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.
If I seem to be extolling the chimerical “virtues” of felons and crooks, one might assume in much the same way as the naive and gullible praised Dillinger, Capone, Ma Barker and her boys, back in the day, well, I live in the real world and I do truly really understand that Billy the Kid and Murder, Inc. and even Bonnie & Clyde were way less than icons to hold up to one’s children... but... nonetheless...
I would rather spend time reading about Boston Blackie and Fantomas and Harry Lime than have to put up with one more pelvic twitch of Christina Aguilera or pelvic piercing of Pink. What used to be a necessary and even enriching, innervating, if not ennobling retreat to the made-up worlds of high crimes and low misdemeanors in the pulps, has been relentlessly, ceaselessly, tirelessly bastardized by corporate and advertising thugs (far worse than the Bad Guys you’ll find in this volume), into a pounding, remorseless assault of empty trivial crap that fills the air, saturates our perceptions of the received world, and turns us away from ourselves and our true values and our important pursuits. Distractions that make the tomfoolery and toughtalk of the pulps seem as rich and golden as the Analects of Confucius or a paraphrasing of Lao Tzu. In the stories in this book, taken from the heart and core of that popular entertainment engine of the ’20s, ’30s, and ’40s, you will experience an escapism that steals nothing from you, reduces you not one scintilla, pleasures and distracts you the way a tall champagne flute of good, tart lemonade does on a blistering August afternoon.
The fictions may creak a bit in the joints, some of the writing may be too prolix for modern tastes (don’t forget, they were writing for % to a penny-a-word in those halcyon days of post-Depression America), and we have been exposed to an electronically-linked world for so long now, that some of the attitudes and expressions in these fables may seem giggle-worthy, but this is a muscular writing that sustained us through some very tough times, and their preserved quality of sheer entertainment value is considerable. So be kind.
As for me, well, I come to this book with credentials that are not trumpeted in the “official biographies” or in a Who’s Who or the Encyclopedia of American Authors. But mine is exactly the proper vita for a book’a’crooks.
As I said, I grew up in situ with the pulp detective magazines. And in my earliest days as a professional I wrote for the metamorphosed hard-boiled pulps in digest-size (which stick-in-the-mud Penzler has trouble perceiving as equally valid cred for “pulp” as the larger-sized magazines). I wrote for Manhunt, Mantrap, Mayhem, Guilty, Sure-Fire Detective, Trapped, The Saint Mystery Magazine (both U.S. and U.K editions), Mike Shayne’s, Tightrope, Crime and Justice Detective Story, and Terror Detective Story Magazine, just to glaze your eyes and bore yo ass with a select few of the rags for which I toiled. So that’s a second good reason for me being the one who stands here at the prow of the ship, urging you aboard.
But the cred that stands, the one that beats the bulldog, is that I was a felon. I mentioned my first incarceration at age eleven, a spree of petty theft involving comic character pinback buttons concealed in boxes of Wheaties; but that was just the first. Age thirteen, ran off and wound up in a huge free-standing cell in the old (now-razed) Kansas City slam, all alone save for a carny geek who went nuts without his bottle of gin a day, and impressed me forever with the stench of rotgut sweated out via armpits. Booted out of Ohio State University in 1954, in part, for shoplifting. Saw the inside of the Columbus jail on that one.
U.S. Army brigs of various venues, 1957-59, mostly for insubordination. 1960: I’m in New York, living down in the Village, guy I had a beef with phones in bullshit charges of “possession of firearms” to the cops, they bust me, toss me in The Tombs (see my book Memos from Purgatory), and finally the Grand Jury looks at it, the D.A. knows it’s bullshit so he urges them to return No True Bill, and that was that.
Civil Rights days. I was in jails in Mississippi, Georgia, Alabama with Martin, and on and on. In Louisiana, a couple of redneck cops grabbed me on a back road in Plaquemine Parish, hauled me in, stripped me to the waist, cuffed me behind my back, lifted me up between them, hung the cuffs over a meat hook turned into the top-half of a Dutch door, and took turns walloping me across the belly with a plastic kiddie ballbat, careful to leave barely a mark on the outside. Did that till the Boss of Plaquemine, the infamous Leander Peres showed up, thumbed through my wallet full of I.D. and credit cards, discovered I was from Hollywood, knew there’d be a geshry (as we say in Yiddish) if I vanished, had his boys take me down, and redeposited me: in a ditch somewhere out on a dark back road, with this admonition, which I recall with telephonic accuracy more than four decades later: “Nex’ tahm you show yo ass in Plack-uh-mun, jew-boy, we gonna jus’ kill you.”
Is it appropriate that Otto picked me for the introductory remarks about crooks and felons? You better believe it, dawg. Now go thee hence, inside farther, and enjoy yourself.
Tell ’em Harlan sent you. And now, just shuddup and leave me alone. A tired old felon slumped and maundering about his days on the other side of the law.
The Cat-Woman
Erle Stanley Gardner
Of the many pulp creations of Erle Stanley Gardner (1889–1970), one of his personal favorites was Ed Jenkins, known as the Phantom Thief, his first significant series character (after Bob Larkin, who lasted only two adventures), who appeared in seventy-four novellas, more than any other protagonist.
Much of Gardner’s career is important and inspiring because of the sheer numbers. In the decade before the first novel about Perry Mason, The Case of the Velvet Claws (1933), he averaged approximately 1,200,000 published words a year — the equivalent of one 10,000-word novella every three days, for 365 days. And he had a day job as a lawyer.
He dictated cases to his secretary and, in 1932, it finally occurred to him that he could dictate fiction, too, which greatly speeded up the writing process, enabling him to produce novels for the first time. Velvet Claws famously took three and a half days, though Gardner mostly said it was really four days, since he needed a half day to think up the plot.
Jenkins made his debut with “Beyond the Law” in the January 1925 issue of Black Mask and was one of the most popular series detectives in the history of the magazine. When Gardner decided to write no more about him, readers caused such an uproar that he was forced to continue producing his capers. “The Cat-Woman” was first published in the February 1927 issue of Black Mask.
It was a matter of seconds... I heard running steps on the walk...
Big Bill Ryan slid his huge bulk into the vacant chair opposite my own and began toying with the heavy watch chain which stretched across the broad expanse of his vest.
“Well,” I asked, showing only mild annoyance, for Big Ryan had the reputation of never wasting time, his own or anyone else’s.
“Ed, I hear you’ve gone broke. I’ve got a job for you.”
He spoke in his habitual, thin, reedy voice. In spite of his bulk his mouth was narrow and his tone shrill. However, I fancied I could detect a quiver of excitement underlying his words, and I became cold. News travels fast in the underworld. He knew of my financial setback as soon as I did, almost. My brokers had learned my identity — that I was a crook, and they had merely appropriated my funds. They were reputable business men. I was a crook. If I made complaint the courts would laugh at me. I’ve had similar experiences before. No matter how honest a man may appear he’ll always steal from a crook — not from any ethical reasons, but because he feels he can get away with it.