspective on Nebel.

Haining, Peter. The Classic Era of American Pulp Magazines. Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2000. Looks at Nebel’s contribution to the pulps and the relationship of pulp fiction to its more respectable literary cousins.

Horsley, Lee. The Noir Thriller. New York: Palgrave, 2001. Scholarly, theoretically informed study of the thriller genre. Includes readings of Nebel’s Six Deadly Games, Sleepers East, and The Adventures of Cardigan.

Lewis, Dave. “The Backbone of Black Mask.” Clues 2 (Fall/Winter, 1981): 118-127. Profile of Nebel emphasizing his indispensable role in Black Mask’s publication.

Madden, David, ed. Tough Guy Writers of the Thirties. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1968. Profile of the hard-boiled pulp writers who made “tough guy” detectives famous. Provides context for understanding Nebel.

Nolan, William F. The Black Mask Boys: Masters in the Hard-Boiled School of Detective Fiction. New York: W. Morrow, 1985. Profile of Nebel and such compatriots as Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and Erle Stanley Gardner.