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
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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.
I am working on the second skip on Sedgwick near Division, when I get the surprise of my life. Prince Pete Strogovich, cane and white spats and all, comes out of a little confectionery store. I step into a doorway and watch him saunter across the street and go into a saloon. Then I walk into the confectionery store. It’s a dump; dirty showcases, stationery, candy boxes and empty soft drink bottles standing all around. There’s a magazine rack on one side.
Next to it sits the biggest woman I’ve ever seen in my life. She’s six feet one or two inches tall and big all around. She weighs two-ninety or three hundred and none of it is flabby fat.
“What can I do for you?” she asks, her voice a hoarse bass.
I pretend not to hear her and started pawing over the magazines.
“Can I help you?” she goes on. “What magazines are you looking for?”
I make up the name of a dick mag.
“I don’t carry that one, but there’s plenty of detective magazines, just as good.”
“They’re not just as good,” I retort. “That’s the trouble with you storekeepers. You’re always trying to sell something just as good.”
She starts panting like she has the asthma and I give her a look. Her eyes are slits in her fat cheeks, but they’re glittering slits. She’s good and sore.
“Get the hell out of here!” she snaps at me. She starts getting up from the big reinforced chair and I beat it to the door.
When I get outside Prince Peter’s coming out of the saloon, dabbing a handkerchief to his aristocratic mouth. I walk across the street and meet him on the corner.
“Hi, Pete!” I say to him.
He knows me all right. But he isn’t overjoyed to meet me. “What are you doing here?” he asks.
“Nothin’ much, Pete, just trying to locate a skip.”
“Skip?” he asks. “What is a skip?”
“Well, suppose you buy a suit of clothes on the installment plan, or a diamond ring or a car. You try to beat the firm out of the money and move without leaving a forwarding address. A skip tracer runs you down and hands you a summons. That’s me.”
“Then you are a detective, no?”
“Well, I do detective work, all right, but I’m not exactly a detective.”
“So!” The prince gets out his monocle and begins polishing it on his gloves. He’s sizing me up. After a minute, he decides I’m O.K. “My friend, would you do a job for me? For two weeks I have been looking for a man and I can not find him. He... he owes me some money, just like your skips. You think, perhaps, you can find him?”
“Probably, but you see, I work for a collection agency and I only look for people they want.”
“But I would pay you well. Here!” He whips out a leather wallet and pulls out a couple of bills. Fifties. I take them from his hand and rub them. “You’re paying me a hundred dollars to find this man for you?”
“One hundred dollars now. When you find him I give you four hundred dollars more. You work for me, huh?”
I fold the bills four ways and put them into my pocket. Argus Adjustment Agency pays me five dollars for finding a skip. Sometimes I find two in one day. Sometimes I don’t find two in a week.
“What’s this fellow’s name?”
“Roberts,” the prince says, “W. C. Roberts.”
I don’t tumble right away, not until the prince says: “He owes me five thousand dollars. He has give me the note and promise to pay...”
And then I know. W. C. Roberts is the name on Tony Druhar’s note, the one I’d slipped out of his pocket and had in my own right now. I say: “What was the last address you had of this Roberts, and what does he look like?”
“I do not know what he looks like,” the prince says. “But his last address is — was,” he pulls a tiny notebook from his pocket, “518 Rookery Building.”
I write the address down on a card.
“He isn’t there any more, I take it.”
“No, he have moved and not give the new address. But you find him?”
“For five hundred bucks I’d find John Wilkes Booth,” I tell him.
“Booth? I do not know him.”
“Never mind. And where’ll I find you?”
He thinks that over before giving me the answer. “At the Gregorian Towers on Michigan Boulevard.”
I write that down, too, then I ask him the question that’s been bothering me for a long time. “Say, Prince, would you mind telling me what nationality you are?”
He likes that. He pulls himself up straight and sticks the monocle in his eye. “I am Serbian,” he says proudly. “My cousin was the king of Serbia. King Peter Karageorgovich.”
Me, I don’t even know where Serbia is. The name’s vaguely familiar, but that’s about all. I make up my mind to look it up sometime.
I leave the prince and get on a south-bound Sedgwick Street car, but at Chicago Avenue it moves too slow and I get off and grab a cab. I have a hundred bucks and I want to see what it’s like to spend money.
The rookery building is one of those old office buildings that was built right after the war — the Civil War. One of these days they’re going to tear it down and use the ground as a parking lot.
I go straight to the superintendent’s office. “I’m looking for a Mr. W. C. Roberts, who used to have an office in this building,” I say to him. “Is that so?” The supe comes back at me. “Some other people are looking for him, too — including the cops.”
“Ha, the cops! And why’re they looking for him?”
“You ain’t never heard of W. C. Roberts, mister?”
“What’d he do, kill someone?”
“Uh-uh.” He gives me a funny look, then reaches into his pocket and brings out a slip of paper. He hands it to me and I look at it. It has some writing on it:
“For value received I promise to pay to William Kilduff, five thousand dollars.”