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.
Halfway down the long hall to the bedroom, the program he had heard before began again. Only this time the man was speaking.
“Why don’t you leave him?” he demanded. “I make enough to support you and my mother, too. Just one good break and I’ll be a lieutenant and—”
The woman stopped him with a kiss, murmured with an unaffected passion. “It’s not the money, honey. It’s jes’ I don’t want to worry him now. He’s so little an’ funny-lookin’, an’ all he’s got is me. But once his book is finished an’ he’s famous like he says he’s goin’ to be—”
Cansdale turned slowly towards the front room. The band was still playing, muted now. But the voices came from the bedroom.
An unreasoning fury should have seized him, but it didn’t. The only emotion that he knew was fear, sudden and terrible. He had been so wrong. Perhaps he had been wrong in thinking that he could get away with murder. His eyes were suddenly open. The past two years rushed through his mind like the life of a drowning man. He remembered sly looks and glances that had failed to register at the time; smirks on the faces of his fellow teachers and his students. Even Miss Roby had looked strangely at him. He had forgotten to pay his supper check. There had been the matter of the cab. Perhaps someone had seen him enter. He hadn’t been intelligent, he had been dumb. Step by step, rung by rung, he had allowed his blind infatuation to be the nails in the ladder he had built — a ladder leading to the chair.
No woman, not even Evelyn, was worth that. He wanted to be out in the night with the cold of the wind against his burning cheeks. Mazie was suddenly lovely. He wanted her as he had never wanted any woman. Perhaps it wasn’t too late. She had loved him once. Perhaps she might again. She wasn’t guilty. He was. If he hadn’t neglected her, left her alone—
He tiptoed meekly down the hall towards the still open kitchen window. He would return at nine. He would never leave Mazie alone again. He would break with Evelyn in the morning. He would—
As he passed the opened door of the darkened bedroom a board squeaked beneath his feet. He tried to step more lightly, lost his balance, and the half brick scraped along the wall.
There was an answering scrape of springs from the bedroom as a man got suddenly to his feet. The little teacher turned instinctively. With his hat brim and his coat collar almost touching he formed a grotesque silhouette in the half light. The half brick raised above his head, in the hand flung out to keep his balance, looked like the squat barrel of an automatic.
“The killer! The moron!” Mazie’s scream from the blackness of the bedroom was pure terror.
“No,” Cansdale croaked, protesting from a throat so dry the single word rasped like a file. “I—”
He failed to finish the sentence. A blast of gun-fire lighted the room and the first of six soft-nosed .45 slugs pinned him to the far wall of the hallway. He hung there a moment pinned to the wall like a spitted butterfly, then crumpled slowly to the floor.
There had been not one but many flaws in his perfect murder. The worst of these, as Lieutenant Mack summed up the situation to his wife some twelve months later, had been: “So what can we do but keep our mouths shut? So what if he wasn’t the killer. He was trading on his name. He intended to kill you. If I hadn’t just ‘happened’ to be passing by, he’d a done it. The coroner’s inquest proved that. No. I tell you, Mazie, all we can do is keep our mouths shut. This was just one of them there cases where—”
The newly promoted lieutenant paused to wipe the perspiration from his forehead and make a mental vow.
Still the same eager smile on half-parted, too-full lips. “One of those cases where what, honey?”
“Well,” the former sergeant summed up the situation, “one of those cases where what was sauce for the goose turned out to be apple sauce for the gander.”
A Little Different
W. T. Ballard
W(illis) T(odhunter) Ballard (1903–1980) was born in Cleveland, Ohio, and, after college, briefly worked for his father’s electronics magazine, then for a newspaper, followed by less than a year each at two movie studios. He had written sporadically for several pulps before creating Bill Lennox, a motion picture troubleshooter, for Black Mask, successfully using his work background at First National and Columbia to lend authenticity to his stories, which soon rivaled Dashiell Hammett, Carroll John Daly, and Erle Stanley Gardner in popularity.
Over the course of a half century, Ballard became one of the most prodigiously productive writers in America, his credits including ninety-five novels, more than a thousand short stories and novellas, and about fifty movie and television scripts. In addition to selling to the pulps, Ballard was published in the top slick magazines, including The Saturday Evening Post, McCall’s, and Esquire. Lennox appeared in twenty-seven Black Mask stories between 1933 and 1942, five of which were collected in Hollywood Troubleshooter (1985), as well as four novels: Say Yes to Murder (1942), Murder Can’t Stop (1946), Dealing Out Death (1948), and Lights, Camera, Murder, as John Shepherd (1960). He also wrote as Neil MacNeil and P. D. Ballard, and was one of many writers to produce novels under the house names Nick Carter and Robert Wallace.
“A Little Different,” the first Bill Lennox story, was published in the September 1933 issue.
Bill Lennox, studio trouble-shooter, finds real trouble and the shooting not so good.
1
Bill Lennox nodded to the gateman and climbed on to the shine stand, just inside the General gate. The shine-boy grinned, his white teeth flashing in his dark face. “When is you all gwine tuh star me, Mister Lennox?”
Bill said, absently: “Pretty soon, Sam. Lean on that brush, will you; I’m in a hurry.”
“I’se leaning.” The boy ducked his head and went to work briskly. A big beaming car came through the gate. Bill could see the woman on the rear seat, a dazzling blonde with dark eyebrows. He watched the car sourly until it halted before the star’s bungalow dressing-room. The blonde descended, assisted by her maid, and disappeared. Lennox said something under his breath, found a quarter, which he tossed to the boy, and climbed from his seat.
Sol Spurck, head of General-Consolidated Films, put his short fingers together and stared at Lennox as the latter came into his office. “Where was you yesterday?”
Lennox looked at him without visible emotion. “Out, Sol. Out doing your dirty work.”
The short figure behind the big desk shifted uncertainly. “I told you that you should watch out for that dumb cluck Wayborn. He’s in a jam.”
Lennox shoved his hands deep into his trouser pockets and sat down upon the corner of the desk. “What, again?”
Spurck seemed to explode. “Again — again! Always that guy—”
“Save it.” Lennox’s voice was very tired. “What’s he done now?”
“Am I a mind reader — am I?” Spurck had come to his feet and was bouncing about the office. “What is it that I pay you for — what is it? Must I do everything — everything? I tell you that Wayborn’s gone. Fifty thousand they want — fifty thousand for that—”
Lennox said: “Remember your arteries, Sol. Who wants fifty grand and for what?”
Spurck was wrenching open the drawer of his desk. He pulled forth a dirty scrap of paper and shoved it at Lennox. “Find him — find him quick. Are we half through shooting Dangerous Love? I ask you. Can we shoot without Wayborn? But fifty thousand for that schlemiel. I wouldn’t pay fifty thousand for Gable yet, and they ask it for a ham like Wayborn.”