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.
“Forgive me,” Russell said coldly, “if I don’t see the point.”
“You’ll see it,” Keenan said grimly. “You killed Peale because he was going to talk. He was saying he figured I had been dumb enough to — then you shot him. If he’d finished I think he’d have said dumb enough to let you fool me the way you did him. And you killed Peale to shut his mouth, not to protect yourself. Winging him in the arm would have done that.”
Gravely, without surprise, the Englishman faced him, a big man, tanned and quiet, calm, steady eyed. “So you see a catch,” he said. “Are you sure there is one?”
Keenan growled: “It was there from the start. You’re pretty fast with your hands. I’ve seen worse sleight of hand men on the stage. Maybe you were in that racket at one time but this paid you better. Every time you pulled it off it meant thirty or forty grand. I never figured out how you could get a gun out so fast while Peale was swinging his around; but say it was in your sleeve — it was plenty small enough to fit there — and a decent magician could flick it out faster than light.
“And a decent magician,” he went on, “could let Miss Bridges look at the big diamond now, the genuine one, and then switch it with a fake that looked exactly like it when you took it away from her to replace it in the pile. Satisfy us that one was good and you knew we wouldn’t bother to look at the rest.”
There was a pause. Ellen Bridges’ dark eyes flickered from Keenan to the bearded man, to the stones. She reached out to the tawny one and silence lasted for three breaths. Then she cried: “Oh, it isn’t the same. It’s paste!”
Keenan’s smile was grim. “A swell racket, Russell. You had two ways to work it. The first was to get rid of me and slug the girl when she came here alone with the money. The other was to switch the stuff, and when your punks missed up on me last night you had to work it this way to get the money. You fooled Peale and lots of others. When he started to squawk last night, kidding me for being a smart guy before he gave the inside, probably, on how you had switched the stuff on him too, you fed him a steel slug to shut his mouth.”
Russell said: “Yes,” in a clipped, hard sound. His eyes had lost all depth, become pinpoints of blued metal. His right arm was before him, raised slightly, the sleeve hanging loose. “You are right. I’m fast with my hands, Keenan — fast enough to kill you before you can wink an eye. That’s why you and the girl will get up very carefully and back into the closet. That’s why you’ll keep your hands over your head.”
Russell was standing close against the other side of the table. Keenan sat directly across from him, carelessly slouched in his chair, long legs doubled.
“Get up,” Russell said softly. “You and the girl. Don’t move your hands.”
“Please,” Ellen Bridges whispered. “Do what he says, Joe. The money isn’t—”
Joe Keenan remained still. One of his hands was on the table — the other, the right, was hooked by a thumb in the top pocket of his coat. His gray eyes, narrowed and hard, watched Russell’s face. He did not answer him.
There was a silence with only the sound of the girl’s breathing in it. There was something impassive but alert and poised in the stiff erectness of Russell’s body; he looked at Keenan for a long moment, expressionlessly. He said: “You’re a fool,” and his lips drew back slightly, tautly, into the lean brown cheeks.
Keenan saw the flicker in his eyes that preceded motion. Keenan made a little sidewise shrug as if about to get out of the chair. Watching Russell, his long legs, beneath the table, straightened, spread a little. Then, suddenly, he shot his body, feet first, beneath the table.
Keenan’s toes hooked around Russell’s ankles. He jerked inward, and the Englishman slammed over backward on to the floor.
Keenan scrambled upward, pushing with his left hand, the table before him as lead smacked lightly into the wood. Keenan flashed a glance around the table edge. Russell, on his back, the tiny pistol in his right hand, swung it for a second shot, and again the lead smacked without weight into the table. Keenan flipped his hand out and the big automatic spouted flame.
The blue eyes emptied suddenly of light, of life — for an instant they looked back at Keenan with a blank, dead glitter. Then he collapsed fast, limply, and did not move at all.
Keenan’s lean dark face stared down at him. He put his automatic back and got up and crossed to the phone in one corner.
“Police headquarters,” he said, into the mouthpiece, winking solemnly at Ellen Bridges’ white face over it.
It was late afternoon when he got into the roadster with the girl, reversed it around the police car parked outside it, and swung out to the road. Shaking a little, she pressed into his arm.
“You... you’re a fool,” she whispered, looking up at him. “He might have shot you — killed you. I’m still shivering inside. Why did you do it?”
“Why?” Keenan moved his shoulders slightly. “Maybe just because I didn’t like the guy. There was a contraption inside his sleeve that held the small pistol — all he had to do was jerk his elbow and a spring snapped the gun down into his hand faster than you could watch it. An outfit like that is part of the equipment of a sleight of hand man, only usually guns aren’t in them. Close enough a toy like that could kill any man the way it killed Peale.”
“It could have killed you,” Ellen Bridges said softly. “And the money wouldn’t have meant that much to me, Joe.”
Keenan said: “It wasn’t the money. With an outfit like that, a man didn’t have a chance. Major Russell was a rat. There’s just one thing to do with a rat, Kitten. I figured that staring him down like that would knock him off balance, make him panicky. When Russell was on the short end of a hundred to one chance he was cool; and a heel like him had had it all in his favor so long that he’d forgotten what it was like to play it even up.”
Shivering, Ellen Bridges came close into his shoulder, put her hand over his on the steering wheel.
“And it wasn’t me?” she asked, after a while. “Not even a little bit?”
Keenan looked down at her, his gray eyes amused.
He said: “That’s one you have to figure out, Kitten.”
Murder in the Ring
Raoul Whitfield
Raoul (Faucconier) Whitfield (1896–1945) was born in New York City and traveled with his family extensively, spending much of his youth in the Philippines. During World War I, he served with the U.S. Army Air Corps in France as a pilot. When he returned to the United States, he went to learn the steel business (he was related to Andrew Carnegie), then worked as a newspaper reporter and began to write fiction for pulp magazines. He used his flying background to write aviation stories for the pulps in the early 1920s, then sold his first mystery to Black Mask for the March 1926 issue. He went on, in a serious burst of prolificity, to write nearly ninety stories, under his own name and as Ramon Decolta, for Black Mask between that first effort and his last one, only eight years later, for the February 1934 issue. During that time, he also wrote five mystery novels: three under his own name, Green Ice (1930), Death in a Bowl (1931), and The Virgin Kills (1932); and two under the pseudonym Temple Field, Five (1931) and Killer’s Carnival (1932). As Whitfield, he wrote four juveniles, all with aviation backgrounds: Wings of Gold (1930), Silver Wings (1930), Danger Zone (1931), and Danger Circus (1933). His Black Mask story “Man Killer,” which was published in the April 1932 issue, was filmed as Private Detective 62 by Paramount in 1933; Michael Curtiz was the director, and the comic crime story starred William Powell and Margaret Lindsay.