My tenses are balled up, but my heart's in the right place

I have been trying to put this post together since January. I hope somebody reads it before the weekend.

So over Christmas when derspatchel and I were staying at my parents' house, I needed something to read as always and right there on the window seat was Otto Penzler's The Black Lizard Big Book of Black Mask Stories (2010). The title is not exaggerating. The paperback is about the size of a healthy volume of the OED and almost as slangy. I enjoyed the original serialized version of Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon (1929) and Ramon Decolta's Rainbow Diamonds (1931), but I was really struck by a short story called "Doors in the Dark" (1933) by Frederick Nebel. I'd heard of the series it belonged to. I decided to see how many of the stories were available these days.

Over the last weekend of the old year and the first weekend of the new one, I read my way through all thirty-seven novelettes about John X. Kennedy of the Free Press and Captain Stephen J. MacBride of Richmond City, originally published in the legendary pulp magazine Black Mask between 1928 and 1936 and recently collected in four sequential volumes: Raw Law: The Complete Cases of MacBride & Kennedy Volume 1, 1928–30 (2013), Shake-Down: The Complete Cases of MacBride & Kennedy Volume 2, 1930–33 (2013), Too Young to Die: The Complete Cases of MacBride & Kennedy Volume 3, 1933–35 (2014), and Winter Kill: The Complete Cases of MacBride & Kennedy Volume 4, 1935–36 (2014). The first volume was an experiment; when the remaining three came in to Porter Square Books, I read them straight through in two nights. Immediately afterward I tried to write about the stories, got a couple of thousand words in, and imploded in a puff of citation. This time around I've tried to cut down on the parentheses. Fictional and dysfunctional as he may be, Kennedy had better appreciate the lengths I go to for him and really interesting pulp.

To be fair, the first volume—roughly the first two years of the series—is only good pulp. The first five stories are sometimes grouped under the title "The Crimes of Richmond City" and that's exactly what you get. You have honest cops and crooked cops and political bosses and bootleggers and raids and murders and punches and graft and guns. Most of the characters are hardboiled types, ethnic stereotypes included. The plots are violent and fast-moving and tend to solve their crimes at the last minute, often by convenience rather than sleuthwork; the prose is chunky and vivid and occasionally difficult to parse. I found the stories compulsively readable, but that didn't stop me from wanting to edit them. There were three recurring elements that I noted as unusual and all of them were characterizations.

First, the setting. We get more detail on Richmond City as the series progresses, but it's a character from the first story on. It's on the East Coast ("New Guns for Old," 1929) and we know it's northerly because it demonstrates the inimitably cruddy winter weather found from New York to Maine. It has a port and a river and suburbs and a theater district. It's not an analogue of Boston or New York City, because both of these cities exist within the world of Nebel's stories and can be easily reached by trains leaving from Richmond City's Union Station ("Backwash," May 1932)—New York in two hours—which really makes me think of the Northeast Corridor, although the only line mentioned by name is the usefully vague "Great Eastern & Central Railway" ("Tough Treatment," January 1930). There is also a train to Montreal. My best-guess mental map locates it somewhere in Connecticut. Without a prominent university, I can't think of Richmond City as New Haven, but I can envision it where we have Bridgeport. It's heavy on industry and, since the advent of Prohibition, crime. If it had magic, it would probably be Felport. We get the names of streets, neighborhoods, wards, trucking companies, telephone exchanges, politicians, entertainers, public libraries, fences, snitches, license plates, shipping lines, all the usual minutiae of urban worldbuilding; seeing it applied outside of a secondary-world context, however, is really fun. As written, the city comes off as slightly too two-fisted to make a good vacation spot, but it's also true that prolonged exposure to film noir leaves the impression that nobody lives in Los Angeles but crooks, dopes, and the occasional bemused carhop. The theater scene is probably a credit to its arts council.¹

Secondly, MacBride. He's a classic pulp hero in that he's an incorruptible force of law in a city where even the Mayor is on the take ("Law Without Law," April 1929), but he's also a middle-aged family man with a wife with whom he is very much in love, a college-age daughter about whom he worries with the crime rate the way it is, and a house in the suburbs with a mortgage on it ("Dog Eat Dog," October 1928). Being an honest cop has done his salary no favors ("Graft," May 1929), so he carries heavy insurance to take care of his family when he dies in the line of duty ("The Law Laughs Last," November 1928). He exists in a milieu where shootouts take place as often as arrests and it is considered good policing to bring suspects in with bruises, but he's not a vigilante cop: one of the engines of his character is the tension of anger and restraint, of trying to play by the rules when the rules keep changing hands for cash. Even when it's personal and he regrets his forbearance afterward, he's not a jury or an executioner, he's a captain of police. Sometimes he wishes he'd been a plumber like his father.

Lastly, Kennedy, though he really gets interesting under the cut. At this stage he's a supporting player who's stealing his way into the spotlight; he slopes into scenes with his hands in his pockets and a cigarette in the corner of his mouth, helps himself to drinks from the bottle in MacBride's desk and cigars from the box on top of it, advises and annoys the police in equal measure and turns it all into front-page news. He always looks tired; sometimes he looks exhausted. His knowledge of the city's rigged politics is casually encyclopedic and he has a cynical bon mot for every level of it. In the opening story of the series ("Raw Law," September 1928), he describes himself as "hard-boiled as hell" and he's right—although MacBride is the professionally tougher character, the reporter is the one whom nothing can shock. Like most characters of his type, he gets the best lines in the story, whichever story it is. "In the Spring—tra-la—a young man's fancy and all that crap. Which has nothing to do with the case" ("Hell-Smoke," November 1929).

If slam-bang, trash-talking action were all the MacBride and Kennedy stories had to recommend them, I wouldn't be writing this post. Raw Law was a sufficiently distracting read that I ordered the rest of the series, but I wouldn't call its nine novelettes masterpieces of the genre so much as really solid type species. The more time Nebel spends on these characters and their world, however, the more something happens that is never guaranteed in a long-running series, though it's always a victory for art when it occurs. The stories get better. The style improves until it's almost graceful, even achieving at times a curt, rhythmic poetry. The plotting becomes more complex. The ethnic slurs and stereotypes start to recede.² Minor characters take on personalities beyond their necessity to the plot. Recurring characters deepen and gain side plots of their own. The city becomes less flagrantly corrupt and therefore more ethically complicated. And it turns out that if you take the archetype of the hardboiled, wisecracking, perpetually tight reporter and drop it into three dimensions, what you get is a real person with a severe drinking problem whose friends really worry about him, because no human being can actually drink as much as a fictional character in this genre and stay healthy and/or employed.

( There is a Providence . . . that watches over fools, drunks, and bum reporters. )

I am actively surprised that Nebel never wrote a novel about MacBride and Kennedy. It feels like a natural progression; the last couple years of the series tend increasingly toward the literary, as opposed to pulp, as the crime action becomes less important than the relationships of the characters and the milieu through which they move. The characters are still growing. Richmond City has moved out of Prohibition and into the Depression. I would have loved to be able to track MacBride and Kennedy in real time through the decades, much as Margery Allingham did with Albert Campion—Nebel kept writing until his death in 1967. He even wrote novels. I am curious about all three of them. Just none of them, as far as I can tell, were linked to any of his series characters.³

I am somehow not entirely surprised that when the MacBride and Kennedy stories finally hit the screen courtesy of Warner Bros. in 1937, the Kennedy role went to a woman: the eponymous Smart Blonde Torchy Blane, played in seven out of nine films by Glenda Farrell, who had made a hit earlier in the decade as the plucky but more importantly fast-talking and not infrequently hungover girl reporter of Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933); Steve MacBride became her fiancé, played most of the time by Barton MacLane with a slightly re-spelled last name and dialed-back competence to allow for more pointed agency on Torchy's part. Please conclude from these facts whatever you would like about the slash potential of the series. Someday TCM will show one or more of these movies and I will probably enjoy them and experience slight cognitive dissonance.⁴ God knows how the Production Code will handle the drinking.

The subject header of this post is something that Kennedy says in "Die-Hard" (August 1935) after automatically reporting the address of a murder victim as if the man were still in residence. Who says self-annotating dialogue started with Joss Whedon? Clever, self-deprecating, facetious, true, it's such characteristic Kennedy, I might as well leave it as an exit line. I can't recommend everything about this series, but I can recommend its eventual defining character, the genius loci of Richmond City. I like to think he'd take it philosophically.

1. The theater scene of Richmond City in fact provides one of the funniest lines in the entire series, or at least funniest if you live in the city I do. In "New Guns for Old," Richmond City acquires an honest mayor who proceeds to cause just as much trouble as his corrupt predecessor by cracking down on liquor and vice with such suddenness and severity that it does nothing to disrupt crime in the city except in the sense that displacing it from its usual haunts causes a tidal wave elsewhere. "Then he closed a popular burlesque house and banned presentation of three plays which he considered slightly off-color. The Post-Express screamed at this, because two of the plays had had successful runs in Boston."

2. Nebel never gets over his use of eye dialect to represent accents, which I find very difficult, but I'll take it in return for the decrease in the number of times per page I have to read a whole bunch of period-accurate ethnic/racial epithets. It never quite goes to zero—and I never got used to the narrative use of "white" to mean regular, stand-up, honorable, any more than I accept "Christian" as a natural synonym for decency, generosity, being a mensch—but by the end of Shake-Down it's no longer face-smacking. Nebel's politics also get what I would consider better as the series goes on. In the early entry "Hell-Smoke," the police have to break a labor strike and I get the story's point that the strike leader is a self-serving demagogue who'll sell his men out to the bosses in exchange for "a nice slice of graft" after raising the hopes of desperate workers with legitimate complaints, but I still listen to the way Nebel's police talk about unions and I watch them break up protests and violently protect strike-breakers and you know that gif of the coconut octopus noping its way offscreen? That's me, reading "Hell-Smoke." There is such a thing as being on the wrong side of history and it happened to that story. It's a shame; self-serving demagogues have become topical again.

3. The reprints' introduction by Evan Lewis is invaluable for biographical information and I have relied it on it for most of my knowledge of Frederick Nebel and his other work; I disagree with it frequently on issues of interpretation. Far from being "the most comedic of the entire saga," for example, the Kennedy-starring "Bad News" is a miniature family tragedy with a quietly existential ending. There's a surface misdirection of humor as Kennedy engages to track down an old friend's hot-headed son despite slushy weather, importunate cabbies, and a steadily rising level of blood alcohol, but the prevailing tone is bleak and cavernous, unglamorous as a railway station's waiting room on a chilly, sleety night. Kennedy snarks his way through the plot with his usual motormouth, but he can't talk it into a happy ending. You can't even call the girl at fault a femme fatale; she's just a self-centered, spiteful, attractive kid who makes bank on her looks and almost certainly won't come to a bad end. The sole bright spot is a middle-aged romance which Kennedy furthers to his own loss. "Joe Marino may get married soon . . . There's a dame might have straightened me out." He ends the story so drunk, the barman has to put him to bed. I am very fond of "Bad News." I think it's one of the best stories in the entire nine-year series. It would have made a fantastic little movie in the '30's or '40's, exactly the kind of bittersweet B-list oddity I love running across. A comedy, however, unless you mean it in the strictly Elizabethan sense of ending with a marriage, it is not.

4. It is irresistible to speculate about the casting without the genderswap. I wondered at the time about Roscoe Karns—cynical newspapermen were one of his specialties, boozing optional and fast talk guaranteed. There's a rather nice portrait of Burgess Meredith from Street of Chance (1942) that has the right whimsical smile, albeit Meredith looks a lot more alert than Kennedy is usually described. The character's small size and ironical attitude would have suited Richard Barthelmess, although the actor wouldn't develop the right shadows under his eyes until the late '30's. I'm not sure what a hardboiled Leslie Howard would have looked like—and as much as I love him, he was never plausibly American—but he'd certainly have had the fey self-destructive angle covered. I'm happy to hear suggestions in comments. I'd love to see him drawn by the artist of Tanglefoot.