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.
“Then you know that I didn’t kill Buddy Tomlinson? You really do know!” Phyllis held her hands pressed tight against her throat.
I looked at Allene. She took a step or two toward me. That wad of cotton fluffed out in my throat. “We know who killed Tomlinson and Osgood both, don’t we, Allene?”
She stopped, then began moving again, circling around the room. “Are you joking with me, Lloyd?”
“I wish I was. I wish it more than you know, though maybe not for the reason you think. You knew Tomlinson had a good chance of getting his hands on the Buford money through Emagine, unless something was done about him. You went to his bungalow, maybe planning to kill him, maybe not. But you did kill him. Osgood saw you leaving. You were wearing Emagine’s hat and coat, and he thought it was Emagine at first. But when he heard her story, he was inclined to believe it and guessed it had been you.
“You had killed Tomlinson to hold on to your money, Osgood reasoned. If Emagine went to the chair, it would not only leave you clear, Allene, but would remove her as the last obstacle between you and the Buford fortune. It looked sweet from where Osgood sat. He dug you for five grand, but when you’d had time to think, you knew it was no good. It would never be any good as long as Osgood was alive. So you killed him too.
“When I found Osgood dead on the beach, I started trying to think of the whole thing as he would have thought. You were the only answer, Allene. You were the one who could have easily gotten Emagine’s hat and coat. You had motive. And I’m afraid they’ll pin it on you. There must be some of your fingerprints on the five grand I took off of Osgood. There’ll be so many more things when they start looking and digging, Allene.”
She looked from face to face, her hands knotted at her sides. Then she wheeled and lunged for the door. But the knife was quicker. The knife flashed in my hand, thudded in the door, close to her face. It paralyzed her. It paralyzed everyone in the room. She came to life first. She grasped the knife and pulled it from the wood. “You’d do this to me, Lloyd?”
That wad of cotton in my throat choked me.
“What else could I do?” she whispered. “I’d never had but one thing in a lousy life — that money. That damned filthy Buford money — and now I was going to get cheated out of that. I didn’t mean to kill Buddy Tomlinson. I only wanted to scare him. But he grabbed at the gun — and it went off. I thought that if I hired a detective to warn Buddy away from Emagine, Buddy’s body would be found and no one would ever think I had known he was dead. I thought that would take suspicion from me, and once Buddy’s body was found, the detective would have no more to do with the case.
“After that, it seemed easier. It was much easier to kill Osgood. Yes, killing gets easier all the time—”
She sliced the word off with the knife. A spasm crossed her face, telegraphing a wave of horror over the room. A little cough bubbled in her throat.
I had never thought she’d use the knife for that. I’d only wanted to scare her, to bring her up at the door before Ben and his men began pulling guns. I’d wanted her to stop, to think. To talk. To cop a plea. To live.
She had saved my life. It was the only possible way I could have saved hers.
But she’d used the knife on herself.
I caught her in my arms as she crumpled, laid her gently on the floor. The scene in the room was breaking apart, people moving, converging on her. Her eyes flicked open. “Why couldn’t it have been different, Lloyd? Why couldn’t you have showed me Florida — the — part — the tourist never sees?”
Tears welled in her eyes. A spasm shuddered over her.
I stood up, fighting the moisture in my eyes. Distantly, I heard Emagine Buford say, “In a way, I’m not surprised. She was always sort of—”
“Shut up!” I screamed.
Somehow I got out of the room. I walked down the corridor outside, not seeing its walls, not feeling its floor under my feet.
Only remembering. That longing that was almost pain. That terrible, pitiful hunger. Even death hadn’t erased it from her face, and I knew at last why Allene Buford had never been quite beautiful...
One Shot
Charles G. Booth
Charles G(ordon) Booth (1896–1949) was born in Manchester, England, then emigrated to Canada before settling in Los Angeles in 1922 to become a screenwriter for 20th Century Fox. While he was a popular and successful pulp writer and novelist in his time, even his best works, such as Gold Bullets (1929), Murder at High Tide (1930), The General Died at Dawn (1941), and Mr. Angel Comes Aboard (1944), are seldom read today.
The motion pictures that he wrote, however, as well as those based on his novels, are a different matter, still commonly found on late-night movie channels. The House on 92nd Street (1945) was released shortly after World War II as a thinly disguised film version of the FBI’s success in bringing down the largest Nazi espionage organization in the history of the United States, the Duquesne Spy Ring, in 1941. A black-and-white noir semidocumentary, it featured an introduction by J. Edgar Hoover and real-life FBI agents in several scenes. Booth won an Academy Award for Best Original Motion Picture Story and was nominated for an Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best Motion Picture Screenplay (with cowriters Barré Lyndon and John Monks Jr.). It starred Lloyd Nolan and William Eythe. Films based on Booth’s novels are Johnny Angel (1945, with a screenplay by Steve Fisher and Frank Gruber, based on Mr. Angel Comes Aboard) and The General Died at Dawn (1936, with a screenplay by Clifford Odets).
“One Shot” was published in the June 1925 issue.
Peter Stoddard found Nat Hammond’s letter waiting for him on his return to Los Angeles. Stoddard had never liked Hammond over much — few people did, for that matter; nevertheless, he opened the letter with a good deal of anticipation. He knew of only one reason why the celebrated engineer should write him.
Stoddard was something of an authority on antiques. Twelve months before, he had offered to purchase the famous Parsee Sunrise from Walter Hammond, Nat’s brother, on behalf of Philip Andrea, the South American collector. Andrea was a friend of his. But notwithstanding the tragic accident that had wrecked Walter Hammond’s brilliant brain and left him broken in body and spirit two years prior to that, he had continued to adore the antique and the beautiful, and Stoddard could not induce him to part with the ancient symbol of the Parsee faith at any price. Walter Hammond had died six months ago.
Stoddard, also, was an engineer. He had won his spurs early in life, for he was still under thirty-five. But his was not the spectacular renown of the Hammond Brothers, builders of the Tse Chen railroad; rather, it was that solid, unobtrusive eminence such as men achieve by dint of their dogged refusal to admit themselves inferior to any contingency life may have in store for them. He was a tall, strongly built man with a rugged, kindly face tanned to a leathery hue by wind and sun. One sensed in him qualities of permanency and dependability leavened by a queer boyishness that endeared him to those who knew him intimately.
Stoddard was keenly observant in his undemonstrative way; and as he opened the letter, it occurred to him, as it had often done in the past, that he had never met brothers so opposite in their natures and in their outlook upon life as the two Hammonds.