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.
“Because he was Thornburgh.”
He didn’t say anything for about five minutes. Then: “I reckon that’s right. How’d you guess it?”
We were sitting beside the wreckage now, waiting for the police that we had sent our commandeered chauffeur to phone for.
“He had to be,” I said, “when you think it all over. Funny we didn’t hit on it before! All that stuff we were told about Thornburgh had a fishy sound. Whiskers and an unknown profession, immaculate and working on a mysterious invention, very secretive and born in San Francisco — where the fire wiped out all the old records — just the sort of fake that could be cooked up easily.
“Then nobody but the Coonses, Evelyn Trowbridge, and Handerson ever saw him except between the tenth of May and the middle of June, when he bought the house. The Coonses and the Trowbridge woman were tied up together in this affair somehow, we knew — so that left only Handerson to consider. You had told me he came to Sacramento sometime early this summer — and the dates you got tonight show that he didn’t come until after Thornburgh had bought his house. All right! Now compare Handerson with the descriptions we got of Thornburgh.
“Both are about the same size and age, and with the same color hair. The differences are all things that can be manufactured — clothes, a little sunburn, and a month’s growth of beard, along with a little acting, would do the trick. Tonight I went out to Tavender and took a look at the last batch of laundry, and there wasn’t any that didn’t fit the Coonses — and none of the bills all the way back were large enough for Thornburgh to have been as careful about his clothes as we were told he was.”
“It must be great to be a detective!” McClump grinned as the police ambulance came up and began disgorging policemen. “I reckon somebody must have tipped Handerson off that I was asking about him this evening.” And then, regretfully: “So we ain’t going to hang them folks for murder after all.”
“No, but we oughtn’t have any trouble convicting them of arson plus conspiracy to defraud, and anything else that the Prosecuting Attorney can think up.”
Fall Guy
George Harmon Coxe
George Harmon Coxe (1901–1984) was born in Olean, New York, and attended Purdue and Cornell before becoming a journalist and advertising man. His first stories were about his (undistinguished) college career, which appeared in American Boy, and then his mystery tales in Detective Stories. Although known today for his detective stories, he was also a prolific writer of sports, romance, adventure, and sea stories for a variety of pulp magazines. Later, he wrote for the top slicks, mainly war stories that he imbued with rich background material gleaned from his years as a special correspondent in the Pacific theater.
Coxe’s first mystery novel, Murder with Pictures (1935), featured Kent Murdock, a newspaper photographer who was to be the protagonist in twenty-three of his more than sixty published novels in a career that spanned more than forty years. The novel served as the basis for a film of the same title, released by Paramount in 1936 and starring Lew Ayres and Gail Patrick.
Jack “Flashgun” Casey, Coxe’s other famous detective character, was also a newspaper photographer, though tougher and less educated than Murdock. He made his debut in the March 1934 issue of Black Mask, and had successful careers in radio with Flashgun Casey (later Casey, Crime Photographer), running for more than a decade after its 1943 debut, and film, with Women Are Trouble (1936, MGM, starring Stuart Erwin) and Here’s Flash Casey (1938, Grand National, with Eric Linden).
“Fall Guy” was published in the June 1936 issue.
Somebody had to take it and Flashgun Casey was a natural.
I
It was the fag end of a dull day, and Casey was slouched behind his desk in the anteroom of the photographic department of the Express arguing with Tom Wade about the pennant chances of the Red Sox. When the telephone rang, he scowled at the interruption, hesitated, reached reluctantly for the offending instrument.
“Trouble, I’ll bet,” he growled.
He flipped the receiver into his hand and said: “Hello... yeah. Who? Norma?”
O’Hearn, who was leafing through an old movie magazine in search of the more undraped studies, winked at Wade and said:
“Umm. Norma.”
“Sure,” Casey was saying, grinning now. “I saw in the paper you were in town.” He listened a few moments, added: “A favor? Sure. Anytime... Now? Okey, I’ll be right over.”
He planted the telephone on the desk with a flourish, gave a downward tug at his battered brown felt and swept his trench coat from a hat rack.
“Is she any good?” O’Hearn asked doubtfully. “This Norma.”
“Quiet, Mugg,” Casey said. Then, turning at the doorway: “If the Mayor wants me I’ll be at the Carteret.”
“Can you get in?” Wade asked, grinning.
“Listen,” Casey said. “When I step in that hotel the manager nods.”
“Yeah,” cracked O’Hearn. “To the house detective.”
Casey swung into the hall with a spring in his stride and a twinkle in his eye. He flipped a hand to the office boy who crossed his path, had good-natured answers for the elevator boy, the overalled pressmen in the car and the two circulation hustlers who got on at the second floor.
Without knowing it Casey sat, temporarily at least, upon that mythical and precarious spot known as the top of the world. There was no reason for this. It was just a mood. The mood was catching, and when the car stopped everybody was grinning.
Casey was like that. Big, thick through the chest and flat across the stomach, he was a burly figure with a rugged squarish face and craggy jaw. Gray peppered shaggy brown hair over the ears; his clothing was baggy but not cheap. His manner was often blunt, crabby; his dark eyes, without much illusion, were frequently sober. Sometimes he wore a grouch as a protective garment, but when he smiled he did a good job and seemed, somehow, to reflect a friendliness that was vital and genuine.
Whistling tunelessly, he bumped his cream-colored roadster out of its parking space at the curb, slid down Tremont Street through the gathering dusk of the June day. An afternoon rain had turned to a stubborn mist, leaving the pavement glossy and making shimmering red and green and orange lights of the traffic signal ahead of him.
He caught a green arrow at Boylston, and ten minutes later he was pounding briskly through the entrance of the Carteret. Answering the doorman’s lofty, “Good evening, sir,” he strode hard-heeled into the lobby as though he owned the place, bogged down slightly in ankle-deep carpet and bounced skilfully from a fat man’s stomach when he winked at a marcelled blonde behind the magazine counter.
A silent elevator cushioned him to a stop on the ninth floor and he rapped a hard fist against a pastel-blue door marked Suite 9-B. He had a momentary wait; then the doorway was filled with a woman’s silhouette and a vibrant contralto voice said:
“Flash.”
“Norma.” He got his hat off and took the firm, warm hand. “Gee, it’s good to see you.”
Silently she drew him into the entryway, took his arm, and they went into the room side by side. He saw from opened doorways beyond that there were at least three rooms to the suite. This first, the drawing room, was cream and green — hangings, upholstery, rug. Near the windows a man sat at a knee-hole desk which had apparently been moved in, because it did not go with the period furniture. There was a portable typewriter on the desk, a lot of scattered papers, a briefcase on the floor.