I've been on a Frederick Nebel binge this week, read the
Mysterious Press collection from the late Eighties called THE
ADVENTURES OF CARDIGAN, which reprints six novelettes from
Dime Detective, plus two more Cardigan novelettes in the
anthologies TOUGH GUYS AND DANGEROUS DAMES and HARD-BOILED
DETECTIVES. These stories are about Jack Cardigan, an
operative for the Cosmos Detective Agency, and since Cosmos
is a nationwide outfit, they take place in New York, St.
Louis, San Francisco, an unnamed Midwestern city, and a
fictional East Coast resort town similar to Atlantic City. I
thoroughly enjoyed them. The plots are fairly simple but with
enough twists to be interesting, and Nebel writes in a style
that's fast-paced without being overly terse. Not much
characterization--Cardigan doesn't seem to have a life beyond
his job--but that's all right given the time period in which
they were written. Nebel isn't on the same level as Hammett
and Chandler. He's not the prose stylist they were, nor is
there any sense that he's doing anything other than writing
fast-moving, entertaining stories. But judged on that basis,
he's very successful and well worth reading.
James
-- # To unsubscribe from the regular list, say "unsubscribe rara-avis" to # majordomo@icomm.ca. This will not work for the digest version. # The web pages for the list are at http://www.miskatonic.org/rara-avis/ .
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : 22 Nov 2002 EST