The Black Lizard Big Book of Black Mask Stories
- Автор: Adams Cleve F., Babcock Dwight V.
- Год: 2010
- Язык: английский
- Год: A Vintage Crime/Black Lizard
- ISBN: 978-0-307-45543-7
- Жанр: Криминальные детективы
Электронная книга - «The Black Lizard Big Book of Black Mask Stories». Краткое содержание книги:
Black Mask was the apotheosis of noir. It was the magazine where the first hardboiled detective story, which was written by Carroll John Daly appeared. It was the slum in which such American literary titans like Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler got their start, and it was the home of stories with titles like “Murder Is Bad Luck,” “Ten Carets of Lead,” and “Drop Dead Twice.” Collected here is best of the best, the hardest of the hardboiled, and the darkest of the dark of America’s finest crime fiction. This masterpiece collection represents a high watermark of America’s underbelly. Crime writing gets no better than this.
“You mean that when the accident happened at the track, Mr. Smith, or Andrews, or whatever his name was, told the police that Uncle Dave, the dead man, was named Andrews, while he pretended to be Uncle Dave?”
“That’s it. Andrews and your uncle had actually met in that fishing camp, just as Andrews told me. They got to be friends and came to New Orleans together. Your uncle had told Andrews enough about his affairs for Andrews to know your uncle lived on an income, and that a good part of it was soon due. Andrews himself was in a tough hole financially. When the accident happened he saw his chance. He and your uncle were about the same size, both blond. They didn’t look particularly alike, but they looked enough alike for a vague description to fit either one of them. And nobody knew them.
“Everybody took Andrews’ word for it that he was McCracken. He wrote his wife in New York, and when your uncle’s body arrived, Mrs. Andrews buried it just as if it were her husband, and collected his insurance. The insurance company didn’t investigate. They had the word of the New Orleans authorities that Andrews had been killed in an accident. Andrews was waiting for your uncle’s checks to arrive. He had some old signatures of your uncle’s which he could trace as endorsement — and that would be that. Then he could leave, change his name again, and your uncle would vanish. Or with good luck he could just keep on living on your uncle’s income.”
“And then?”
“Then this matter of the bonds turned up. Andrews wouldn’t go to Boston, so Blumberry came here. I think he came intending to kill your uncle, but he swears no. With your stubborn uncle out of the way it would have been easy to persuade you, the heir, to sign over the bonds. Unless he meant to kill your uncle, there wasn’t any need for having those skeleton keys that would open his hotel room, for walking up the stairs so he wouldn’t be seen, for having the knife ready.
“What Blumberry didn’t know was that you had come to New Orleans two days before and phoned and frightened Andrews so bad he was hiding, but still trying to collect the mail with the checks in it. So Blumberry went up and waited in your uncle’s room for him to come. It was this Roscoe Jancey who came instead.”
“What was he doing?”
“He was a member of a New York firm that was interested in the bonds. For two days he’d been trying to locate McCracken, or the man he thought was McCracken. He’d hired a private detective. Finally he got the idea the desk clerk was lying and that McCracken was in his room all the time. So he went up and turned the doorknob and went in.
“Blumberry says they argued and learned they were there on the same business and finally fought. Personally I think Blumberry was standing by the door and let him have it as he came in, thinking Jancey was your uncle, and not seeing his mistake until too late. Anyway, he killed him.
“He must have just been slipping down the stairs as I came and he saw me. He was sure you saw him as he started across the lobby, and realizing that would break his story of not having been there, he marched up to the desk, asked for McCracken’s room number, and headed for the elevator. He knew I would probably still be in the room, and he might be able to make me a fall guy for the killing.”
“But what was he doing on Andrews’ balcony later?”
“He had begun to guess the truth after the redhead came in asking for Art. I’d forgotten about her saying, ‘Art, darling,’ until I found the drawings in that house near City Park. Then I remembered that Arthur Andrews had been a small-time artist.
“Anyway, Blumberry figured if he was right, and if somebody was pretending to be McCracken but wasn’t, and if he could turn that fellow over to the police, all would be swell. He would have the real McCracken dead and he would have somebody convicted of Roscoe Jancey’s death — because it would look as if Jancey had recognized Andrews as a fake and Andrews had killed him.
“Blumberry traced Andrews the same way I did, by his wife’s address in the paper. She’d given the cops her maiden name, but she’d had to give them her right address. Blumberry crawled up to the balcony to get a look; about that time I scared Andrews into hiding on the balcony, and there they were together, both listening to what I told the redhead.”
Mary asked what they were going to do to Andrews.
“I don’t know. A mild jail term. I’ll do what I can to help, because he came through for me on the balcony. He wasn’t a killer, not even when he had you and didn’t know what to do with you. He was afraid you’d find out he was pretending to be McCracken. Even after I arrived and we both knew he was a fake, he didn’t kill us.”
Mary and I both got to thinking about how we felt when we thought he was going to kill us, and we polished off our drinks in a hurry.
I felt better, then, and warmed up.
“I think we’ll have another,” I said. “To McCracken.”
“You mean Smith.”
“Another one for Smith,” I said. “And then one for Andrews, so we’ll have him right under whatever name he prefers.”
Her Dagger Before Me
Talmadge Powell
Talmadge Powell (1920–2000) was born in Hendersonville, North Carolina, and attended schools in North Carolina, Tennessee, New York, and California, studying creative writing at the University of North Carolina. He settled into a career as a professional writer fairly early, selling his first mystery story to 10-Story Detective, which ran in January 1944. Although he produced stories in various genres, more than two hundred of his pulp and digest-size magazine stories were in the mystery, crime, and detective field, both under his own name and using various pseudonyms, including Jack McCready, Anne Talmadge — for the novel Dark Over Acadia (1971) — Robert Hart Davis, Robert Henry, Milton T. Lamb, and Milton Land. For four novels about Tim Corrigan, he employed the familiar Ellery Queen byline used by several other writers. His short-story-writing career spanned four decades, and many of his original, character-driven tales were adapted for Alfred Hitchcock Presents; they were collected in Written for Hitchcock (1989).
Of the nine mystery novels under his own name, five were about Ed Rivers, a tough but goodhearted Tampa-based private eye, including his first book, The Killer Is Mine (1959), followed by the much-praised The Girl’s Number Doesn’t Answer (1960), as well as With a Madman Behind Me (1962), Start Screaming Murder (1962), and Corpus Delectable (1964).
He was the guest of honor at Pulpcon in 1996.
“Her Dagger Before Me” was published in the July 1949 issue.
Pleasure-hungry Allene’s gay step-mother had nothing but time, a gigolo, and money on her hands — Allene’s money!
Chapter One
Cold Meat
I had been on a divorce case, shadowing a man most of the night before; so I didn’t do anything about the screaming telephone for the first few seconds except try to swim back down in the sticky molasses of sleep and wish whoever was calling would go away.