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.
“Every window and door locked on the inside, hey?” Bartlett snapped.
“Yes.”
“And you searched every room in the house?”
“Yes.”
Bartlett grunted indistinguishably. Then he took a black bound notebook from his pocket and penciled rapidly on its pages. Stoddard hung on his movements fearfully and breathlessly. Finally, he could stand it no longer.
“Look here, Bartlett!” he burst forth, huskily. “You don’t believe she did it, do you? It looks bad, I know! But, good Lord, man! She couldn’t have done it! Look at her!”
In his desperate eagerness to impress the marshal Stoddard stepped forward and caught him fiercely by the arm.
But the other shook him off, chuckling grimly.
“If she didn’t do it, I’d like to know who did! Every window and door locked and bolted and the girl and Hammond alone in the house! Two and two still make four, Stoddard! You can’t get away from it!”
Julia uttered a cry and covered her face with her hands. Stoddard’s arm dropped limply to his side. He had expected this, of course; nevertheless, Bartlett’s reasonable deductions left him weak and trembling, all his rugged strength sapped out of him. Julia had intrigued him as no other woman had ever done, and if he could have shifted her burden to his own broad and capable shoulders he would gladly have done so. He had known her scarcely more than an hour; but into that time had been packed the emotional experiences of a lifetime.
Tyson, still in the doorway, took a shambling step forward. Then he stopped, a look of horror creeping into his faded eyes. His lips mumbled soundlessly and his old teeth clicked together like castanets. Bartlett returned to his notebook.
“That Parsee trinket — what’s it worth?” the marshal demanded abruptly after a moment.
“Twenty thousand dollars,” Julia whispered in dead tones.
The Parsee Sunrise. Stoddard caught his breath sharply. A little train of thought had flared up in his mind. If the ancient symbol had been stolen, and he could establish that fact, the existence of a third party might be argued — surely a point in Julia’s favor. He stared at the antique desk thoughtfully. It seemed to leer back at him.
The desk had been manufactured in a day of political intrigue — probably for someone of importance — when combination lock safes were unknown and a secret compartment in a private desk was a highly desirable feature. Stoddard had examined the grain of the top of the desk in the hope of discovering a concealed chamber of some kind, feeling sure that if there was one the Parsee symbol would be inside it. Now he began to run his fingers painstakingly over the right-hand front leg, as he had been about to do when Bartlett arrived.
Several minutes elapsed. The marshal continued to make notes in his black bound book. Julia had not moved from her chair in front of the fireplace. Tyson was still standing within the door, mumbling soundlessly to himself. Stoddard began on the left front leg of the desk. Suddenly, Bartlett closed his book with a snap, pocketed it, and turned to Julia.
“Get your things together,” he commanded, tersely. “I’m going to take a look around the house. Then we start for San Paulo. The sheriff and the D.A.—”
“No!”
The single word, uttered by Stoddard, had the effect of a pistol crack. A cry of exultation broke from his lips, and he pointed dramatically down at the top of the antique desk. Then Bartlett and Julia and Tyson rushed forward. Stoddard met them with an ecstatic look on his rugged face and his left hand closed fiercely, triumphantly, on Julia’s arm.
A section of the top of the desk, some eight inches long and five inches wide, stood erect, revealing a compartment perhaps four inches deep. There was a hole in one corner of the compartment. Near it lay the Parsee Sunrise, glittering like a constellation of minute stars. A bundle of papers, their edges serrated as with the fretting of tiny teeth, lay on the bottom of the compartment partly supporting an automatic pistol that had been carelessly thrust into the compartment in such a way that its muzzle pointed directly at where Hammond’s body must have been before he fell forward, and his death agony shut down the cunningly concealed section he had just released.
Entangled with the trigger guard and hair trigger of the pistol was a common mousetrap, baited with cheese. And caught by the leg in the trap Nat Hammond had set for it was one of Walter Hammond’s white mice! In futile terror it had dragged the trap across the trigger as Hammond had opened the compartment. The roar of the shot that had killed Hammond had stilled its tiny heart.
The Dancing Rats
Richard Sale
Richard (Bernard) Sale (1911–1993) was born in New York City and educated at Washington and Lee University (1930–1933), where he had already begun to write professionally, selling early stories to the pulps, including “The White Cobra” to The Shadow magazine in 1932. He went on to write more than 350 stories, mostly mystery fiction, for all the major pulp magazines, including Black Mask, Thrilling Mystery, Argosy, and Detective Fiction Weekly, for which he created his most successful series character, the newspaper reporter — cum-detective Joe “Daffy” Dill, whose adventures also featured Bill Hanley and Candid Jones. He also wrote stories for all the major slick magazines.
His first novel, Not Too Narrow... Not Too Deep (1936), is an adventure tale of ten convicts who escape from a French penal colony (a renamed Devil’s Island) and a mysterious stranger who accompanies them. It was filmed by MGM in 1940 as Strange Cargo, starring Clark Gable, Joan Crawford, and Peter Lorre. His finest novels are Lazarus #7 (1942) and Passing Strange (1942). He had an active career in the film industry as a writer, with such credits as Mr. Belvedere Goes to College (1949), A Ticket to Tomahawk (1950), Suddenly (1954), a suspense film with Frank Sinatra, and Torpedo Run (1958), which he also directed. With his wife, Mary Anita Loos, he wrote Gentlemen Marry Brunettes (1955) and other films.
“The Dancing Rats” was published in the June 1942 issue.
What was the mysterious and terrible disaster that threatened to wreak havoc in Oahu, reduce the Pacific fortress to impotency and throw the shadow of death across every mother’s son on the island? Dr. Nicholas Adams, summoned from his work at the leper colony of Molokai, had just forty-eight hours to find out!
Chapter One
The Episode of Mr. Sze
The wireless had been burning a hole in Nick Adams’ pocket ever since it had been delivered to him at the Cardwell Institute’s labs over on the island of Molokai. Nick had been checking the progress of the Institute’s fight against leprosy there when the war broke. And although the perfidy at Pearl Harbor had been a memory for some time now, he had remained on Molokai’s north coast, checking experimentations with Brooke Carteret, a fine leprosy medico.
The wireless, however, took his interest away from Molokai abruptly, and returned it to Oahu. Even in the baby clipper plane of the Inter-Island Steam Navigation Company, he could not restrain himself from pulling the thing out once more and rereading it. He knew every word by heart then, as the soiled and frayed message indicated, but it was so damned provocative, he couldn’t resist staring at it.
It said: