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.
Lott picked at his chin.
“You should have heard the old dame squawk,” Martin Klug said suddenly, with a laugh. “Then you should have heard her gurgle when I got hold of her windpipe. It sounded like water running out of a sink!”
He sighed.
“We’ve divided up the stuff, Lott. Let’s get down to brass tacks. Let’s divide up the girl. You want her. I want her. Who gets her? That’s what I want to know.”
The dark man took a deliberate sniff of snow and stretched his long arms.
“I’m in a drift. But don’t dig me out! Who gets the girl? Who gets Beatrice the Beaut? Ask her? Who does get you, sweetheart?”
The girl ceased admiring the long, new white kid gloves in her hands.
“They are just my size. It was good to shake the old ones. Now these—”
“Answer the question!” Lott said briskly. “Who gets you?”
She looked slowly from one to the other.
“Well,” she murmured, “you’re both nice. I like you both.”
“Make a choice,” Lott said brusquely. “Don’t beat around the bush. We both can’t have you. That’s polygamy; against the law. It wouldn’t do to run afoul of the law — that way. So — which?”
The girl let a scowl creep across her beautiful face.
“I think,” she said, after an interval, “if you would stop calling me Beatrice, I’d like you the best!”
Lott picked at his lips.
“Good. Then I get you, eh? Is that it?”
Martin Klug lurched heavily to his feet.
“Like hell you get her!”
He made a swift lunge at Lott. But the dark man was too quick for him.
Lott jumped to his feet and threw back his head with a quick, feline motion. The blow glided harmlessly over his shoulder. He seized the whisky bottle by the neck as the blond youth sprang at him like a tiger. He sidestepped and brought the bottle down with all his force on the skull of the other.
Klug stopped short, moaned faintly, groaned, and sank in an odd, limp heap on the table.
Then he rolled off it and sprawled, stirless, on the dirty uncarpeted floor.
Lott laughed a little.
“Poor fool! Now we have three thousand more than we had two minutes ago. I guess I’ve killed him. A tap on the facade is always like that if you use force. Maybe it’s just as well. He was only a river rat. Get on your hat and coat, Beatrice. Put the cash in a bag. We’ve got to get out of here now in a hurry.”
While the girl hastened to obey his orders, Lott took another sniff of dope and prodded Klug’s body with his foot.
“No imagination,” he said under his breath. “It’s just as well—”
The girl loomed up before him. She had a satchel in her hand and wore the large, dusty picture hat.
“Wait until I put on these new gloves. They’re soft. I love them. I always wanted them.”
She began to flex her hands into them while Lott pushed Klug’s body under the table.
“What did you do with the other gloves — the dirty ones?” he asked.
The girl held out a rounded arm and inspected the new glove.
“What did I do with ’em? What do you think? I just naturally chucked them away. What do I want with rotten old gloves like those, that have been cleaned twelve times?”
Lott drew his brows together and glanced at his nickel watch.
“Where did you throw them?”
She began donning the second glove.
“Oh, in the trash basket in the old witch’s room. What difference does it make?”
Lott grasped her arm. His face had changed. Color had crept into it. His eyes burned queerly.
“In the trash basket! You threw your old gloves in the trash basket in that room!”
The girl sought to wrench her arm from the tight grip he put upon it.
“What’s eating you!” she said sibilantly. “You’ve got too much snow on board—”
Lott drew his lips over his teeth.
“You fool!” he cried. “You little fool! You’ve—”
He stopped and dropped her arm. The lids fell over his gleaming eyes. He moved his head to one side as if listening. Something in his attitude caused the girl to listen, too. For a long, tense minute she heard nothing. Then, on her strained ears sounded a footfall on the stairs outside... another.
She heard Lott draw a quick breath.
At the same instant the door burst open and two men stepped in, drawn revolvers glinting in the gaslight. Both wore derby hats and an air of authority. One motioned her to fall back against the wall; the other man jammed his gun in Lott’s face.
“I’m Davis of Headquarters!” this second man snapped. “You and the moll are wanted. Case of murder — croaking old Mrs. Cabbler the rich widow! Out with your dukes and let me jewel you!”
Lott, against the table, hands trembling over his head, looked at the cowering figure of the girl.
“In the trash basket,” he whispered. “Oh, God—”
The detective, adjusting steel handcuffs, grunted.
“In the trash basket is right! It was a careful job and neatly turned. Not even a burnt match or a fingerprint. But no crime is perfect. We fished the dirty gloves out of the trash basket. They were full of numbers and those ink marks the cleaners put in them. We spent the day getting a line on the numbers in them. An hour ago we found the establishment that had cleaned them—”
You’ll Die Laughing
Norbert Davis
There are happy stories about the lives of the hard-working, hard-drinking writers for the pulps, those wildly creative typing machines who produced a hundred thousand words a year and up. Walter B. Gibson, who wrote most of The Shadow novels, famously produced more than a million words a year for more than twenty straight years. Some went into other kinds of writing: for Hollywood, slick magazines, books, radio, and, later, television.
And there are unhappy stories. One of the bright young talents who sold his first story to Black Mask while still a law student at Stanford, Norbert Davis (1909–1949), had so much writing success so quickly that he didn’t bother to take the bar exam. As quickly as he could produce a new story, it sold — first to the pulps, then to the higher-paying slicks like The Saturday Evening Post. Combining the excitement of a fast-moving mystery with humor, there seemed to be no limit to his potential.
Several marriages went bad, his agent died unexpectedly, and the slicks started to reject some of his work. Having turned his back on the pulps where he got his start, he felt it would condemn him as a failure to return to those pages. At the age of forty, he closed his garage door, started his car engine, and died of carbon monoxide poisoning.
“You’ll Die Laughing” was first published in the November 1940 issue of Black Mask. This is its first book appearance.
A soft-hearted loan-shark’s legman learns — the hard way — never to buy a strange blonde a hamburger or complain if the neighbor’s radio blasts too long and loud
Chapter One
Blood From Turnips
He was a short pudgy man, and he looked faintly benign even now with his eyes almost closed and his lips twisted awry with the effort of his breathing. He had silver-white hair that curled in smooth exact waves. It was almost dawn and it was bitter cold.