Tough as Nails: The Complete Cases of Donahue From the Pages of Black Mask

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

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.

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

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 men, 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
.