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.
“Very well, Adams.”
Nick descended the stairs to the floor of the loft. There were electric torches flashing around. He saw the crated rats, red-eyed, scuffling, squealing, panicky. His skin crawled. He walked out of the place quickly. He borrowed a light to look at his trousers but they were devoid of fleas. The chances in that hole were terrific. He watched the men sealing up the building. When Captain Malta came out, Nick said: “These trucks will have to be driven some place and burned. They’re thoroughly infected at this point and we can’t openly spray them with the gas. It’s too deadly.”
Captain Malta ordered the soldiers to drive the trucks out toward Barber’s Point and to set them all together out there and await instructions. “I’ll call the Army post and ask them if they can’t use a flame-thrower on the blasted things. That’s quick fire to kill everything in a hurry.”
They went around through the alley to Bishop Street and soon the report came that the place was sealed. The quarantine crew made a quick inspection of their own, then ran a hose into the building. The pumps started, and the hydrocyanic gas went in.
“But Cameron!” Malta said suddenly. “What about Cameron?”
Nick stared at the closed building. His face was dull and unexpressive. “You have no worries about Cameron,” he said. “Hydrocyanic is quick and painless.” He slumped. “There’s nothing else for me to do here, Captain. I’d rather not stay around.”
Captain Malta looked up to the boarded windows on the second floor. Then he nodded. “Yes,” he said. “I see your point. I think we’ve no further need for you at this time, Doctor. Good-night.”
There was a single shot, sharp and clear. It came from the building...
“Good-night,” Nick said.
“Well, sweetheart,” said Dr. Eddie Wing, who drove him away from the scene, “spend the night with me?”
“No,” Nick said. “Thanks, Eddie. I’m going back to the Royal Hawaiian. I want to see about passage.”
“East?”
“Yes. I’m going home to the States.”
Eddie Wing smiled grimly. “What are you going to do there, Nick?”
“Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of the country,” Nick said. He smiled too. “I guess we’ve got to take a moratorium on saving lives, Eddie. First you kill the bug; then saving a life becomes easy. I’m going to offer my services to the Medical Corps. Perhaps I can help in isolating and destroying the pestis Japanicus.”
“And the pestis Germanicus,” Eddie Wing said.
“And the ladybug Italia,” Nick said.
Bracelets
Katherine Brocklebank
Katherine Brocklebank was unique in the history of Black Mask magazine, and a rara avis in the detective pulp fiction world in general. In the first place, she was a woman and, unless cloaked behind initials or a male pseudonym, the only one identified in the thirty-two-year history of Black Mask, even when it was under the control of a female editor, Fanny Ellsworth, from 1936 to 1940. Second, she created a female series character, Tex of the Border Patrol, who appeared in four stories late in the 1920s. Readers of Black Mask, as was true of all the detective pulps, demonstrated in their letters to the editor that they didn’t particularly care for either female protagonists or authors. While there were some exceptions in other popular magazines, fiction by or about women (except as sidekicks or girlfriends, or the occasional villain) represented a tiny fraction of the thousands of detective stories published annually in the golden age of the pulps (which was between the two World Wars).
“Bracelets,” the first story about Tex of the Border Patrol, was published in the December 1928 issue. The other three Black Mask stories in which she starred were “White Talons” (January 1929), “The Canine Tooth” (June 1929), and “The Silver Horseshoe” (July 1929).
A tale of Tia Juana after the closing hour of the Border and all the good folks have gone home.
Tex watched from the corners of her eyes, watched, with a tight little pucker around her heart.
The girl seemed so young, so incongruous in that blatantly obvious setting. She was like a flower from an old-fashioned garden and yet there she was in the ribald atmosphere of the Blue Fox — where Pancho, the shifty-eyed Mexican proprietor, rubbed his palms together and smiled his oily smile to his patrons; where Eddie swung his bamboo cane to the syncopated time of his moaning Hopa-Holi orchestra — Eddie who wore a chocolate brown suit to match his complexion, a screaming orange tie and a straw hat, who sang the latest popular ballads in a voice — untrained, crooning — as insidious as the ether-doped drinks that the silken-voiced bartenders slid across the bars of Old Town, that were now world-famous, polished to a dull red glow by the elbows of many nationalities.
Tex shifted her eyes to the long mirror back of the bar, noting her titian wig with an inward smile of satisfaction. Strangely enough her greenish gold eyes took on a copper glint. Her wide, good-humored mouth had turned to one of hard wisdom under the clever manipulation of a vivid lip-stick. The orange rouge, slapped carelessly on either cheekbone, gave the finishing touch to a Border percentage girl, calloused, eager — pathetic.
She eased away from the obese gentleman from Kansas City, who pawed her with maudlin intensity, and edged a little nearer to the girl. Her eyes traveled slowly over her, cognizant of the soft green silk dress; the skirt a bit longer than was smart, the floppy affair of black straw that shadowed her face. She seemed like a slender flower-stalk as she leaned against the bar, her arms draped across its stained surface, her fingers playing nervously with the string of bracelets she wore on her left wrist.
Tex noticed particularly the girl’s hands. Narrow and white with long, thin fingers that were never still — fingers that hovered constantly over the bracelets — bracelets that caught and held Tex’s attention. There were eight of them, Chinese, of intricate design, amber and gold, carved ivory, jade. They made a peculiar clanking sound whenever the girl moved her arm.
Tex let her gaze rove blearily along the string of heterogeneity that lined the bar: percentage girls, cheap, faded creatures with gold-filled teeth who wheedled unwilling male sightseers into buying them drinks; thrill-hunters; society matrons with a veneer of hauteur washed off by Border hooch; flappers; groggy daddies whose wives were abroad for the summer; doubtful ladies in shoddy evening clothes; crafty-eyed Mexicans; derelicts; law-dodgers.
Slowly Tex’s eyes came back to the girl and the vain little fish-faced man who stood beside her. They had come in together and Tex knew from things she had heard — never mind how or where — that this must be “The Eel.” A clever crook was The Eel, who had so far eluded the police, who was always under suspicion but had never been caught with the goods. He claimed to be Mexican, although his intimates knew that he was half Chinese. Under an assumption of intoxication Tex studied him closely. With his oily, mud-colored skin, slick black hair and opaque slanting eyes he resembled his pseudonym, and Tex imagined she’d want to wash her hands after touching him. He looked — slimy.
Tex lurched against the girl. “ ’Lo,” she gurgled in her slightly husky voice.