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.
His first work appeared in such pulp magazines as Detective Fiction Weekly and Double Detective, but his major creation was private detective Rex McBride, who appeared in his first novel, Sabotage (1940), and subsequently in And Sudden Death (1940), Decoy (1941), Up Jumped the Devil (1943), The Crooking Finger (1944), as well as the posthumously published Shady Lady (1955). Unlike Philip Marlowe’s ethos of a private detective being the equivalent of a knight, McBride borders on being a fascist, screaming that “an American Gestapo is what we goddamn well need” in a fit of extreme pique, and a racist, with ethnic slurs abounding in McBride’s adventures. It is evident that Adams was neither, as he goes out of his way — oddly, it must be said — to make his own protagonist seem ridiculous and boorish.
Adams published three pseudonymous works as John Spain: Dig Me a Grave (1942), Death Is Like That (1943), and The Evil Star (1944), as well as a collaboration with Robert Leslie Bellem, The Vice Czar Murders (1941), as Franklin Charles.
“The Key” features the Los Angeles cop team of Lieutenant Canavan and Lieutenant Kleinschmidt; it was originally published in the July 1940 issue of Black Mask.
Lieutenant Canavan’s trouble was dames — toward whom he behaved as a sort of cross between Walter Raleigh, Galahad and a bull in a china shop. It was a rare gal indeed who could appreciate his interesting efforts to be helpful when murder was on the loose.
Chapter One
Night-Court Galahad
She didn’t look like the sort of girl they usually hauled into Night Court. There was nothing tawdry about her, nor defiant, and Canavan, always on the alert for the unusual, paused on his way up the far aisle for a second look. The courtroom was packed, every seat filled and perhaps fifty or sixty spectators lapping over into the U-shaped aisle surrounding the rail. These last made a sort of human picket fence against the walls. Canavan, trying not to obstruct someone else’s view, found himself wedged between George Kolinski and Terence O’Day.
Kolinski, known around town as Big George, was really big. Taller even than Canavan, and a hundred pounds heavier, he was a jovial, opulent picture of what the rackets could do for the man at the top. Dewey, being three thousand miles away, hadn’t gotten around to him yet.
Terry O’Day ran a daily column in the Meteor called “Night and O’Day.” Night Court was only part of his beat. He was believed to have a speaking acquaintance with every crook, cop and play-boy in the whole city. He wore expensive clothes sloppily, as though he didn’t give a damn what people thought — which he probably didn’t — and his long, horsily waggish face was as apt to be seen in the Biltmore Salon as in Tony the Greek’s Greasy Spoon. His stuff was brilliant and cynical and, on occasion, could tear the heart right out of you. A lock of thinning sandy hair usually straggled out from beneath a hat that was as familiar as the face under it.
Making room for Canavan he whispered: “Hi, flatfoot. You’re a long way from headquarters.”
Canavan nodded. “I had to bring a mug over here to keep his lawyer from finding him.” He looked sidewise at Kolinski. “This time it isn’t one of your boys.”
Kolinski’s fat face mirrored pleased surprise. “Thanks, pal. Thanks too much.” A three-carat diamond twinkled merrily as he laid a pudgy finger alongside his nose. “Glad to know you’re using Jefferson Heights as cold storage again.”
Canavan kept watching the girl. She sat on the prisoners’ bench together with two street-walkers, a giant scarred Negro and a kid in grimy overalls who looked as though he had been hauled off a freight train. An aged Mexican was being questioned by Justice Marie Tarbell. Canavan, on sudden impulse, left his place against the wall and leaned over the rail separating him from the clerk’s table.
Justice Tarbell banged her gavel. “Lieutenant Canavan!”
Straightening, he waved at her. “Yes, ma’am?”
She glared at him. “This is a courtroom, not a thoroughfare. I wish you would remember that!”
The crowd tittered. Canavan, completely unembarrassed, begged the Court’s pardon. He had all he wanted, anyway. His whispered colloquy with the clerk had given him the girl’s name and the charge against her. She was accused of beating a dinner check at the Cathedral. Canavan’s right eye, the one away from Judge Tarbell, drooped a little, and the clerk rearranged the charge slips so that the one concerning Miss Hope Carewe was on the bottom of the batch. Miss Carewe herself, unaware of the interest being taken in her, tried unobtrusively to put another inch between herself and one of the street-walkers. Against that drab back-drop, perhaps because of it, she looked like a million dollars.
Canavan went back up the aisle and into the main lobby of the jail, and from one of the public booths called Luis Renaldo, who ran the Cathedral. “Luis? This is Bill Canavan. You filed a complaint against a gal named Hope Carewe.”
Renaldo’s voice was smooth as silk. “For eight bucks I’d file a complaint against my own grandmother.”
“Maybe your grandmother,” Canavan said. “Not against this gal, unless she wouldn’t let you take it out in trade. Personally, I don’t think she would.”
Renaldo laughed softly. “Such a suspicious nature. So what, Lieutenant?”
“So I want you to call up and kill the charge. I’ll take care of the eight bucks.”
“Meaning she’d prefer you to me?”
Canavan cursed. “Listen, heel, this gal don’t even know I’m alive. But for eight bucks I wouldn’t have her spend the night in a tank full of tramps and worse. You get on the phone and kill that complaint.”
“O.K.” Renaldo sighed. “O.K., copper, but just the same I want the eight bucks. Tonight, not next payday, savvy?”
“You’ll get it!” Canavan snarled. He suddenly felt like a fool. Pronging the receiver with a vicious swipe, he banged out of the booth and went down the tall steps to the street.
It was perhaps fifteen minutes later that the girl came through the swinging doors. Silhouetted against the light from within she seemed taller. She was wearing a street suit of some dark blue material, no topcoat. Beneath the matching hat with the little green feather her hair showed coppery gold, and Canavan guessed her eyes would have gold flecks in them too. The property clerk had given her back her bag.
Canavan stepped out of the shadows, lifting his hat. “Take you someplace, Miss Carewe?”
She descended the steps. Her eyes were, as he had suspected, golden brown. They were also faintly contemptuous. “You’re the man whom the judge reprimanded. Lieutenant Canavan, wasn’t it?”
He admitted this without shame.
She said, still distantly aloof: “Aren’t you presuming a little bit on the badge you carry?”
He had the grace to flush. “Maybe I am, at that.” He put on his hat, turned away. Then, because he was a persistent sort of guy, he again faced her. “Listen, I can’t exactly explain it, but when I saw you there in a place you’d no business to be—” He broke off as the full implication of her question hit him. “Hell’s fire, if you think I make a business of rescuing ladies in distress—”
“Oh, so it was you who rescued me!”
“Well—”
She stood there a moment, considering him. “I can’t quite make up my mind whether to be angry with you or grateful.”