Tough as Nails: The Complete Cases of Donahue From the Pages of Black Mask
Frederick Nebel
Illustrations by Arthur Rodman Bowker
Edited & Compiled by Rob Preston
Introduction by Will Murray
The Black Mask Library
Series Editor
Keith Alan Deutsch
Managing Editor
Boris Dralyuk
Acknowledgements
Thanks to
John Benson, William G. Contento, John Desbin, Keith Alan Deutsch, Stefan Dziemianowicz, Doug Ellis, Larry Estep, Ron Goulart, Perry Grayson, Doug Greene, Paul Herman, Rich Kahl, Timothy Lantz, Dave Lewis, Steve Lewis, Denny Lien, John Locke, Joel Lyzeck, Ken McDaniel, Walker Martin, Will Murray, Lynn Myers, Rick Ollerman, Bill Pronzini, Dan Roy, Kevin Burton Smith, Bob Wardzinski, Robert Weinberg, Robert Wheadon, and John Wooley.
The Publishers wish to express many thanks and much appreciation to Rob Preston.
Rob preston would also like to acknowledge the following resources in compiling the frederick nebel bibliography:
E.R. Hagemann’s A Comprehensive Index to Black Mask, Michael Cook & Steve Miller’s Mystery, Detective and Espionage Fiction, Leonard Robbins’ The Pulp Magazine Index, The Fictionmags online index, and Rara-Avis mailing list.
Contents
Introduction
Rough Justice
The Red-Hots
Gun Thunder
Get a Load of This
Spare the Rod
Pearls Are Tears
Death’s Not Enough
Shake-Up
He Could Take It
The Red Web
Red Pavement
Save Your Tears
Song and Dance
Champions Also Die
Ghost of a Chance
Publication History
Bibliography of the Works of Frederick Louis Nebel
Introduction
Will Murray
It was a tough time. It was a very tough time.
The Great Depression of the 1930s fostered some very hard-boiled writers. Dashiell Hammett. Raymond Chandler. Paul Cain. Horace McCoy. Others too numerous to mention.
One of the greatest of these, and most overlooked, was Frederick Lewis Nebel (1903–1967). Like Hammett, Nebel came out of the Roaring ’20s, specifically the period when the sleepy pulp fiction field exploded. New publishers, new magazines abounded. Prosperity drove those twenty and twenty-five cent magazines into circulation heights never to be seen again.
Nebel was one of the coming writers for Fiction House, an upstart new pulp publisher that rode prosperity like a cowboy rides a bucking bronco. Their editorial motto was “Action stripped to the bone.”
Young and ambitious, Nebel had skipped college and knocked around the world some—which was the preferred background for the aspiring pulpster. A teenage stint as a farmhand in his great uncle’s homestead in the Canadian north woods gave him all the background he needed to break into Fiction House’s North-West Stories, so-called because it featured tales of the Wild West and the Northwest both. It was rugged he-man adventure, and the reading public ate up these tales of strapping two-fisted outdoorsmen.
Nebel stuck to the Northwestern side of North-West Stories early on. Before long, he was spinning yarns for Fiction House’s stable of thick magazines, creating characters like the Driftin’ Kid for Lariat and hosts of others for Action Stories and Air Stories. He was still in his early 20s.
Writing about one of his early Yukon heroes, Nebel once observed:
This may sound ancient in these days of ultra-modernism. But rough men, elemental men, men who could hold a grudge until doomsday—they are the men that built empires and tramped a broad road ’round the world.
That was the kind of pulp-paper hero Fred Nebel espoused. And on which he made his early reputation.
In the summer of 1926, a new editor took control of Black Mask, a Fiction House rival that mixed detective, western and adventure stories. Joseph Thompson Shaw sought to refine his new charge, already featuring the popular works of Carroll John Daly, Erle Stanley Gardner and Dashiell Hammett. The ball was rolling. Shaw had only to guide it forward.
Fred Nebel climbed aboard that year. He had contributed only one story prior to Shaw, “The Breaks of the Game.” Soon, he would become one of the magazine’s most reliable and prolific contributors. Maybe it was the excitement that was growing in the magazine’s pages. Or perhaps in Shaw, Nebel discovered a kindred spirit.
For Shaw wished to offer the American public a new kind of hero. One, he wrote, “…who knows the song of a bullet, the soft slithering of a swift-drawn knife, the feel of hard fists, the call of courage.” That description was standard pulp, if somewhat poetic. Shaw aimed to take pulp heroism to a new level.
In the post World War I era, readers were shucking off the old conventions. Nowhere was this more true than in the moribund detective field. Where the public had been satisfied with eccentric deductive geniuses, the amateur criminologist who ran rings around police and professional crooks alike, now male readers wanted raw meat. Some had known the horrors of war. Others had only read about it. But they demanded more raw realism in their escape fiction.
Carroll John Daly had been giving it to them since 1922 through his super-violent private detective, Race Williams. Dashiell Hammett tempered that approached to a realistic level that defined this new school of “hard-boiled” writing. Joe Shaw believed that the cool, tough but dispassionate Hammett approach was the future of the detective field. So he set out to transform Black Mask.
Out went the last of the old formula detective heroes. From then on, only real detectives—whether official or private—would be admitted to Black Mask’s austere pages. Newspapermen, lawyers, professional adventurers and other tough types were also permitted. The only other qualification: they had to be two-fisted.
As Shaw described the Black Mask ideal, “He is vigorous-minded; hard, in a square man’s hardness; hating unfairness, trickery, injustice, cowardly underhandedness; standing for a square deal and a fair show in little or big things, and willing to fight for them; not squeamish or prudish, but clean, admiring the good in man and woman; not sentimental in a gushing sort of way, but valuing true emotion; not hysterical, but responsive to the thrill of danger, the stirring exhilaration of clean, swift, hard action—and always pulling for the right guy to come out on top.”
In this groundbreaking new writing environment, Fred Nebel fit right in. He had lived, and he could write. How much of the lean Fiction House approach to action writing infiltrated Black Mask is unclear. But Nebel was a natural.
Fred Nebel might have become only one of Black Mask’s regulars, like the half-forgotten Roger Torrey or the utterly neglected Ed Lybeck, but for the fact that Dashiell Hammett was not long for Black Mask. Hardcover fame and Hollywood glory would soon beckon him to better money and markets.
Nebel first emerged as a significant voice with the first installment of an extended story, “The Crimes of Richmond City,” which introduced Police Capt. Steve MacBride. “Raw Law” kicked off the semi-serial in the September 1928 issue.
A regular series followed, which only grew in popularity when Nebel expanded the role of the inebriated comic-relief reporter, Jack Kennedy of the Free Press. Soon, Fred Nebel was one of Joe Shaw’s stable of regulars.
As contributor Tom Curry once observed, “Shaw was one of those editors who believed in using staff writers rather than buying whatever the mails brought in. He picked eight or ten me
n, and bought from them steadily…. Shaw gave his writers the rein, let them do the writing while he did the editing. He had to cut out crudities, and such; that was only right. Hammett wrote one brand of stuff, Gardner another, Daly a third, Nebel his own; and Curry had his line. There was real variety in the magazine. It was refreshing.”
Then Shaw lost Dashiell Hammett completely in 1930. Hammett’s departure left an unfillable void that nevertheless had to be filled.
To replace the departed Continental Op, Fred Nebel introduced “Tough Dick” Donahue in “Rough Justice.” The new series kicked off with the November 1930 issue. It was the final story in that issue. Hammett’s last Op yarn, “Death and Company,” led off that same issue. It was as if Joe Shaw was deliberately orchestrating the passing of the hard-boiled torch.
Cut of very different fabric than the Op, yet comfortably in the same sub-genre of shady-side-of-the-law lawman, Donahue is a disgraced ex-New York City police detective working for the Interstate Detective Agency as private investigator. Familiarly, he was called “Donny.” It was Shaw who called him “Tough Dick” Donahue in the story blurbs. Nebel never did.
“Rough Justice” introduces the streetwise Irishman out of his element, in a sweltering St. Louis. The tale is not merely a prime example of Fred Nebel’s brittle approach to hard-boiled storytelling, but showcases one of his favorite fictional devices—the use of weather as a dramatic accompaniment—if not counterpoint—to the action. This may have been a reaction to Fiction House’s editorial strictures. Its editors told their writers: “No weather reports.” Freed of that restriction, Nebel raised meteorological atmospherics—whether it be heat, hail or thunderstorms—to high art. “Rough Justice” is a prime example.
A three-part storyline followed. Nebel wrote new Donahue yarns in bursts of three or four, which Shaw invariably scheduled in consecutive issues. Typically, many of them followed the Hammett formula of novelettes presented as connected stories. Not exactly serials, they allowed for better plot development without violating the Depression-era editorial taboo against serials.
Ironically, the series almost ended prematurely with the seventh tale, “Death’s Not Enough”, when a new rival to Black Mask, Popular Publication’s Dime Detective, offered Nebel four cents a word to inaugurate a new P.I. series, featuring Jack Cardigan of the Cosmos Detective Agency. He was virtually a simulacrum of Donahue, except that Cardigan operated out of St. Louis.
After a year, Nebel relented and new Donahue stories began appearing in Black Mask, starting with “Shake-Up.” They continued until 1933, when Nebel again retired “Donny” Donahue with “Champions Also Die.”
With the Depression making life hard and ordinary people even harder, the hard-boiled characterization that was so refreshing in the ’20s seemed triply appropriate in the 1930s. It was as if Joe Shaw and his writers had been ahead of their time and hard times had caught up with them.
In his laconic style, hard-boiled characters who could be tough yet breezy, honest but also semi-scrupulous, Fred Nebel was Hammett’s natural heir. Some readers preferred him to Hammett. And unlike some failed Black Mask writers, like James H.S. Moynahan (of whom Shaw once said, “Jim is so far wrong that his machinery creaks and groans”), Nebel was no Hammett imitator, but an authentic voice in his own right.
That he never achieved Hammett’s stature was a matter of professional choice. In 1933, with Fiction House temporarily out of business and other pulp magazines folding under the great groaning weight of the deepening Depression, Nebel broke into hardcover with Sleeper’s East. New novels emerged from his typewriter in 1934 and 1935.
Then Nebel succumbed to the lure of the slicks. The money was better than what the hardcover houses paid. The chances of a sale to Hollywood were about equal, or better. The slick circulations were also suffering. Older, more expensive contributors were being cast aside in an austerity move. Seasoned pulp scribes were sought to bring in new readers. Collier’s and Redbook opened their doors to Nebel’s work. It would be only a matter of time before he cracked the top slick market, The Saturday Evening Post.
Still, loyalty kept Nebel contributing to Black Mask. Kennedy and MacBride continued their cockeyed adventures. And pulping for Dime Detective was nearly as lucrative as slicking for Redbook.
Yet the indefatigable Donahue again refused to perish. A final case straggled out in 1935. A close reading of “Ghost of a Chance” however, proves conclusively that this is a rejected Cardigan story. Donahue is said to be working for the Cosmos Detective Agency, not Interstate.
Fred Nebel continued the Kennedy and MacBride stories until Joe Shaw’s abrupt departure from Black Mask in August 1936. Ironically, Nebel’s final submission was rejected by Black Mask’s publisher over Shaw’s objections in these final months. Its title is unknown, but it could have been a last Donahue, one supposes.
Again demonstrating deep loyalty to Shaw, Nebel severed all relations with Black Mask. He was all but out of the pulps in 1937.
After that, Frederick Lewis Nebel was a slick man. He never looked back. Even when Joe Shaw assembled his historic Hard-Boiled Omnibus in 1946, Nebel steadfastly refused to allow one of his best Kennedy and MacBride stories to be reprinted in its pages, essentially stifling his own literary posterity. Essentially, he turned his back on the genre that made his name, and it likewise returned the favor.
In a letter dated December 8, 1945, Nebel gave his reasons:
The reason why I don’t want to see my old Black Mask stuff between boards is because I think it served its purpose well when it was first published but I honestly cannot see what purpose it would serve now. These times have moved fast. The stories, published between ten and fifteen years ago, seem now to be dated. The very sense of timeliness that made them good does not, I think, make them so good now. I can work up no enthusiasm.
Shaw pleaded with Nebel to reconsider:
I’m in one tough spot,” he wrote. “Simon & Schuster have asked me to write an introduction as to what made Black Mask and its recognized distinctive style click. Well, that’s the story of you and Dash, particularly, and Ray Chandler when he came along later. It isn’t my story—I never ‘discovered’ an author; he discovered himself. I never ‘made’ an author. He made himself. And you and Dash made that first distinctive style… How the hell am I going to tell about it if you are not there?
But Fred Nebel stood as firm as one of his pulp protagonists.
While Nebel later relented, permitting a half-dozen Donahue tales to be reprinted in the 1950 collection, Six Deadly Dames, he had already been left behind, a fading memory in the minds of his readers, while Hammett, Chandler and others went on to become celebrated, then legendary.
Fred Nebel belongs equally in that august pantheon. Joe Shaw put it this way in 1945: “Every worthwhile editor in the country knows you were one of the highlights in creating that distinctive type and style, along with Dash and Ray; a pretty good triumvirate in any man’s language.”
With this complete collection of “Tough Dick” Donahue’s cases, perhaps at last he will.
Rough Justice
A hard-boiled, fighting dick trails his man through the dangerous by-ways of St. Louis’ underworld.
Chapter I
Donahue came in through the door from the outer office and stood with his hat in one hand, using the other hand to mop his face with a wrinkled handkerchief. He was a big lanky man with black hair, deep-set dark eyes, a long jaw and a long straight nose. He wore a lightweight dark gray suit, no vest, a white oxford shirt with soft collar attached, and a blue crepe tie. He looked hot and uncomfortable and there were two lines attesting to that between his rather wiry eyebrows.
“You Stein?” he asked with half a grumble.
The small dapper bald man behind the shiny oak desk nodded and the motion of his head made the daylight flash on his horn-rimmed spectacles in a way that for a moment hid his eyes.
“I’m Donahue.”
Stein said, “Oh, yes. I had a
wire from Hinkle.”
“Here’s a letter,” said Donahue as he crossed to the desk.
He sat down in an arm-chair facing Stein while Stein tore open the letter and read a few lines.
Stein nodded and said, “Oh, yes.” He folded the letter, laid it on the desk and crossing his hands on the desk said, in a gentler tone, “Yes—yes, indeed.”
Donahue was fanning himself with his straw hat. He saw a water-cooler in a corner beyond Stein’s right shoulder. He said, “It’s hot,” and got up and went to the water-cooler. He drew out a glass of water, tasted it, carried the glass back to the chair and sat down again. He looked squarely at Stein, took a long draught, said, “Ah,” and put the glass down on the desk. He smacked his lips and said, “Ah, that’s good. St. Louis is not a burg for a cold-weather guy.” His tawny face, which had been lowering, gradually brightened, and suddenly he smiled, showing long hard teeth.
Stein smiled back at him. Stein’s smile was not spontaneous. It did not reveal his teeth because his lips did not part. It was a gentle, fixed, surface smile not particularly friendly.
Donahue said, leaning forward, “I suppose Hinkle just introduced me. He said you’d be a lot of help. We’ve got something hot, and of course you’ll be on hand if I get in trouble. But aside from that, he said you’d see I met the right guys.”
“Of course,” said Stein. “But just what sort of right guys do you want to meet?”
“A cop that can be smeared. A cop that knows this burg up, down and across—and”—he lowered his hard blunt voice—“a cop that’ll keep his jaw shut after he’s smeared and stay out of the way. No harness bull. A bigger guy.”
Stein said, “Anybody with you?”
“No. This is a lone tail and no small fry.”
“Did Hinkle say how much you’re to spend?”
Donahue shook his head. “No. He said you’d reason that out. If you spend too much, you’ll argue with him. All I want is a cop in the know, and he’s not going to know too much about what I’m after.”
Tough as Nails: The Complete Cases of Donahue From the Pages of Black Mask Page 1