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.
Hanan laughed suddenly; a terribly forced, high-pitched laugh.
“It is very funny,” Druse said. “It would all have worked very beautifully if you” — he moved his eyes to Mrs. Hanan — “hadn’t happened to see the man who came up the fire-escape to call on you, before he saw you. The man whose return Mister Hanan has been impatiently waiting. The man” — he dropped one eyelid in a swift wink — “who confessed to the whole thing a little less than an hour ago.”
Druse put his hand into his inside pocket and took out the black velvet jewel-case, snapped it open and put it on the table. “I found them in the safe at your place at Roslyn,” he said. “Your servants there objected very strenuously — so strenuously that I was forced to tie them up and lock them in the wine cellar. They must be awfully uncomfortable by now — I shall have to attend to that.”
He lowered his voice to a discreet drone. “And your lady was there, too. She, too, objected very strenuously, until I had had a long talk with her and convinced her of the error of her — shall we say, affection, for a gentleman of your instincts. She seemed very frightened at the idea of becoming involved in this case — I’m afraid she will be rather hard to find.”
Druse sighed, lowered his eyes slowly to the rubies, touched the largest of them delicately with one finger. “And so,” he said, “to end this vicious and regrettable business — I give you your rubies” — he lifted his hand and made a sweeping gesture towards Mrs. Hanan — “and your wife — and now I would like your check for twenty-five thousand dollars.”
Hanan moved very swiftly. He tipped the edge of the table upward, lunged up and forward in the same movement; there was a sharp, shattering crash of chinaware and silver. The derringer roared, but the bullet thudded into the table. Hanan bent over suddenly — his eyes were dull, and his upper lip was drawn back over his teeth — then he straightened and whirled and ran out through the door to the living-room.
Mrs. Hanan was standing against the big buffet; her hands were at her mouth, and her eyes were very wide. She made no sound.
Druse went after Hanan, stopped suddenly at the door. Hanan was crouched in the middle of the living room. The Filipino boy stood beyond him, framed against the darkness of the entrance-hall; a curved knife glittering in his hand and his thin yellow face was hard, menacing. Hanan ran out on the terrace, and Druse went swiftly after him. By the dim light from the living room he saw Hanan dart to the left, encounter the wall there, zigzag crazily towards the darkness of the outer terrace, the edge.
Druse yelled: “Look out!” ran forward. Hanan was silhouetted a moment against the mauve glow of the sky; then with a hoarse, cracked scream he fell outward, down.
Druse stood a moment, staring blindly down. He took out a handkerchief and mopped his forehead, then turned and went into the living room and tossed the derringer down on the big center table. The Filipino boy was still standing in the doorway. Druse nodded at him and he turned and went through the dark entrance-hall into the kitchen. Druse went to the door to the dining-room; Mrs. Hanan was still standing with her back to the buffet, her hands still at her mouth, her eyes wide, unseeing. He turned and went swiftly up the broad steps to the office, took up the telephone and dialed a number. When the connection had been made, he asked for MacCrae.
In a minute or so MacCrae answered; Druse said: “You’ll find a stiff in Mrs. Dale Hanan’s apartment on the corner of Sixty-third and Park, Mac. She killed him — self-defense. You might find his partner downstairs at my place — waiting for his boss to come out... Yeah, his boss was Hanan — he just went down — the other way... I’ll file charges of attempted murder against Hanan, and straight it all out when you get over here... Yeah — hurry.”
He hung up and went down to the dining room. He tipped the table back on its legs and picked up the rubies, put them back into the case. He said: “I called up a friend of mine who works for Mahlon and Stiles. As you probably know, Mister Hanan has never made a will.” He smiled. “He so hated the thought of death that the idea of a will was extremely repugnant to him.”
He picked up her chair and she came slowly across and sank into it.
“As soon as the estate is settled,” he went on, “I shall expect your check for a hundred and thirty-five thousand dollars, made out to the insurance company.”
She nodded abstractedly.
“I think these” — he indicated the jewel-case — “will be safer with me, until then.”
She nodded again.
He smiled, “I shall also look forward with a great deal of pleasure to receiving your check for twenty-five thousand — the balance on the figure I quoted for my services.”
She turned her head slowly, looked up at him. “A moralist,” she said — “morbid — and mercenary.”
“Mercenary as hell!” he bobbed his big head up and down violently.
She looked at the tiny watch at her wrist, said: “It isn’t morning yet, strictly speaking — but I’d rather have a drink than anything I can think of.”
Druse laughed. He went to the buffet and took out a squat bottle, glasses, poured two big drinks. He took one to her, raised the other and squinted through it at the light. “Here’s to crime.”
They drank.
The Perfect Crime
C. S. Montanye
Carlton Stevens Montanye (1892–1948), an active writer in the early years of pulpwood magazines, appears to have had an exceptional fondness for criminals as protagonists.
Although he wrote for many different periodicals, he achieved the peak of any pulp writer’s career by selling numerous stories to Black Mask, beginning with the May 1920 issue and continuing through the issue of October 1939. Most were about various crooks, including the Countess d’Yls, who steals a pearl necklace in “A Shock for the Countess,” Monahan, a yegg, and Rider Lott, inventor of the perfect crime.
His most famous character is the international jewel thief, Captain Valentine, who made his Black Mask debut on September 1, 1923, with “The Suite on the Seventh Floor,” and appeared nine more times in two years, concluding with “The Dice of Destiny” in the July 1925 issue. The gentleman rogue also was the protagonist of the novel Moons in Gold, published in 1936, in which the debonair Valentine, accompanied by his amazingly ingenious Chinese servant Tim, is in Paris, where he has his eye on the world’s most magnificent collection of opals.
Montanye also was one of the writers of the Phantom Detective series under the house name Robert Wallace.
“The Perfect Crime” first appeared in the July 1920 issue of Black Mask.
I
Two men sat at a table in a waterfront saloon. One was tall, dark and thin. He had the crafty, malevolent face of a gangster or crook. His eyes were beady and set close to a hawk-beak nose. His mouth was loose and weak but his chin was square. The other man was also tall. He was blond and broad shouldered. He was healthy in appearance and youthful looking. He resembled a stevedore or a freight handler from the docks. The two men had never seen each other until ten minutes past.
The dark man absently reached into a pocket and drew out a small, round pasteboard box. He opened it and dipped a thumb and forefinger into it and pinched out some white stuff. This he placed well into a nostril and sniffed it up his nose.
He looked across at the blond, who regarded him curiously.
“Walk in a snow storm, brother?”