Jack Cardigan
Created by Frederick Nebel (1903-1967)

The award for most appearances by a series character in Dime Detective has to go to prolific pulpster Frederick Nebel's private eye JACK CARDIGAN. Starting with "Death Alley" in the November 1931 issue, and wrapping up in the May 1937 issue with "No Time To Kill", the hard-as-nail Irish op for the Cosmos Agency in St. Louis appeared a whopping forty-four times! Unfortunately, most of the stories are long out of print, and seldom anthologized, save for the 1988 Mysterios Press collection The Adventures of Cardigan (reviewed elsewhere in these pages by Mario Taboada).

The Cardigan storiues has a hard-charging, ferocious vitality all their own, ticking timebombs that inevitably explode into action in a grand finale of violence and mayhem. You read one of these stories, and you'll know you've read something.

And while Nebel may not have been the world's greatest characterist (his stories are people with quick sketches, not in-depth development), he also does deserve a tip of the fedora for creating Patricia Seaward, one of the few strong and viable female detectives in the boy's world of the pulps, as tough in her own way as her partner. As Marcia Muller puts it in the introduction to Hard-Boiled Dames, even though the women in "Nebel's Cardigan stories were mere employees of the Cosmos Agency, they were able to help out the boss in forthright and startling ways." Seaward covered Cardigan's back in several of the stories, and on more than one case, pulled his biscuits from the oven.

Nebel's other major private eye was Tough Dick Donahue, who appeared in the pages of Black Mask. But Nebel was probably best known for his stories featuring hardboiled crime reporter Kennedy of The Free Press and his buddy, Captain Steve MacBride. In fact, Cardigan actually made his debut, as a cop, in one of the Kennedy and MacBride stories in Black Mask, before appearing in Dime Detective as a private dick.

SHORT STORIES

• "Death Alley" (November 1931, Dime Detective)
• "Hell's Pay Check" (December 1931, Dime Detective)
• "Chains of Darkness" (July 1, 1933, Dime Detective)
• "Murder á la Carte" (November 15, 1933, Dime Detective)
• "Spades Are Spades" (January 1, 1934, Dime Detective)
• "Hot Spot" (March 1, 1934, Dime Detective)
• "Kick Back" (April 1, 1934, Dime Detective)
• "Hell Couldn't Stop Him" (April 15, 1935, Dime Detective)
• "The Dead Die Twice" (August 1935, Dime Detective)
• "Lead Poison" (April 1936, Dime Detective)
• "No Time to Kill" (May 1937, Dime Detective)

COLLECTIONS

• The Adventures of Cardigan (1988)...Buy this book

RELATED LINKS

• The Adventures of Cardigan by Frederick Nebel: Review by Mario Taboada