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.
Harkness made a quick stabbing dive for it, to try to catch it before it hit the floor. He made it. His mind was quick enough, and so was his muscular coordination. He got it on the drop, in mid-air, in the relatively short distance between bureau-top and floor. But he got it the wrong way, caught at it in the wrong place.
A spark jumped out of his hand and there was a heavy-throated boom.
Then for a minute more nothing happened. None of them moved, not even he. He remained bent over like that, frozen just as he’d grabbed for it. Rogers remained seated at the table, staring across it. Blake continued to clutch the cards he’d been shuffling, while his head slowly came around. Rogers, at least, had been a witness to what had happened; Blake had even missed seeing that much.
Harkness was moving again. He folded slowly over, until his face was resting on the floor, while he remained arched upward in the middle like a croquet-wicket. Then he flattened out along there too, and made just a straight line, and lay quiet, as though he was tired.
Rogers jumped up and over to him, got down by him, turned him over. “Help me carry him over onto the bed,” he said, “It musta hit him—” Then he stopped again.
Blake was still stupidly clutching the deck of cards.
“He’s gone,” Rogers said, in an oddly-blank voice. “It musta got him instantly.” He straightened up, still puzzled by the suddenness with which the thing had occurred. “I never saw such a freaky—” Then he saw the gun. He stooped for it. “What did you leave it lying around like that for?” he demanded irritably. “Here, take it!” He thrust it at its owner, and the latter’s hand closed around it almost unconsciously.
Blake was finally starting to get it. “A fine mess!” he lamented. He went over to the door, listened. Then he even opened it cautiously, looked out into the hall. The shot apparently hadn’t been heard through the thick walls and doors of the venerable place they were in. He closed it, came back again. He was starting to perspire profusely. Then, as another thought struck him belatedly, he took out a handkerchief and began to mop at himself with something akin to relief. “Hey, it’s a good thing you were right in here with the two of us, saw it for yourself. Otherwise you might have thought—”
Rogers kept staring down at the still figure, he couldn’t seem to come out of his preoccupation.
Blake came over and touched him in anxious supplication on the arm, to attract his attention. “Hey, Rodge, maybe you better be the one to report it. It’ll look better coming from you, you used to be on the force yourself—”
“All right, I’ll handle it,” Rogers said with sudden new-found incisiveness. “Let’s have the gun.” He lined his hand with a folded handkerchief before closing it on it.
Blake relinquished it only too willingly, went ahead mopping his face, like someone who has just had the narrowest of narrow escapes.
Rogers had asked for his old precinct number. “Give me Lieutenant Colton.” There was a moment’s wait. He balanced the instrument on one shoulder, delved into his pockets, rid himself of all the paper currency he had on him. He discarded this by flinging it at the table, for some reason best known to himself.
In the moment’s wait, Blake said again, mostly for his own benefit: “Boy, it’s the luckiest thing I ever did to ask you in here with us to—”
Rogers straightened slightly. Three years rolled off him. “Eric Rogers reporting back, lieutenant, after an extended leave of absence without pay. I’m in room Seven-ten at the Hotel Lancaster, here in the city. I’ve just been a witness to a murder. Donny Blake has shot to death, with his own gun, a man named William Harkness. Under my own eyes, that’s right. Orders, lieutenant? Very well, I’ll hold him until you get here, sir.” He hung up.
Blake’s face was a white bubble. It swelled and swelled with dismay, until it had exploded into all the abysmal fright there is in the world. “I wasn’t near him! I wasn’t touching it! I wasn’t even looking! I was turned the other way, with my back to— You know that! Rogers, you know it!”
Rogers kept holding his own gun on him, with the handkerchief around it. “Sure, I know it,” he agreed readily. “I know it and you know it, we both know it. You hear me say it to you now, freely, for the last time, while we’re still alone here together. And after this once, neither God nor man will ever hear me say it again. I’ve waited three years, seven months, and eighteen days for this, and now it’s here. You found a loophole once. Now I’ve found a loophole this time. Your loophole was to get out. My loophole is to get you back in again.
“Listen to me so you’ll understand what I’m doing, Blake. You’re going to be arrested in a few more minutes for murder. You’re going to be tried for murder. You’re going to be — if there’s any virtue left in the laws of this State — executed for murder. They’re going to call that murder by the name of this man, Harkness.
That’s the only name that’ll be mentioned throughout the proceedings. But the murder you’re really about to be arrested, tried, and electrocuted for will be that of a man whose name won’t appear in it once, from first to last, from beginning to end — Police Sergeant O’Neill. That’s the murder you’re going to die for now!
“We couldn’t get you for the one you did commit. So we’ll try you for another you didn’t commit and get you for that instead.”
The Third Murderer
Carroll John Daly
It doesn’t take a genius to recognize that there are better airplanes than the ones flown by the Wright Brothers, but they were there first, assuring themselves an important place in history.
The same holds true for Carroll John Daly (1889–1958). There have been many practitioners of the hard-boiled private eye story who are far superior to Daly, but he was the first, inventing the form nearly three-quarters of a century ago with a story titled “Three Gun Terry” featuring private investigator Terry Mack. The story appeared in Black Mask in the issue of May 15,1923, and served as the prototype for all the tough, wise-cracking private dicks who followed.
The first story featuring Race Williams, his most famous character, soon followed with the publication of “Knights of the Open Palm” in Black Mask on June 1, 1923. When he followed with another Race Williams story, “Three Thousand to the Good,” in the July 15, 1923, issue, Daly had created the first hard-boiled private eye series in fiction.
While in no way a distinguished literary performer, the relentless narrative drive of Daly’s fiction made him one of the highest paid pulp writers for a quarter of a century, so popular that it was widely reported that his name on the cover automatically increased sales of the issue by 15 %. The Third Murderer was originally serialized in Black Mask (June-August 1931) as “The Flame” and Race Williams.
Chapter I
A Threat to Kill
I didn’t like his face and I told him so.
He was handsome enough in a conceited, sinister sort of way. And the curve to the corner of his mouth was natural too — but more pronounced now by the involuntary twitching of his upper lip; a warning that a lad is carrying too much liquor and is getting to the stage where he’ll slop over. Which is his own business, of course, and not mine — except when that lad decides to slop over on me.