Authors and Creators
Frederick Nebel
(AKA Grimes Hill, Lewis Nebel, Eric Lewis)
(1903-1966)

He was born Louis Frederick Nebel on November 3, 1903. He dropped out of high school at age 15. He worked the docks and checked cars. He became a farmer and a sailor on a tramp steamer.

But by his early 20s, Louis Frederick Nebel and his blue-collar work ethic had turned to the typewriter, and he was churning out pulp stories with the regularity of an assembly-line.

Nebel wrote and wrote, and then he wrote some more. He became a charter member of the Black Mask school, the group of writers who worked for that magazine and championed the hardboiled detective noir style of the 1920s.

Not bad for a Staten Island kid who bounced around from job to job and place to place for the early part of his life.

After his stint on the New York docks, Nebel moved to Canada to work on a farm and fell in love with the wilderness. His experience in the northern woods became his main topic for his first few years, as he wrote adventure stories. He used his own name as well as pseudonyms Grimes Hill and Eric Lewis.

His first story appeared in Black Mask in 1926, just a few years after Dashiel Hammett and Caroll John Daly. Nebel, by the way, counted Hammett among his good friends.

Nebel created the MacBride and Kennedy stories -- MacBride the cop and Kennedy the hard-drinking reporter, both investigating crime in the corrupt Richmond City. Another Nebel series featured Tough Dick Donahue, of the Inter-State Detective Agency.

In the late 1920s, Nebel met a woman named Dorothy Blank in Paris. She was from St. Louis. They married in 1930 and lived in St. Louis, where much of Nebel's work is set. In the early 1930s, Nebel wrote his only three novels: the suspense tales "Sleeper's East" and "Fifty Roads to Town," and "But Not The End," set in Depression-era New York City.

By this time, he was writing short stories for another famous pulp, Dime Detective. For that magazine, he created Jack Cardigan, the tough, Irish detective for the Cosmos Dective Agency.

Nebel sold the rights to MacBride and Kennedy to Warner Brothers in the 1930's, but had nothing to do with the adaptations. Perhaps it's just as well. Somewhere along the line, skinny, drunk-as-a-skunk Kennedy became a wisecracking newswoman, Torchy Blane, and MacBride the object of her affections. Nine films were made in the series.

When pressed about it, Nebel would respond, "Hell, they always change the stuff around. But I don't mind--as long as I don't have to make the changes."

In 1934, Nebel and his wife moved from St. Louis to Connecticut. He hired a new agent and started selling to slick magazines. In 1937, he and Dorothy had a son, Christopher. That same year, Nebel gave up selling to the pulps entirely, and began writing for slick magazines such as Collier's.

He stayed in Connecticut until the late 1950s. Then he became painfully ill, so he and Dorothy packed up and moved to Laguna Beach, Calif. Suffering from chronic high blood pressure, he health continued to go downhill. He stopped writing by the mid-1960s. He suffered a stroke in late April 1967 and died on May 3.

One critic notes that Nebel's work can be divided into two periods: before 1933 and after. Before 1933, he wrote about tough, loner detectives who were up against trouble. After 1933, his stories featured more of a support network -- secretaries, reporters, cops and sources.

Maybe marriage made him realize the value of companionship.. One thing is certain: while Nebel's work is not as well known as his good friend Hammett, and while much of his early work has not been reprinted, he deserves to be read and re-read as a hero of pulpdom.

NOVELS

COLLECTIONS

SHORT STORIES

RADIO

FILM ADAPTATIONS

SCREENPLAYS

Contributed by Hugh Lessig, with additional material by Kevin Burton Smith. For this short sketch, Hugh says "I am indebted to Katherine Harper, an English professor at Bowling Green State University and the excellent analyses offered at the Pulp Mystery Adventure Web Site, the anthology Hard-Boiled, edited by Bill Prozini and Jack Adrian Robert Weinberg's essay "Cardigan," found in The Adventures of Cardigan, published by The Mysterious Press."

| Table of Contents | Detectives A-L M-Z | Film | Radio | Television | Comics | FAQs |
| Trivia | Authors | Hall of Fame | Mystery Links | Bibliography | Glossary | Search |
| What's New: On The Site | On the Street | Non-Fiction | Fiction | Staff | The P.I. Poll |

Remember, your comments, suggestions, corrections and contributions are always welcome.
At the tone, leave your name and number and I'll get back to you...