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 moved closer toward him, her brown eyes searching his face.
“I wish—”
It was all she had time to say. The rush of sounds that cut her off hit both of them at the same time, muffled by distance and the closed door of the room, and yet horribly distinct, stiffening them both together as though they had been clutched by invisible clammy tentacles. A shrill incoherent yell, hysterical with terror but unmistakably masculine. A heavy thud. A wild shout of “Help!” in the doctor’s deep thundery voice. And then a ghastly inhuman wailing gurgle that choked off into deathly silence.
7
Balanced on a knife edge of uncanny self-control, the Saint stood motionless, watching the girl’s expression for a full long second before she turned away with a gasp and rushed at the door. Hoppy Uniatz flung himself after her like a wild bull awakened from slumber: he could have remained comatose through eons of verbal fencing, but this was a call to action, clear and unsullied, and such simple clarions had never found him unresponsive. Simon started the thin edge of an instant later than either of them; but it was his hand that reached the doorknob first.
He threw the door wide and stepped out with a smooth combination of movements that brought him through the opening with a gun in his hand and his eyes streaking over the entire scene outside in one whirling survey. But the hall was empty. At the left and across from him, the front door was closed; at the opposite end a door which obviously communicated with the service wing of the house was thrown open to disclose the portly emerging figure of the butler with the white frightened faces of other servants peering from behind him.
The Saint’s glance swept on upwards. The noises that had brought him out had come from upstairs, he was certain: that was also the most likely place for them to have come from, and it was only habitual caution that had made him pause to scan the hall as he reached it. He caught the girl’s arm as she came by him.
“Let me go up first,” he said. He blocked Hoppy’s path on his other side, and shot a question across at the butler without raising his voice. “Are there any other stairs, Jeeves?”
“Y-yes sir—”
“All right. You stay here with Miss Chase. Hoppy, you find these back stairs and cover them.”
He raced on up the main stairway.
As he took the treads three at a time, on his toes, he was trying to find a niche for one fact of remarkable interest. Unless Rosemary Chase was the greatest natural actress that a generation of talent scouts had overlooked, or unless his own judgment had gone completely cockeyed, the interruption had hit her with the same chilling shock as it had given him. It was to learn that that he had stayed to study her face before he moved: he was sure that he would have caught any shadow of deception, and yet if there had really been no shadow there to catch it meant that something had happened for which she was totally unprepared. And that in its turn might mean that all his suspicions of her were without foundation. It gave a jolt to the theories he had begun to put together that threw them into new and fascinating outlines, and he reached the top of the stairs with a glint of purely speculative delight shifting from the grim alertness of his eyes.
From the head of the staircase the landing opened off in the shape of a squat long-armed T. All the doors that he saw at first were closed; he strode lightly to the junction of the two arms, and heard a faint movement down the left-hand corridor. Simon took a breath and jumped out on a quick slant that would have been highly disconcerting to any marksman who might have been waiting for him round the corner. But there was no marksman.
The figures of two men were piled together on the floor, in the middle of a sickening mess; and only one of them moved.
The one who moved was Dr. Quintus, who was groggily trying to scramble up to his feet as the Saint reached him. The one who lay still was Jim Forrest; and Simon did not need to look at him twice to see that his stillness was permanent. The mess was blood — pools and gouts and splashes of blood, in hideous quantity, puddling on the floor, dripping down the walls, soddening the striped blazer and mottling the doctor’s clothes. The gaping slash that split Forrest’s throat from ear to ear had almost decapitated him.
The Saint’s stomach turned over once. Then he was grasping the doctor’s arm and helping him up. There was so much blood on him that Simon couldn’t tell what his injuries might be.
“Where are you hurt?” he snapped.
The other shook his head muzzily. His weight was leaden on Simon’s supporting grip.
“Not me,” he mumbled hoarsely. “All right. Only hit me — on the head. Forrest—”
“Who did it?”
“Dunno. Probably same as — Nora. Heard Forrest... yell...”
“Where did he go?”
Quintus seemed to be in a daze through which outside promptings only reached him in the same form as outside noises reach the brain of a sleepwalker. He seemed to be making a tremendous effort to retain some sort of consciousness, but his eyes were half closed and his words were thick and rambling, as if he were dead drunk.
“Suppose Forrest was — going to his room — for something... Caught murderer — sneaking about... Murderer — stabbed him... I heard him yell... Rushed out... Got hit with — something... Be all right — soon. Catch him—”
“Well, where did he go?”
Simon shook him, roughly slapped up the sagging head. The doctor’s chest heaved as though it were taking part in his terrific struggle to achieve coherence. He got his eyes wide open.
“Don’t worry about me,” he whispered with painful clarity. “Look after — Mr. Chase.”
His eyelids fluttered again.
Simon let him go against the wall, and he slid down almost to a sitting position, clasping his head in his hands.
The Saint balanced his Luger in his hand, and his eyes were narrowed to chips of sapphire hardness. He glanced up and down the corridor. From where he stood he could see the length of both passages which formed the arms of the T-plan of the landing. The arm on his right finished with a glimpse of the banisters of a staircase leading down — obviously the back stairs whose existence the butler had admitted, at the foot of which Hoppy Uniatz must already have taken up his post. But there had been no sound of disturbance from that direction. Nor had there been any sound from the front hall where he had left Rosemary Chase with the butler. And there was no other normal way out for anyone who was upstairs. The left-hand corridor, where he stood, ended in a blank wall; and only one door along it was open.
Simon stepped past the doctor and over Forrest’s body, and went silently to the open door.
He came to it without any of the precautions that he had taken before exposing himself a few moments before. He had a presentiment amounting to conviction that they were unnecessary now. He remembered with curious distinctness that the drawing-room curtains had not been drawn since he entered the house. Therefore anyone who wanted to could have shot at him from outside long ago. No one had shot at him. Therefore...