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.
“Yuh last chance, yuh fool,” hissed Jefe. “Hand over that paper!”
The girl seemed to wilt, her head drooping forward as if too heavy to hold erect, although her words rang out clearly in the silently waiting room. “No! You — murderer!”
“Hold her arm out, Pancho,” ordered Jefe, and the green bangle touched her slender clenched hand.
“Oh, God! Oh, God!” she murmured hopelessly, despairingly.
Tex eased a little to one side so that Pancho’s broad back was between her and the girl.
“She’s too good ter live,” continued The Eel, and laughed. A sound that reminded Tex of a hyena she had once heard in the zoo — mirthless, blood-chilling.
Then with his laugh another sound mingled — slyly apologetic. A sort of muffled plop.
An expression of wonder spread over Pancho’s crafty features as he loosened his hold on Mame and slumped grotesquely to the brick floor.
“What the hell?” muttered The Eel, staring at the inert body of Pancho; then he raised his eyes to a thin stream of smoke that was drifting from the mouth of a small pistol encased in Tex’s steady fingers. His gaze traveled on upward until it encountered the unflinching gold-green eyes of Tex.
“Ah’d — rather take you — alive,” she murmured with a faint smile.
For a moment he stared at her, expressionless, immovable; then without the slightest warning he sprang straight at her, knocking the pistol to the floor, curling his fingers about her wrist. Holding the jade bracelet lightly, gingerly, between the thumb and fingers of his right hand.
A little quiver of panic shivered through Tex, then her cold, sane reasoning came to her rescue. She held The Eel’s eyes with her own while she eased her left hand toward the green menace and with a swift movement of her strong fingers snatched the bracelet from him. He lunged for it. She met the darting hand with a movement as swift as his own. His slender fingers entered the circlet; the needle-like prongs cut and tore. He gave a cry of rage and terror, clawing frantically at the poisonous manacle, but the more he pulled at it the deeper sank the sharp gold points into his punctured flesh.
His writhing agony was horrible to see. It made Tex a little sick. She stooped to recover her pistol and regarded the girl who sagged against the cot and stared at her with a dazed look in her shadowy eyes.
“In which bracelet did you hide the paper?” asked Tex unexpectedly.
The girl fingered the bangles with fluttering fingers. “This one,” she answered automatically, caressing a beautifully carved circlet of mellowed ivory. “It’s — Arthur’s favorite.”
Tex caught the girl by her shoulders and gently shook her. “Gather yourself,” she admonished, not unkindly, “and go quickly to Tia Juana. Phone to my chief, J. C. Gilbert. Here’s his number. Tell him Tex has sent for him. To come to Pancho’s at once — and to bring a doctor.” She gave the girl a little push toward the door. “Hurry!”
Slowly Mame pulled the heavy door toward her, paused and looked back at Tex with a slight pleading gesture of her slim white hands. “You’ll take care of — Arthur?”
Tex nodded, still the girl lingered.
“When he wakes — you’ll tell him — that — my... my... love for him — was greater — than... than... my — fear?”
A lump rose in Tex’s throat and she had to swallow it before answering. “Ah’ll — tell him,” she said softly.
Mame left reluctantly, slipping quietly out into the darkness, closing Tex in the shrouded room.
The candles burned low, dripping over the edges of their rusty iron holders.
Tex allowed her eyes to wander around the dimly flickering room, to slide quickly over the lifeless body of Pancho, on to the twisted form of The Eel, that even in death seemed to coil, like a snake. She turned with a lightening spirit to Arthur Hewett. He was breathing evenly, calmly.
She dropped wearily into the chair near the cot and slipped her pistol back into the frayed depths of her bead bag. Her fingers touched the cool hardness of a pair of handcuffs. “Bracelets,” she murmured, and a little exultant cry trickled from her throat.
Diamonds Mean Death
Thomas Walsh
Thomas (Francis Morgan) Walsh (1908–1984) was born in New York City and received his BA from Columbia University in 1933, the same year in which he sold his first short story, “Double Check,” to Black Mask. He sold several additional stories to Black Mask, one of which was honored by Joseph T. Shaw when he selected “Best Man” (October 1934) for his groundbreaking anthology The Hard-Boiled Omnibus (1946), which he regarded as the best work produced during his tenure as editor of Black Mask. Walsh went on to sell numerous stories to Collier’s, The Saturday Evening Post, and Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, one of which, “Chance after Chance,” won the Edgar Allan Poe Award in 1978. The first of his eleven New York police novels, Nightmare in Manhattan (1950), had previously won the Edgar for Best First Novel. It was filmed in the same year by Paramount as Union Station, starring William Holden, Nancy Olson, and Barry Fitzgerald. The exciting screenplay, for which Sydney Boehm was nominated for an Edgar, remained extremely faithful to the novel, although the locale was changed from New York’s Grand Central Station to Chicago’s titular crossroads, and the kidnapping victim was a blind teenage girl instead of a young boy. Walsh’s The Night Watch (1952) also served as the partial basis, with Bill S. Ballinger’s Rafferty, for the Columbia film noir Pushover (1954), which starred Fred MacMurray as a good cop gone bad, and Kim Novak in her first major role.
“Diamonds Mean Death,” Walsh’s last Black Mask story, was published in March 1936.
There is a trick even to the trade of murder.
In the yellow cone of light thrown down by the lamp behind her, the girl’s dark face looked lovely and eager, a pale, glowing cameo sharp cut against the shadows at her back.
The two men seated across the table watched her with varying emotions — Major Geoffrey Russell with very clear, slightly amused blue eyes, a smile faint on his lips, a cigarette graceful in his long fingers. Joe Keenan was not smiling; he sat at the end of the table, sharp face watchful, gray eyes shining coldly, with small glints of color, as if the diamonds heaped carelessly on the cloth before the girl were reflected there in pinpoints of ice.
None of the three spoke. There was a slight clicking sound as the girl’s fingers flashed through the stones, selecting one, holding it to the light for an instant, then passing on to the next.
In the corners of the room shadows held steady, cut in sharp patterns by the yellow glow of the lamp. Thick drapes concealed the windows at the far side, and occasionally Joe Keenan’s restless gaze flicked to them. Heavily lifeless, they hung there without motion, and through them only a few night sounds, mournful with distance, pierced in from the woods outside.
Joe Keenan’s eyes had kept steadily attentive on those drapes for the past twenty minutes, even when he had apparently been looking elsewhere. But there had been no movement from them, and no sound, and gradually his right hand had relaxed on his thigh, six inches from the automatic in his topcoat pocket.
Bending forward into the light as he lit another cigarette, Major Russell smiled at him, offered him his case. He was a bulky, muscular man of forty, rather tall, with skin tanned to a deep leathery tinge, and a short, square-cut beard of flaming auburn, through which his teeth showed very white when he smiled. Keenan took a cork-tipped cigarette from the extended case and nodded thanks; he was lighting it when a sharp breath of admiration from the girl drew his eyes.