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.
I had to ask it. “Why? Why would he — if you’re right.”
“I’m helping him, that’s why. I’m helping him to make up his black mind to hang a rope from the grating in the top of that smokehouse, and dangle from it. He hasn’t got the guts to, yet. So every time he’s in town, he sits on the platform a while to rest. And I tell him what a murdering son of a gun he is.”
He spat toward the tracks. He said: “There are a few of us know the score. Not the sheriff; he wouldn’t believe us, said it would be too hard to prove.”
The scrape of feet behind me made me turn. The tall man with the huge hands and the granite face was standing up now. He didn’t look toward us. He started for the steps.
The agent said: “He’ll hang himself, pretty soon now. He wouldn’t come here and sit like that for any other reason, would he, mister?”
“Unless,” I said, “he is deaf.”
“Sure. He could be. See what I meant? If a tree falls and the only man there to hear it is maybe deaf and maybe not, is it silent or isn’t it? Well, I got to get the mail pouch ready.”
I turned and looked at the tall figure walking away from the station. He walked slowly and his shoulders, big as they were, seemed a little stooped.
The clock in the steeple a block away began to strike for eight o’clock.
The tall man lifted his wrist to look at the watch on it.
I shuddered a little. It could have been coincidence, sure, and yet a little chill went down my spine.
The train pulled in, and I got aboard.
Arson Plus
Peter Collinson
Peter Collinson is the pseudonym of (Samuel) Dashiell Hammett (1894–1961), who was born in St. Mary’s County, Maryland, and served in the Motor Ambulance Corps during World War I; he also served in the Signal Corps during World War II, mostly on the Aleutian Islands. He worked for the Pinkerton Detective Agency in several cities, including Baltimore, San Francisco (where he got a promotion for catching a man who had stolen a Ferris wheel), and Los Angeles, where he was involved in the rape case that ruined the then-famous comic actor Fatty Arbuckle; he was also once assigned to follow the notorious gangster Nick Arnstein. His years as a detective provided rich background for his crime stories, and he discovered early on that the pulp magazine market was a good one.
Although he is recognized as one of the giants in the history of the American hard-boiled school of fiction, Hammett produced only five novels and a modest number of short stories, especially when compared with the output of other successful pulp writers. After a few fairly trivial pieces for the Smart Set magazine, he wrote his first crime story and submitted it to Black Mask under the pseudonym Peter Collinson. In the underworld argot of the day, a “Peter Collins” was a nobody. Hammett added the “on” to make the name read, literally, “nobody’s son.”
“Arson Plus” is one of four stories sold to Black Mask under the Peter Collinson name, and the first Continental Op story. It was published in the October 1923 issue.
This is a detective story you’ll have a hard time solving before the end. Form your ideas of the outcome as you go along and then see how near you guessed it.
Jim Tarr picked up the cigar I rolled across his desk, looked at the band, bit off an end, and reached for a match.
“Fifteen cents straight,” he said. “You must want me to break a couple of laws for you this time.”
I had been doing business with this fat sheriff of Sacramento County for four or five years — ever since I came to the Continental Detective Agency’s San Francisco office — and I had never known him to miss an opening for a sour crack; but it didn’t mean anything.
“Wrong both times,” I told him. “I get two of them for a quarter; and I’m here to do you a favor instead of asking for one. The company that insured Thornburgh’s house thinks somebody touched it off.”
“That’s right enough, according to the fire department. They tell me the lower part of the house was soaked with gasoline, but God knows how they could tell — there wasn’t a stick left standing. I’ve got McClump working on it, but he hasn’t found anything to get excited about yet.”
“What’s the layout? All I know is that there was a fire.”
Tarr leaned back in his chair, turned his red face to the ceiling and bellowed:
“Hey, Mac!”
The pearl push-buttons on his desk are ornaments as far as he is concerned. Deputy sheriffs McHale, McClump and Macklin came to the door together — MacNab apparently wasn’t within hearing.
“What’s the idea?” the sheriff demanded of McClump. “Are you carrying a bodyguard around with you?”
The two other deputies, thus informed as to who “Mac” referred to this time, went back to their cribbage game.
“We got a city slicker here to catch our firebug for us,” Tarr told his deputy. “But we got to tell him what it’s all about first.”
McClump and I had worked together on an express robbery, several months before. He’s a rangy, towheaded youngster of twenty-five or-six, with all the nerve in the world — and most of the laziness.
“Ain’t the Lord good to us?”
He had himself draped across a chair by now — always his first objective when he comes into a room.
“Well, here’s how she stands: This fellow Thornburgh’s house was a couple miles out of town, on the old county road — an old frame house. About midnight, night before last, Jeff Pringle — the nearest neighbor, a half-mile or so to the east — saw a glare in the sky from over that way, and phoned in the alarm; but by the time the fire wagons got there, there wasn’t enough of the house left to bother about. Pringle was the first of the neighbors to get to the house, and the roof had already fell in then.
“Nobody saw anything suspicious — no strangers hanging around or nothing. Thornburgh’s help just managed to save themselves, and that was all. They don’t know much about what happened — too scared, I reckon. But they did see Thornburgh at his window just before the fire got him. A fellow here in town — name of Handerson — saw that part of it too. He was driving home from Wayton, and got to the house just before the roof caved in.
“The fire department people say they found signs of gasoline. The Coonses, Thornburgh’s help, say they didn’t have no gas on the place. So there you are.”
“Thornburgh have any relatives?”
“Yeah. A niece in San Francisco — a Mrs. Evelyn Trowbridge. She was up yesterday, but there wasn’t nothing she could do, and she couldn’t tell us nothing much, so she went back home.”
“Where are the servants now?”
“Here in town. Staying at a hotel on I Street. I told ’em to stick around for a few days.”
“Thornburgh own the house?”
“Uh-huh. Bought it from Newning and Weed a couple months ago.”
“You got anything to do this morning?”
“Nothing but this.”
“Good! Let’s get out and dig around.”
We found the Coonses in their room at the hotel on I Street. Mr. Coons was a small-boned, plump man with the smooth, meaningless face and the suavity of the typical male house-servant.
His wife was a tall, stringy woman, perhaps five years older than her husband — say, forty — with a mouth and chin that seemed shaped for gossiping. But he did all the talking, while she nodded her agreement to every second or third word.
“We went to work for Mr. Thornburgh on the fifteenth of June, I think,” he said, in reply to my first question. “We came to Sacramento, around the first of the month, and put in applications at the Allis Employment Bureau. A couple of weeks later they sent us out to see Mr. Thornburgh, and he took us on.”