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.
“Wait a minute, pal,” I say to him. “You made a bargain with me — four hundred bucks more if I found W. C. Roberts for you. There’s Roberts. Now kick in. I need the dough, on account of I figure on quitting my skip tracing job and maybe getting married!”
He pays. Then I pick up the telephone and call police headquarters.
Finger Man
Raymond Chandler
Arguably the greatest mystery writer of the twentieth century, Raymond Chandler (1888–1959) brought a literary sensibility to that least likely of places — pulp magazines. Pulps were very clearly and specifically designed to be fast, cheap, action-filled entertainment for the masses. No literary aspirations or pretensions were welcomed by the hard-working editors of even the best of them, notably Black Mask and Dime Detective. Still, Dashiell Hammett brought important realism to his pulp stories, and Chandler elevated the form even further.
Philip Marlowe, the hero of all seven of Chandler’s novels, appears in this printing of “Finger Man,” a novella filled with bad guys and corruption. When the story was first published in the October 1934 issue of Black Mask, the first-person narrator was unnamed. For its first book appearance, the anonymous shamus in “Finger Man” was given the Marlowe name, as Chandler had become the “hottest” mystery writer in America because of his Marlowe novels. The majority of Chandler’s short fiction was collected in three paperback originals published by Avon in its “Murder Mystery Monthly” series, 5 Murderers (1944), Five Sinister Characters (1945), and Finger Man (1946), and his detectives, whether named Carmody, Dalmas, Malvern, Mallory, or unnamed, were transformed into Marlowe. As the detectives evolved from the earliest experiments to the more complex and nuanced hero he envisioned and later compared to a modern-day knight, the adventures became classics of the American crime story.
Putting the finger on a murder victim is rarely a safe bet
One
I got away from the Grand Jury a little after four, and then sneaked up the backstairs to Fenweather’s office. Fen weather, the D.A., was a man with severe, chiseled features and the gray temples women love. He played with a pen on his desk and said: “I think they believed you. They might even indict Manny Tinnen for the Shannon kill this afternoon. If they do, then is the time you begin to watch your step.”
I rolled a cigarette around in my fingers and finally put it in my mouth. “Don’t put any men on me, Mr. Fen weather. I know the alleys in this town pretty well, and your men couldn’t stay close enough to do me any good.”
He looked towards one of the windows. “How well do you know Frank Dorr?” he asked, with his eyes away from me.
“I know he’s a big politico, a fixer you have to see if you want to open a gambling hell or a bawdy house — or if you want to sell honest merchandise to the city.”
“Right.” Fenweather spoke sharply, and brought his head around towards me. Then he lowered his voice. “Having the goods on Tinnen was a surprise to a lot of people. If Frank Dorr had an interest in getting rid of Shannon who was the head of the Board where Dorr’s supposed to get his contracts, it’s close enough to make him take chances. And I’m told he and Manny Tinnen had dealings. I’d sort of keep an eye on him, if I were you.”
I grinned. “I’m just one guy,” I said. “Frank Dorr covers a lot of territory. But I’ll do what I can.”
Fenweather stood up and held his hand across the desk. He said: “I’ll be out of town for a couple of days, I’m leaving tonight, if this indictment comes through. Be careful — and if anything should happen to go wrong, see Bernie Ohls, my chief investigator.”
I said: “Sure.”
We shook hands and I went out past a tired-looking girl who gave me a tired smile and wound one of her lax curls up on the back of her neck as she looked at me. I got back to my office soon after four-thirty. I stopped outside the door of the little reception room for a moment, looking at it. Then I opened it and went in, and of course there wasn’t anybody there.
There was nothing there but an old red davenport, two odd chairs, a bit of carpet, and a library table with a few old magazines on it. The reception room was left open for visitors to come in and sit down and wait — if I had any visitors and they felt like waiting.
I went across and unlocked the door into my private office, lettered “Philip Marlowe... Investigations.“
Lou Harger was sitting on a wooden chair on the side of the desk away from the window. He had bright yellow gloves clamped on the crook of a cane, a green snap-brim hat set too far back on his head. Very smooth black hair showed under the hat and grew too low on the nape of his neck.
“Hello. I’ve been waiting,” he said, and smiled languidly.
“ ’Lo, Lou. How did you get in here?”
“The door must have been unlocked. Or maybe I had a key that fitted. Do you mind?”
I went around the desk and sat down in the swivel chair. I put my hat down on the desk, picked up a bulldog pipe out of an ash tray and began to fill it up.
“It’s all right as long as it’s you,” I said. “I just thought I had a better lock.”
He smiled with his full red lips. He was a very good-looking boy. He said: “Are you still doing business, or will you spend the next month in a hotel room drinking liquor with a couple of Headquarters boys?”
“I’m still doing business — if there’s any business for me to do.”
I lit a pipe, leaned back and stared at his clear olive skin, straight, dark eyebrows.
He put his cane on top of the desk and clasped his yellow gloves on the glass. He moved his lips in and out.
“I have a little something for you. Not a hell of a lot. But there’s carfare in it.”
I waited.
“I’m making a little play at Las Olindas tonight,” he said. “At Canales’ place.”
“The white smoke?”
“Uh-huh. I think I’m going to be lucky — and I’d like to have a guy with a rod.”
I took a fresh pack of cigarettes out of a top drawer and slid them across the desk. Lou picked them up and began to break the pack open.
I said: “What kind of play?”
He got a cigarette halfway out and stared down at it. There was a little something in his manner I didn’t like.
“I’ve been closed up for a month now. I wasn’t makin’ the kind of money it takes to stay open in this town. The Headquarters boys have been putting the pressure on since repeal. They have bad dreams when they see themselves trying to live on their pay.”
I said: “It doesn’t cost any more to operate here than anywhere else. And here you pay it all to one organization. That’s something.”
Lou Harger jabbed the cigarette in his mouth. “Yeah — Frank Dorr,” he snarled. “That fat, bloodsuckin’ sonofabitch!”
I didn’t say anything. I was way past the age when it’s fun to swear at people you can’t hurt. I watched Lou light his cigarette with my desk lighter. He went on, through a puff of smoke: “It’s a laugh, in a way. Canales bought a new wheel — from some grafters in the sheriff’s office. I know Pina, Canales’ head croupier, pretty well. The wheel is one they took away from me. It’s got bugs — and I know the bugs.”
“And Canales don’t... That sounds just like Canales,” I said.