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.
So that’s where he’s at now, and he’s went to work and got religion down there, and all the people what comes to see him, why he sings hymns to them and then he speaks them his piece. And I hear tell he knows it pretty good by now and has got the crying down pat. And Lida, they got her down there too, only she won’t say nothing ’cepting she done it same as Hutch and Burbie. So Burbie, he’s going to get hung, sure as hell. And if he hadn’t felt so smart, he would of been a free man yet.
Only I reckon he done been holding it all so long he just had to spill it.
The Sad Serbian
Frank Gruber
Few pulp writers were as prolific as Frank Gruber (1904–1969), who at the peak of his career produced three or four full-length novels a year, many about series characters Johnny Fletcher and his sidekick, Sam Cragg; numerous short stories, many featuring Oliver Quade, “the Human Encyclopedia;” and screenplays, including such near-classics as The Mask of Dimitrios, Terror by Night, and, with Steve Fisher, Johnny Angel. He also wrote two dozen Western novels.
In addition to a relentless work ethic and a fertile imagination, he developed an eleven-point formula for his novels which certainly helped speed the writing process. In his autobiography, The Pulp Jungle, which is also an informal history of pulp magazines and the era in which they flourished, he outlined the formula for his mystery stories.
The successful adventure, he believed, needed a colorful hero, a theme with information the reader is unlikely to know, a villain more powerful than the hero, a vivid background for the action, an unusual murder method or unexpected circumstances surrounding the crime, unusual variations on the common motives of greed and hate, a well-hidden clue, a trick or twist that will snatch victory from the jaws of defeat, constantly moving action, a protagonist who has a personal involvement, and a smashing climax. These key points, of course, may well describe all of pulp fiction — and a lot of later adventure and crime stories as well.
“The Sad Serbian” first appeared in the March 1939 issue of Black Mask.
A racket to mulct the multitudes is plenty reason for murder
To look at me reading the death notices while I’m having my breakfast in Thompson’s, you’d think I was an undertaker. I’m not, but my job is just as cheerful. Take this business today. I’ve got a bunch of cards with names, and I’m comparing them with the names in the death notices. I do this every morning and about twice a year I find a name I’m looking for. I strike pay-dirt this morning with the name Druhar.
I finish my breakfast and go out and hunt for my jaloppy, which I’ve got parked a couple of blocks down the street. I climb in and head for the North Side; 598 Blackhawk Street.
These foreigners certainly bury them early in the morning. Although it’s only nine-thirty, they’ve already taken the crepe down from the door. There are a couple of kids hanging around and I ask them: “At what church are they having the mass for Mrs. Druhar?”
“Saint John’s on Cleveland Avenue,” one of the kids replies.
I miss them at the church, so the only thing I can do is go out to the cemetery, which, according to the paper, is St. Sebastian’s, seven miles outside the city limits. It takes me about an hour to get out there, so when I get to the cemetery, they’re breaking up; going back to the cars that have brought them out. I grab an old envelope out of my pocket and wave it around as if it’s a telegram, or something.
“Mr. Tony Druhar!” I yell.
A big fellow, who is just about to climb into a green sedan, says: “Here I am.”
I run over and see that the license number on the sedan checks with the number on one of my cards. So I pull out the old repossess warrant and stick it into Mr. Druhar’s hand. “Sorry, Mr. Druhar,” I say. “I’m taking your car, on account of you haven’t done right by the Mid-West Finance Company.”
This Druhar looks stupidly at the piece of paper in his hand for a minute. Then he lets out a roar you could have heard over on Grant Avenue. “Why, you lousy, grave-robbing—! Is this a time to pull something like this, when I have just buried my poor grandmother?”
“That’s how I found you,” I tell him. “It says in the paper: ‘Mourned by her sons, so-and-so, and grandsons, Tony Druhar, and so-and-so.’ ”
Some people certainly get mad. This Druhar fellow jumps up and down and takes off his hat and throws it on the ground and jumps on it. Then three fellows just as big as Druhar climb out of his sedan and surround me.
“So you’re a skip-tracer!” one of them says, and lets a handful of knuckles fly in my direction.
I’m lucky enough to duck them, but I can see that this isn’t the safest place in the world right now for Sam Cragg. I get a lucky break, though. A motorcycle cop who’s escorted the funeral out here is just a little way off, and when Druhar starts all his yelling, he comes over.
“What’s the trouble?” he asks.
Druhar starts swearing again, but I grab hold of the cop’s arm. “I’ve got a repossess warrant for this car. This Druhar has missed six payments, and the Mid-West Finance Company wants $188 or the car.”
The cop gives me a funny look and takes the warrant from Tony Druhar. He looks at it and then he looks at me. “I’ll bet you hate yourself, mister, when you look at your face in the mirror every morning.”
“Maybe I do,” I tell the cop, “but if I didn’t have this job somebody else would, and I haven’t got a pull, so I can’t get on the WPA, and I have to eat.”
“Why?” asks the cop.
I can see he’s all on the other side, so I give him some law. “Officer, this is a regular warrant, good anywhere in this country. As an officer of the law, I’m calling on you to see that it’s properly served. I want this car or $188.”
There’s some hullabaloo, but after a while Druhar and his pals get together and make me a proposition, which I am sap enough to accept. I’m a softie, and you oughtn’t to be a skip-tracer if you are a softie. They’ve pooled up $32 and they say that Druhar will have the rest of the money for me tomorrow. I’m just cagy enough, though, to make them all give me their names and addresses and prove them by letters and stuff they’ve got with them.
That’s where I made my big mistake and how I got mixed up with the phoney prince.
Next morning I drive up to 736 Gardner Street. Gardner Street is a little one-block chopped up street that has been dumped in between Stanton Park and Ogden Avenue. There are only about thirty houses on the street, and every one of them should have been condemned twenty years ago. Druhar is supposed to live on the first floor of one of these dumps.
I can’t ring the doorbell because there isn’t a doorbell, so I bang the door with my fist. Nothing happens so I bang it again. Then I figure I have been given the runaround and I get sore, and push on the door. It goes open and I walk into the place. Druhar is at home. He’s lying on the floor. He’s dead.