On Frederick Nebel, plus who was the best Black Mask-era writer after Hammett and Chandler?

Read Frederick Nebel's Black Mask stories, and you're apt to notice two things: 1) How good Nebel was, and 2) How far short he fell of Dashiell Hammett, his friend and Black Mask predecessor.

On the one hand, Nebel's prose is not always, pace an admiring introduction, "as fresh today as it was in the 1930s."  It can't be, not filled as it is with "clipped, "chided," or even "gritted"  rather than "said."  That method of jazzing up prose wears decidedly less well today than when Black Maskers routinely indulged it.

On the other, the wit, the pace, the plotting, and some of the descriptions remain fresh. This little word picture, for instance, matches a clumsily archaic job title with a sardonic observation that would not be out of place in Hammett: "District Leader Skoog, nursing a bottle of Cointreau and trying to give the impression he had a refined taste."

Photos by your humble shooter, Peter Rozovsky

That's from "Ten Men From Chicago," one of Nebel's many stories that paired Capt. Steve MacBride and Kennedy of the Free Press (though Kennedy, an alcohol-sodden sounding board, conscience, and comic foil to MacBride in some of the stories, has little to do in this one). Another bit from the same 1930 story shows that Nebel could match the era's best when it came to observational wisecracks:

"Sergeant Otto Bettdecken sat at the desk in the central room eating a frankfurter-on-roll, A clock ticked on the wall behind him. Bettdecken was a large man, with fat rosy cheeks and heavy jowls that overlapped his tight standing uniform collar. From time to time he raised a bottle of home-brew from behind the desk, cast searching eyes around the large room, and took a generous swallow. After each swallow he sighed with that profound air of a man serenely at peace with the world and thankful for the small creature comforts which it bestows upon mankind—and especially police sergeants."

That would not have been out of place in Hammett's first story about the Continental Op, "Arson Plus."  That Hammett's story appeared seven years before Nebel's makes Hammett's accomplishment all the more impressive without, however, detracting from Nebel's.

Now, here's your question: Who is the best hard-boiled crime writer of the 1920s, '30s, and '40s other than Hammett and Raymond Chandler? And why?

© Peter Rozovsky 2015

Frederick Nebel

I've been reading stories from three series the prolific Frederick Nebel wrote for Black Mask and Dime Detective in the 1920s and ‘30s, and one result, aside from my enjoying the stories, has been some thoughts about the demands of writing for a monthly or weekly magazine.

I'd previously read some of Nebel's MacBride and Kennedy stories, featuring police Capt. Steve MacBride and his ubiquitous bane and sidekick, the alcohol-sodden reporter Kennedy of the Free Press. Tough Dick Donahue, a private-investigator Nebel creation who came along a couple of years after MacBride and Kennedy, had a reporter sidekick of his own named Libbey. But Nebel came up with the nice trick of making Libbey a more annoying character than Kennedy, and thus added a bit of variety while satisfying the public's taste for drunken newsmen.

The weekly and monthly pulps are long since dead, and with them, presumably, some of the conflicting pressure on authors to keep things fresh from story to story while at the same time maintaining the formula that holds a series together. Today’s closest counterpart to the pulps is probably weekly television, where the creators of, say, Law & Order, might jiggle the camera a bit more or less one week, or have Sam Waterston and gang vary slightly the pitch in which they delivered their somber, issue-of-the-week headlines.

Even though the pulps are gone, series are still a staple of crime fiction. How do authors change things up even while they stick to the series formula?

© Peter Rozovsky 2011