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MacBride, Steve. Steve MacBride was created by Frederick Nebel (Torchy Blane, Sgt. Brinkhaus, Jack Cardigan, Donny Donahue, Drifting Kid, Gales & McGill, Gwenn McKay, Corporal Tyson) and appeared in thirty-seven stories in Black Mask from 1928 to 1936, beginning with “Raw Law” (Black Mask, Sept. 1928).

Steve MacBride is a police captain in Richmond City, Ohio, a town with a number of similarities to Cincinnati. MacBride’s friend and sidekick, John X. Kennedy, is a reporter for the Free Press. MacBride is a good man who is surrounded by graft, filth and crime but is untouched by any of it. He is over forty, tall and rugged, with a taste for cigars and a refusal to let the law's idiocies stop the criminals from walking away. MacBride is a clever investigator, shrewd and knowledgeable, whose officers are not nearly so clever as he is but who follow his orders and see, when they do, the criminals go to jail. The world of MacBride and Kennedy is a hard one, full of real-life crime and brutalities, and MacBride is a real, old-style cop. Kennedy is a drunk, worn down by the world and other internal demons, but he's a good amateur detective who through his intuition and brains often helps the police.

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