The Black Lizard Big Book of Black Mask Stories
- Автор: Adams Cleve F., Babcock Dwight V.
- Год: 2010
- Язык: английский
- Год: A Vintage Crime/Black Lizard
- ISBN: 978-0-307-45543-7
- Жанр: Криминальные детективы
Электронная книга - «The Black Lizard Big Book of Black Mask Stories». Краткое содержание книги:
Black Mask was the apotheosis of noir. It was the magazine where the first hardboiled detective story, which was written by Carroll John Daly appeared. It was the slum in which such American literary titans like Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler got their start, and it was the home of stories with titles like “Murder Is Bad Luck,” “Ten Carets of Lead,” and “Drop Dead Twice.” Collected here is best of the best, the hardest of the hardboiled, and the darkest of the dark of America’s finest crime fiction. This masterpiece collection represents a high watermark of America’s underbelly. Crime writing gets no better than this.
It was six months before Al and Miriam were married. Everybody went to the wedding, for everybody knew now that Al was innocent. They believed him when he said he just went to his stepfather’s house to borrow enough money to get his sister a square meal. And anyhow, they wouldn’t have been awfully particular, even if they weren’t sure, seeing as how Al was a rich man now.
Al and Miriam were married in the big Carr house where he and Irene were living. They invited me to go, but I couldn’t. I didn’t have anything to wear. My suit had long ago got so that if I’d worn it, there’d be a law against it, and I’d thrown it away and had been wearing my other suit regular since spring.
I walked by the house, which was all lighted up, although it was hardly dark. Then I went across the town and somehow found myself around the house where they used to live. Then I saw my old place on the fence doing nothing, so I climbed up on it. And I started wondering.
I was wondering what was the sense in living, and I was just winning the argument, when I heard a little noise.
I looked up and saw Irene standing there.
“What are you doing on the fence?” she asked.
“Just wondering.”
It sounded silly, but I was. I was wondering now if it was too dark to see the color of a fellow’s cheeks and I was hoping it was. Your cheeks just couldn’t help acting funny if you saw a girl as pretty as Irene standing there.
“And we were wondering, too,” she said. “We were wondering where you’ve been all afternoon.”
“Why, you see,” I said, and commenced fidgeting, so that I almost fell off the fence, “you see — you see, Irene, I just couldn’t go into anybody else’s house dressed like this!”
“Nobody asked you to go into anybody else’s house,” she said.
That made me feel terrible. I knew I’d received an invitation, but I decided they’d made a mistake and sent it to me instead of the right party. I tried to think of something to say, but nothing happened. I was just wishing the fence would bust and send me flying, when Irene spoke again.
“Nobody asked you to go to anybody else’s house,” she said again.
Then she reached up and gently took my hand. And in a very, very soft voice, she said:
“Come home, Jackie boy! Come home!”
That was a year ago. But Al’s and Miriam’s and Irene’s home has been my home ever since. In another couple of years, though, when I start getting rich, there’s going to be a secession from that home and another one started up with just two in it.
Two to begin with, Irene just said — But that’s another story.
Body Snatcher
Theodore A. Tinsley
Theodore A. Tinsley (1894–1979) was a third-generation New Yorker who, after serving in World War I, began a prolific career writing for most of the major pulp magazines, including Black Mask, Munsey’s, Black Aces, Detective Book, All Detective, Action, and several ghostwritten novels for The Shadow and Crime Busters, for which he created Carrie Cashin, the most successful female character in the pulps. A gorgeous and sexy private eye, she was the senior partner in the Cash and Carry Detective Agency in a series that ran for more than three dozen stories. She made her debut in the first issue of Crime Busters (November 1937); when the magazine changed its name to Mystery Magazine with the November 1939 issue, Carrie continued her adventures until nearly the end of the pulp; her last appearance was in the November 1942 issue. Tinsley’s other successful series included Major John Tattersall, who formed Amusement Inc. to fight crime with equally stalwart companions, and Jerry Tracy, the likable, Walter Winchell — type gossip columnist for the Manhattan tabloid the Daily Planet. Three of the twenty-six Tracy stories that ran in Black Mask served as the basis for movies: Alibi for Murder (1936) starred William Gargan,
Marguerite Churchill, and Gene Morgan, and was based on “Body Snatcher” (February 1936); Manhattan Shakedown (1937), with John Gallaudet and Rosalind Keith, was based on “Manhattan Whirligig” (April 1937). Murder Is News (1937) was based on an unidentified Tinsley story and also starred Gallaudet.
Jerry Tracy tries to switch a murder tag.
The shabby suburban bus jolted to a teethjarring halt and the driver growled with patient boredom: “Locust Avenue!”
Jerry Tracy fell over a couple of legs and swung off the bus, conscious that his lips were wreathed in a faint, somewhat silly grin. If the boys at Times Square could see the Daily Planet’s famous little columnist out here in the sticks, could guess what was inside the two paper-wrapped parcels he was carrying, a jeering laugh would go up that would stop the hands on the Paramount clock! Wise guy Jerry, the lad with the case-hardened front — pulling a sentimental pilgrimage to a has-been, because no one else in roaring Manhattan would remember that today was her birthday.
Ordinarily, on a trip out of town, Jerry traveled in his very dodgy Lincoln, with Butch behind the wheel making delighted horn sounds like the Normandie going down the bay. But today the Daily Planet’s columnist had dived inconspicuously into the subway, ridden out to the end of the line and taken a bus the rest of the way. The big package under his left arm was a birthday cake with a pink, gooey trail on top from a baker’s cornucopia that said: “Hey, hey, Sweetie!” The flat, oblong package had come from a five-and-dime; fluted pink candles with tin shields to catch the grease and pins to stick ’em in the cake.
Sweetie Malloy had once been a name to adorn the most famous of the Victor Herbert operettas! Beauty, brains and a velvet soprano voice gone at last — turned out to a forgotten pasturage in a punk suburb. It angered Jerry to think that a woman like Sweetie Malloy should be permitted by fate to settle down in a one-horse, out-of-the-way dump like this.
Chilly raindrops spattered on Jerry’s face. He stared at the gray sky and knew with a wry dismay that it was going to be one of those sullen all-night soakers. By the time he had rung Sweetie’s bell, the dark pavement of the walk was a dull, glistening black.
The sight of Sweetie’s face in the half-open door made Tracy’s throat catch, as it always would at each new sight of her. The singer was gone but the woman remained. The pale yellow entry light fluffed her soft hair, was kind to the threads of gray. Time had padded the once taut line of her throat, had put wrinkles around the clear, amber eyes without disturbing their serenity or their fine courage.
“Jerry!” she gasped, with a quick, frightened inflection.
“How about letting a little guy in out of the rain?”
“Why... yes... Of course! Come... come in...”
There was something in the manner with which she closed the door that put Tracy instantly on the alert, made him study the woman. She was scared to a sickish gray pallor. Stealth! That’s what the careful click of the closing door had meant.
“Anything wrong, Sweetie?” he asked her, with a level stare.
“Wrong? Why, what a question! With you here?” Her voice steadied. “Everything is right, my friend. Come, let me take your coat and... and bundles. Gracious, what huge packages! Don’t tell me they’re for... for me?”
“Happy birthday,” Tracy said gravely. “We’ll open ’em later.” He put his hands on both her shoulders as she turned tremulously. “Listen, keed. Do we have to put on an act — you and me? I’m not Ole Olesen or Jake Kazinsky. I’m Jerry Tracy. I came all the way out here tonight because... well, just because... I’m asking you as an old friend, is anything wrong?”