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.
He stepped back, peered at the shattered cane. Now that the gold head lay in pieces, he could see telltale stains — Eva Tarkey’s blood — that the killer hadn’t been able to wash off when the thing was whole. Blood had seeped in under the gold fitting, discolored the wood. O’Hanna felt like gagging, and felt like beating the bleached white whiskers off the phony.
Flaming Angel
Frederick C. Davis
Frederick C(lyde) Davis (1902–1977) was born in St. Joseph, Missouri, and graduated from Dartmouth College. The one word that is most conspicuously connected to his name as a pulp writer is prolific. In a career that covered more than forty years, he produced an astonishing one thousand short stories and fifty novels, under his own name and using several pseudonyms.
As Curtis Steele, he wrote the first twenty novels about James Christopher — Operator 5 (later Secret Service Operator 5), one of the great superheroes in pulp fiction. Virtually all novels in the series featured a massive invasion of America against pitifully small but brave forces led by Operator 5. The most popular stories under his own name featured Steve Thatcher, better known as the Moon Man — a policeman by day but a shady Robin Hood who wore a globe over his head to obscure his identity; fourteen of the stories were collected in The Night Nemesis (1984). As Stephen Ransome, he produced more than twenty semihard-boiled novels that many regard as his most accomplished work. A Ransome novel, Hearses Don’t Hurry (1941), was filmed as Who Is Hope Schuyler? (1942), starring Joseph Allen, Mary Howard, and Ricardo Cortez. A Davis short story, “The Devil Is Yellow,” was filmed as Double Alibi (1940), with Wayne Morris, Margaret Lindsay, William Gargan, and Roscoe Karns; another, “Meet the Executioner,” was filmed as Lady in the Death House (1944), with Jean Parker and Lionel Atwill.
“Flaming Angel” was published in the March 1949 issue.
Out of the burning flames of his ghastly crime came the searing realization that he would have to kill the same woman twice.
Chapter One
Last Good-By
This is a day I will never forget, Rhea, my darling, because on this day I cremated you. Do you remember, Rhea, sweet, the night you whispered to me in a serious moment while I held you in my arms in the dark,
“When I die, Johnny, please don’t bury me. It makes me shiver to think of lying deep down in that heavy black earth, all alone through all eternity. Instead, let me rise off the earth in a glow of lovely dancing light. Make me what I’ve always yearned to become, Johnny — a shining, hot fire. Just a brief one, Johnny, but bright and beautiful before it goes out forever.”
It was that way today, my sweet Rhea — just the way you wanted it.
We stood with our heads bowed in the crematory chapel — the nicest crematory in the city, Rhea, the one out on Rendezvous Road, which direction you knew so well — and watched the attendants rolling your casket into the iron door of the great oven. I talked to you then, silently in my mind, just as I began to do the night you died and just as I am talking to you now.
I said, “Good-by, Rhea, my darling. You will never be really gone from me, never really gone. We will always be together in the keeping of our secrets — but good-by, good-by forever, my sweet. We will miss you so much, so terribly much — both of us.”
As I watched them rolling your casket into the great furnace, Rhea, I heard sobbing from your friends and neighbors who were present, and I saw tears glimmering in the eyes of our lovely daughter.
Bitter with deepest grief, our Darlene stood at my side, saying her own silent farewells to you, her mother. I could hardly look away from her and back to your coffin because Darlene, only eighteen, looked so very much like you, Rhea. It was almost as if you were not gone at all.
You would have been pleased to see how many attended your funeral, Rhea. Among the crowd in the chapel was one mourner you would have noticed especially. A man. A young man, very handsome — much handsomer than I ever was, Rhea, and very different also in his debonair manner, expensive suit and man-about-town reputation. Can you guess who? Of course, Bruce Dallas.
He was there to see the final flames consume you. I’m sure that most of the other mourners wondered why Bruce Dallas should turn up at the funeral services for Mrs. John Long. Most of them hadn’t even heard that the late Mrs. Long knew him. They seemed so unlike each other — he the smooth-operator type; and she, apparently, just a homebody... the quiet little wife of a salesman of religious books.
He was looking a little worried, Rhea, and a little surly, too, almost as if it was not his own choice to be present. And he was not alone. The man with him was named Jennings, a police detective. Possibly Bruce Dallas had been forced by Jennings to attend the funeral services of Mrs. Long — but no one knew for what reason.
No one but me, Rhea.
The attendants gently closed the massive double door of the furnace — they shut you in, Rhea, while an organ played and a soloist softly sang your favorite hymn.
Then we began to hear, behind the melody, the rumble of the growing fires inside the thick refractory walls. You attained your long-cherished dream of burning.
For the mourners, and for Darlene and me as well, the services soon ended, although the muted thunder of the consuming flames continued to fulfill your wish.
Bruce Dallas, closely accompanied by the detective named Jennings, was one of the earliest to leave. As the others quietly dispersed, I could tell from their faces that they felt I had given you a very nice funeral — one done in a proper manner, showing the grief of a bereaved husband over the untimely loss of the wife he had loved.
I could also tell from their faces, Rhea — to my great gratification — that not one of these mourning friends and neighbors had the faintest suspicion that I had murdered you.
First inside the chapel, then outside on the marble steps, I went through the wearing process of saying good-by to all the mourners and thanking them for their friendly solicitude. Not dreaming that I had actually killed you, they saw me as the same upright and thoroughly proper man they had always known — a fairly successful salesman of religious books who had suffered a bitter loss and been left the lonely responsibility of his pretty eighteen-year-old daughter.
While I was still shaking hands with my well-wishing friends, Darlene came to me.
“The Fraziers want to drive me back home with them,” she said, naming our nearest neighbors. “You won’t mind, will you, Johnny?”
It startled me, Rhea. Not the fact that Darlene preferred to end this ordeal as soon as possible. The poor child was taking your death very hard. No, I was struck a small blow of dismay because Darlene had never before called me “Johnny.” This was the first time she had ever called me anything other than Father.
This wasn’t, of course, the place to rebuke her, particularly because she was so tired by the strain that she seemed hardly aware of what she was doing.
Somehow this grievous experience made her resemble you even more than before, Rhea. Her lovely oval face was pale, with vivid red touches on her cheeks; her full lips were parted a little, as if with an indefinable hunger, and there was a mist in her blue eyes — the same mist I used to see deep in your own lovely eyes, my sweet.
Only eighteen! You were so young-looking when you died that you might have passed for your daughter’s older sister, and on this unforgettably sad occasion Darlene seemed more like you than ever before.