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.
The great reptile reared up in pain and shock. Its terrible head slashed around in a razorlike strike and knocked Wilkins’ dead body clear across the bottom of the pit from the force of the blow. The curved rows of fangs bit into Wilkins’ clothes. They were not venomous but chewed into the cadaver viciously.
The two crushing loops of the serpentine phantasmagoria fell over the dead man, encircled him, and began to contract, the muscles rippling comberlike beneath the scaly skin.
It was a horrid spectacle — a python crushing a dead man.
Deen stood by, unhurt, watching the gruesome scene in lethargic fascination.
Suddenly, above him, he heard a harsh, bitter cry. Gorgan had watched his plans go awry. Wilkins’ corpse had diverted the snake from the detective. The snake would try and swallow the cadaver but would get no further than the head, since it is impossible for any living constrictor to gulp down a man because of the width of the shoulders. He would have to kill Deen himself.
Bestially, Gorgan flung up the pistol.
Deen was taken almost unawares. He saw the ugly black nozzle of the automatic draw a bead on his eyes. With the alacrity of a bullet, he hurled himself to the floor of the pit. Simultaneously, the gun spat flame and death.
The slug tore Deen’s coat and crashed against the glass of the pit, crumbling the glass and leaving irregular footing against the side of the wall.
Deen had lifted himself on his hands, half-kneeling. The peculiar green cigarette holder was between his teeth again. It was held taut, stiff against his gleaming white teeth.
Gorgan was pulling the trigger of the pistol frantically but the lead was going wild, breaking down the glass of the pit.
There was a piercing, whistling hiss like that of an angry, hooded hamadryad.
Gorgan was suddenly transfixed. His eyes bulged maniacally. A purplish cyanotic color pervaded his flesh. His lips moved jabberingly but uttered no sound. A thin trickle of blood coursed slowly down from his throat, from a minute hole directly above his jugular vein. A tiny black hole — a dart-hole.
Gruesomely, Maxie Gorgan fought against the powerful nerve-destroying cobra venom which was seeping through his blood stream and tearing the vortex of his vasomotor system and lungs to shreds. His breath came in agonizing, sobbing gulps and each one was filled with inhuman pain. His face slowly grew black as the toxin destruction grew greater.
For a second, his voice gained audibility.
“You—” he rasped, a death rattle sounding in his throat — “the Cobra...”
He fell forward into the pit, smashing down on his face and rolling over on his back, dead.
Deen climbed out of the pit where the python had swallowed the head of Wilkins and was fighting to engulf the man’s shoulders, an impossibility. He stepped on the scant indentations of broken glass which the bullets had created.
The sound of axes tearing wood floated down to the cellar. He glanced at his watch. True to the hour, the police — as he had outlined in his plan with Ryder and Marshall — were raiding the gloomy House of Kaa.
Inspector Ryder burst into the pit-room, almost at the same instant, service revolver in hand. He surveyed the wreckage of the pit and whistled in horror. Quickly he put a hot bullet through the skull of the regal python. He gazed down and saw the noxious dart imbedded in the upturned throat of Maxie Gorgan.
“The Cobra!” Ryder exclaimed.
“Yes,” Deen said. “The Cobra saved my life. Quick, may I have your revolver?”
Ryder regarded Deen keenly. The green cigarette holder in Deen’s hand caught his eye. For the time being, he said nothing. He handed his gun over.
Deen went around the pit to the packing case which stood next to the railing. He found a hammer and ripped the top unceremoniously off the base. There were three more pythons within, all small specimens, from six to ten feet in length.
One had a small white piece of adhesive tape on the back of its head.
Fearlessly, Deen reached in and yanked the snake out with both his hands. Holding one hand behind the neck, he laid the snake on the floor, placed the gun against its brain and pulled the trigger. The snake thrashed slightly and was still.
Then, opening a knife, the detective slit open the belly, cut away the fatty tissues and lacerated the stomach.
When Deen stood up, a gleaming, dazzling flash of red fire struck Inspector Ryder in the eyes.
“The Kubij Opal!” he cried.
“Exactly,” Deen murmured. “The case is over.”
Ryder eyed the green cigarette holder in the detective’s other hand.
“But what of the Cobra?” he asked.
Deen hastily pocketed the holder. His eyes twinkled.
“The Cobra disappeared just before you came in.”
The Invisible Millionaire
Leslie Charteris
It is almost impossible to measure the success of Leslie Charteris’s famous creation, Simon Templar, better known as the Saint.
The Saint is anything but. He is an adventurer, a romantic hero who works outside the law and has grand fun doing it. Like so many crooks in literature, he is imbued with the spirit of Robin Hood, which suggests that it is perfectly all right to steal, so long as it is from someone with wealth. Most of the more than forty books about the Saint are collections of short stories or novellas, and in the majority of tales he also functions as a detective. Unconstricted by being an official policeman, he steps outside the law to retrieve money or treasure that may not have been procured in an honorable fashion, either to restore it to its proper owner or to enrich himself.
“Maybe I am a crook,” Templar once says, “but in between times I’m something more. In my simple way I am a kind of justice.”
In addition to the many books about the Saint, there were ten films about him, mainly starring George Sanders or Louis Hayward; a comic strip; a radio series that ran for much of the 1940s; and a television series starring Roger Moore, an international success with 118 episodes.
Leslie Charteris (1907–1993), born in Singapore, became an American citizen in 1946.
“The Invisible Millionaire” was first published in the June 1938 issue of Black Mask.
1
The girl’s eyes caught Simon Templar as he entered the room, ducking his head instinctively to pass under the low lintel of the door; and they followed him steadily across to the bar. They were blue eyes with long lashes, and the face to which they belonged was pretty without any distinctive feature, crowned with curly yellow hair. And besides anything else, the eyes held an indefinable hint of strain.
Simon knew all this without looking directly at her. But he had singled her out at once from the double handful of riverside week-enders who crowded the small barroom as the most probable writer of the letter which he still carried in his pocket — the letter which had brought him out to the Bell that Sunday evening on what anyone with a less incorrigibly optimistic flair for adventure would have branded from the start as a fool’s errand. She was the only girl in the place who seemed to be unattached: there was no positive reason why the writer of that letter should have been unattached, but it seemed likely that she would be. Also she was the best looker in a by no means repulsive crowd; and that was simply no clue at all except to Simon Templar’s own unshakable faith in his guardian angel, who had never thrown any other kind of damsel in distress into his buccaneering path.