The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps
- Автор: Anderson Lars, Barr Randolph
- Год: 2007
- Язык: английский
- Год: Vintage Books
- ISBN: 978-0-307-28048-0
- Жанр: Криминальные детективы
Электронная книга - «The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps». Краткое содержание книги:
Weighing in at over a thousand pages, containing over forty-seven stories and two novels, this book is big baby, bigger and more powerful than a freight train — a bullet couldn’t pass through it. Here are the best stories and every major writer who ever appeared in celebrated Pulps like Black Mask, Dime Detective, Detective Fiction Weekly, and more. These are the classic tales that created the genre and gave birth to hard-hitting detectives who smoke criminals like packs of cigarettes; sultry dames whose looks are as lethal as a dagger to the chest; and gin-soaked hideouts where conversations are just preludes to murder. This is crime fiction at its gritty best.
She stopped a minute and rubbed at her dry eyes. The Flame didn’t know how to cry, I guess. Then she went on.
“I couldn’t protect myself, Race. I had not expected him to act so quickly. Before we were off the ground he had taken my gun — and the mechanic who turned our propeller struck me a blow on the head. I was stunned, didn’t fully recover until we were up in the air, high up.
“He was clever, Race. The mechanic was one of his men. That mechanic would swear that I had gone up alone. Michelle was to set fire to the plane, leap with a parachute, be picked up by a man waiting with his car and driven back to the city.
“ ‘This was to be our bridal chariot,’ he said. ‘Now — it’s your coffin, Florence. Like your sister, you crossed me. I loved you; I could have made you very happy. But you proved yourself a rat and a stool-pigeon. I give you death. I fight my own battles, I do not need the police.’ ”
“ ‘And I too can fight my own battles,’ I cried out, as he tossed something on the hot engine and did something to the controls. ‘Don’t jump, Michelle Gorgon! You’ve planned for me to be burnt to death in this blazing plane. I—’ as I saw him on the edge of the cock-pit, his gun covering me, his index finger cocked through the loop of his parachute chord, ‘I ripped the pack on your back with a knife as soon as you climbed into the plane. I cut your parachute. You’ll — you’ll have to burn with me.’
“He seemed to hesitate for a moment — then he smiled and stretched his hand back over his shoulder. The plane lurched. He cried out once, slipped, tottered — and fell. It seemed like hours that I heard his terrible screech of horror. Then the earth coming up, the trees and the crash — and you. But I swear I warned him that I cut—”
I put my hand across her mouth. O’Rourke was coming back.
“I’ll telephone at the first town and have them pick up that Rolls and that mechanic at the field — and then have a look at Rudolph Myer,” O’Rourke said, as we climbed into the police car. “And to ease your mind, Race. That lad was as dead as old King Tut, and it was our mutual friend, Michelle Gorgon.”
“Yes, and anything The Flame had to do with it was self-defense, and—”
“You talk too much.” O’Rourke looked at me as he lit a big black cigar, and I gathered The Flame close to me in the back of the machine. “You know, the body of Gorgon still hung in the trees when I reached it.” And when I looked at him, surprised — for I had seen plainly that the body was on the ground, “I say it still hung in the trees. Get that! I know it, for I had to cut that parachute pack to ribbons with my knife to get him loose. Cut it to ribbons, understand!” And after a pause, while he glared at me, “It’s funny it didn’t open right, but then, they very often don’t, and there’s no explaining... no explaining it.”
After all, O’Rourke wasn’t a bad scout. But Michelle Gorgon was dead, and Michelle Gorgon had held The Flame in his arms. And... oh, I wasn’t superstitious or anything like that. That thought had nothing to do with my moving over in a corner of the back seat and sticking a cigarette in my mouth. I... I just needed a smoke, I guess.
Any more to it? Well — hardly. The body of Eddie Gorgon turned up in the river three days later. We could only guess that Michelle Gorgon had some of his crowd put it there. Why? Well — maybe because he didn’t want it discovered in the underworld, just then, that some one — particularly a lad known as Race Williams — had the guts to shoot his brother, Eddie — or the lad every one thought was his brother, Eddie.
The Villains
Introduction by Harlan Ellison
I, Felon
Not that it’s any of your damned business, but the first time I went to jail was in 1945. I was eleven years old. In 1958 I wrote a story about it. The title was “Free With This Box!” I was twenty-four. Now shuddup and leave me alone.
There are three sections in this group of homages to the pulp writers of a dear and departed era in popular literature. One of them, I’m told, is The Crimefighters, the third will be The Dames, and this one, dealing with the villains. As I am not a woman, it is manifest why I was not solicited by the eminence grise of this project, the esteemed editor Mr. Otto (we calls him “Slow Hand Poppa”) Penzler, to pen the introductory exegesis for the book about the broads; and as you will understand in mere moments, selecting me to front a book extolling the virtues of cops, pseudo-cops, hemi/semi/demi cops, and P.I. cops is about as apropos as a pinata at a paraplegics’ picnic.
I was importuned by Penzler to write a foreword for a book of stories about crooks. We’re talkin’ here thieves, thugs, knaves, poltroons, bilkers, milkers, murderers, arsonists, liars, blackmailers, footpads, cat burglars, shakedown artists, pigeon-drop and 3-card monte swindlers, bloodthirsters, and backstabbers... in short, criminals.
Now, you may ask, what is this delicate flower of advanced age, this pinnacle of society, this world-famous and multiple-award-winning credit to his species, getting at? Is he, heaven for-fend, suggesting that it is right and proper, even condign that this Penzler fellah thinks Ellison is as one with this fictional cadre of creeps and culprits, similar in spirit or outlook or past experience? Is that what we are to believe?
What is it witchu? Didn’t I tell you to shuddup and leave me alone?
First of all, I grew up reading the pulps. I was born in ’34 and, unlike most of the Jessica Simpson-admiring twerps of contemporary upbringing, for whom nostalgia is what they had for breakfast, I actually remember what a hoot it was to plonk myself into the Ouroboros root-nest of the ancient oak tree in the front yard of our little house at 89 Harmon Drive, Painesville, Ohio, with the latest issue of Black Book Detective Magazine or The Shadow. Ah me, those wood-chip-scented, cream-colored pulp pages dropping their dandruff onto the lap of my knickers...
(Those were corduroy boys’ pants, here in America. In England, as I later discovered to my priapic delight, the same word is used to designate female panties — ah yes, in the aphorism of G. B. Shaw: “The United States and England are two countries divided by a common language.”)
... and while Jack Wheeldon and his cronies yelled “kike” as they rode their Schwinns past my eyrie, I went away from that place and that time with the adventures of masked riders, square-jawed crimefighters, mightily-thewed barbarian warriors, spacemen accompanied by gorgeous women in brass brassieres, and culprits too smooth and sagacious to be nobbled by some cigar-masticating flatfoot from the Central Office. There was something called “escapism” in the pop lit of those days. It’s too bad that word has fallen on such hard times. Escapism now, I’m told, is Not A Good Thing. Yet in its place we have “entertainment” that deifies the idle, the infamous, the egregious, and the shallow. In place of Raffles and Flambeau and Jimmy Valentine we have rapper thugs for whom human speech is not their natural tongue, a morbid fascination with those missing and presumed buried or drowned in the Bahamas, the need for a daily fix of tabloid ink infusion anent the presumed grotesqueries of child molesters, serial killers, televangelist alarmists, racists and ratfinks and raucous riffraff. We have been led down the societal garden path to a place where an honest crook who carries no firearm and would not stoop to such ignominious behavior as a carjacking or ballbatting of an ATM is no-price, and we are surfeited with “entertainment” that cheapens us, distances us, turns us into an unworthy people who accept no responsibility for our bad actions, and fills us with a sense of American Idol entitlement that has no substance in reality.