The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps
- Автор: Anderson Lars, Barr Randolph
- Год: 2007
- Язык: английский
- Год: Vintage Books
- ISBN: 978-0-307-28048-0
- Жанр: Криминальные детективы
Электронная книга - «The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps». Краткое содержание книги:
Weighing in at over a thousand pages, containing over forty-seven stories and two novels, this book is big baby, bigger and more powerful than a freight train — a bullet couldn’t pass through it. Here are the best stories and every major writer who ever appeared in celebrated Pulps like Black Mask, Dime Detective, Detective Fiction Weekly, and more. These are the classic tales that created the genre and gave birth to hard-hitting detectives who smoke criminals like packs of cigarettes; sultry dames whose looks are as lethal as a dagger to the chest; and gin-soaked hideouts where conversations are just preludes to murder. This is crime fiction at its gritty best.
Rooney let out a strong Anglo-Saxon word at that.
“What’s this?” he said, staring at me. “The killer was hiding in that room when we was there?”
I shook my head.
“Only half right, Sergeant,” I answered. “He was in the room with you. But he wasn’t hiding.”
“He wasn’t hid—? He was in the—?” Rooney gawked at me like one of us is nuts. “Well, who the—” he stuttered; “where—?”
“All answered with one dramatic gesture, Sergeant,” I cut in. And I gave the bed a pull, rolling it a couple of feet towards the door.
Harley Bond was curled up behind the head. He wasn’t dead. But he was sleeping peacefully, and wasn’t apt to wake up for some little time.
I got my blood money when the jury’s foreman said the harsh words. Police Captain Starr was there when they handed it to me, and he gave me a pat on the head.
“It was easy enough, Captain,” I answered; downcast eyes go well at headquarters, particularly if you’re a private dick. “I was stumped for a while, because I figured Bond came into the room along with the police. A bunch of trucks came by just then, so I couldn’t hear much. But then I figured that what I did hear didn’t prove he wasn’t there right along, talking with Jobson.”
The captain shook his head slowly.
“He was a wise baby, that lad,” he muttered. “Strange how a man of his capabilities could get into a jam like this. But that’s the way of it, I suppose,” he said, turning philosopher. “Got doing business for a gang, saw how easy money could be pulled by playing between the gang and their sucker and was caught with the goods.
“Might have gone panicky; might have thought he was ruined unless he could stop the sucker talking. Anyway he pulled it. Then there was Jobson.
“He knew Jobson was being shadowed, so he phoned us he was meeting him to learn what he could, and for us to call around in half an hour and he’d tell us what he learned. Had himself protected coming and going.” The captain stood up. “A wise baby,” he said, half to himself; “about as wise as they make them.”
I folded my check carefully.
“Pretty wise, Captain,” I agreed. I looked lovingly at the piece of paper in my hand. “But not the wisest, Captain,” I cooed softly, “not the wisest.”
I turned to Coleman Fuller as we went out of the station. “As for you, Mr. Fuller,” I said, “I suppose when you learned I was going out to the Inn alone your motherly instinct made you sneak out the police force to protect me.”
“Exactly,” he said nodding solemnly.
“And I suppose,” I went on, “if the sergeant had appeared too soon and copped the prize himself, you know what would have happened to you?”
He nodded again, just as solemn. I looked him over, wondering if he was human.
“And I suppose,” I said, “you know what a low-brow like me wants to do when he’s come into a juicy bit of money?”
“Exactly,” he murmured. He reached in his pocket and pulled out a full pint flash, and after I took a good pull at it, he finished it off himself. “That,” he said, “is just about enough to last us till we reach the nearest speak.”
I looked him over again; and I liked his looks.
“Exactly,” I said.
Two Murders, One Crime
Cornell Woolrich
Only Edgar Allan Poe ranks with Cornell Woolrich (1903–1968) as a creator of heart-stopping suspense, and Poe produced relatively little compared with the prolific poet of darkness.
A sad and lonely figure (he dedicated books to his hotel room and to his typewriter), Woolrich is the greatest noir writer who ever lived, in spite of stylistic failings that include so much purple prose that, in the hands of a lesser writer, would make one wince. His use of coincidence, too, made believable or unnoticed because of the break-neck thrill ride of his stories, is unmatched by any author with the exception of the unreadable Harry Stephen Keeler.
In addition to hundreds of stories, mainly written for the pulps, Woolrich produced such classic novels of suspense as The Bride Wore Black (1940), filmed in 1968 by Francois Truffaut, and Black Alibi (1942), filmed the following year by Jacques Tourneur as The Leopard Man. The most famous film made from his work is Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954), based on a short story written under the pseudonym William Irish. Among numerous other Irish works to be filmed are the noir classic Phantom Lady, filmed by Robert Siodmak in 1944, two years after book publication, and Deadline at Dawn, directed by Harold Clurman in 1946, also two years after book publication.
“Two Murders, One Crime” was first published in the July 1942 issue of Black Mask under the title “Three Kills for One.”
That night, just like on all the other nights before it, around a quarter to twelve Gary Severn took his hat off the hook nearest the door, turned and said to his pretty, docile little wife in the room behind him: “Guess I’ll go down to the corner a minute, bring in the midnight edition.”
“All right, dear,” she nodded, just like on all the other nights before this.
He opened the door, but then he stood there undecidedly on the threshold. “I feel kind of tired,” he yawned, backing a hand to his mouth. “Maybe I ought to skip it. It wouldn’t kill me to do without it one night. I usually fall asleep before I can turn to page two, anyway.”
“Then don’t bother getting it, dear, let it go if you feel that way,” she acquiesced. “Why put yourself out? After all, it’s not that important.”
“No it isn’t, is it?” he admitted. For a moment he seemed about to step inside again and close the door after him. Then he shrugged. “Oh well,” he said, “I may as well go now that I’ve got my hat on. I’ll be back in a couple of minutes.” He closed the door from the outside.
Who knows what is important, what isn’t important? Who is to recognize the turning-point that turns out to be a trifle, the trifle that turns out to be a turning-point?
A pause at the door, a yawn, a two-cent midnight paper that he wouldn’t have remained awake long enough to finish anyway.
He came out on the street. Just a man on his way to the corner for a newspaper, and then back again. It was the 181st day of the year, and on 180 other nights before this one he had come out at this same hour, for this same thing. No, one night there’d been a blizzard and he hadn’t. 179 nights, then.
He walked down to the corner, and turned it, and went one block over the long way, to where the concession was located. It was just a wooden trestle set up on the sidewalk, with the papers stacked on it. The tabs were always the first ones out, and they were on it already. But his was a standard size, and it came out the last of all of them, possibly due to complexities of make-up.
The man who kept the stand knew him by his paper, although he didn’t know his name or anything else about him. “Not up yet,” he greeted him. “Any minute now.”
Why is it, when a man has read one particular paper for any length of time, he will refuse to buy another in place of it, even though the same news is in both? Another trifle?
Gary Severn said, “I’ll take a turn around the block. It’ll probably be here by the time I get back.”
The delivery trucks left the plant downtown at 11:30, but the paper never hit the stands this far up much before twelve, due to a number of variables such as traffic-lights and weather which were never the same twice. It had often been a little delayed, just as it was tonight.