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.
“Come... in.”
MacBride went in. Yes, the kitchen, and an old woman sitting before the open oven of the stove, and clothes drying on a line above the stove. Faded wallpaper, hand-me-down furniture, warped ceiling. Cracked oilcloth on the floor. Neat, clean — poverty with its face washed.
The girl knew. Oh, she knew! Her breath, bated for a long moment, rushed out.
“Is he...?”
MacBride stood like an image of stone. “Yes. Bad wreck.”
She wilted, like a spring flower suddenly overcome by an unexpected frost. The old woman moved, extended a scrawny arm.
“Betty!”
The girl reeled, spun, and buried her face in her mother’s lap. The mother cradled her in ancient arms.
MacBride wanted to dash out. But he held his ground, and something welling from the depths of him melted the granite of his chiseled face. The old woman looked up, and though her eyes were moist, there was a certain grimness in her expression. Age is strong, mused MacBride. It meets fate with an iron jaw.
The old woman, looking at him, shook her head slowly, as if to imply that this was life, and we either died and left others to mourn, or mourned while others died.
MacBride put on his hat, backed toward the door, opened it softly. He bowed slightly, and without a word, departed.
He was a little pale when he reached the station-house. Doran and Rigallo, his prize detectives, and four or five reserves were hanging about the central room, and Kennedy, his coat collar still up to his ears, was leaning indolently against the wall and blowing smoke circles.
MacBride nodded to Doran and Rigallo and strode into his office. Kennedy tried to edge in but MacBride closed the door in his face. Doran hooked one leg over a corner of the desk and Rigallo stood jingling loose change in his pocket.
He said, “Trouble, eh, Cap?”
“Plenty!” MacBride bit off.
“Was the guy shot?”
“No telling yet. Too messed up to see. That’s the morgue’s job. We’ll get news soon. But I’m willing to bet my shirt the guy’s been done in. If he has, I’m going to bust loose and drive the Atlas Corporation to the wall.”
Doran grunted. “Fine chance, with that bum of a mayor back of it. How the hell did he ever get in?”
“Don’t be dumb,” said Rigallo “That last election was a farce. All the polls in the Fourth and Fifth wards were fixed. Guys voted twice, and the polls committee scrapped a lot of votes for the opposition because of some lousy technicality — illegibility, unreadable signatures and all that crap. Who votes in this city? The better element yap at conditions and turn up their noses and don’t even go near the polls. The bums, the bootleggers, the blockheads and gunmen vote! And the New Party sends loud-mouthed guys to ballyhoo the mill and river bohunks during lunch-hour, and under-cover guys go around near the employment agencies, the bread-lines, and the parks. They find guys out of work and up against it, and they slip ’em a ten-dollar bill to vote. The Atlas Corporation employs eight hundred men, and they vote right or lose their jobs, and their wives, mothers and the whole damned family are dragged to the polls. Now d’you wonder why we have this bum of a mayor?”
MacBride said, “Sounds like Kennedy.”
“It is,” replied Rigallo. “Kennedy and I have the whole thing thrashed out.”
The telephone rang. MacBride picked it up, muttered his name, and listened. When he put the instrument down, he sucked in his breath and curled his lip.
“Poisoned,” he said. “Saunders, the driver, was poisoned. A stuff that he could drink and it wouldn’t have any effect for an hour. Then it hits a man like a stroke of paralysis. That’s how it hit Saunders.”
Doran said, “Must have stopped at a road-house for a snifter and got poisoned liquor.”
“Just that,” nodded MacBride. “I’ll find that roadhouse. Some pup is going to hang for this, just as sure as God made little green apples!”
“Remember, Cap, the mayor,” put in Doran.
MacBride doubled his fist. “I’ll bring it right to his doorstep if I have to, and I’d like to see the bum try to can me. I’m sick and tired of these conditions! I’m going to put a dent in the Atlas Corporation, and wipe out this graft, this dirty, rotten corruption.”
“They’ll bump you off, Mac.”
“I’ll take the chance! I’m insured for twenty thousand, and my plot in the cemetery is paid for!”
It took a tough man to run the Second.
3
NEXT day the noon edition of the Free Press gave the wreck and the death of Saunders a frontpage column. It recited the details in its customary offhand manner, giving the place, the approximate time, name of the deceased, and financial loss. It wound up with the non-committal statement that the police were investigating the matter, but did not say why.
MacBride, reading it over his coffee, at his home in Grove Manor, was a little disgruntled at its apparently disinterested attitude. But, turning the pages, his eye rested on the editorial columns, and particularly on an item labeled,
Crime. We’ve always had it. It is a disease, recurring every so often, like smallpox, diphtheria, and scarlet fever. It lays waste, like any and all of these diseases, and causes suffering, misery and despair.
And on the other hand, wealth, affluence, power. To whom? Why, to those, quite often in high place, who like parasites, feast avidly upon the meaty morsels gathered by vultures who swoop in the dark, kill from behind, and crow at the dawn.
What we need is a crusader. Not a preaching, scripture-quoting, holier-than-thou sort of fellow. Not an altruist, nor a gavel-thumper. But a Man, and we capitalize that symbolically. A man somewhere in the rusty machinery of this municipality, who cares not a whoop for authority and is willing to stack the possibility of losing his job against the possibility of sweeping out the unclean corridors of intrigue and corruption, and satisfying the ego of his own morals and ethics.
A two-fisted, slam-bang, tougher-than-thou sort of man! The streets of Richmond City are more sordid than its sewers. They smell to high heaven. We need a chunk of brimstone to sterilize them. Amen.
“Whew!” whistled MacBride. “This will cause apoplexy in the Town Hall. The Free Press is out to ride ’em.”
He was back in his office at the precinct at one, and Kennedy was sound asleep in the swivel chair. He kicked it, and Kennedy awoke.
“Hello, Mac.”
“Hello. Pretty ripe, that editorial.”
“Thanks.”
MacBride looked at him. “You didn’t write it.”
“Yup. My name’ll go down in posterity.”
“If the Big Gang knew you did it, it would go down in the Deceased Column. Get out o’ that chair.”
Kennedy got out and sat on the desk, swinging his legs.
MacBride said, “I see, now, that you were shooting in my direction. Humph. Crusader!”
Kennedy smiled. “Would you, Mac.”
“I am,” snapped MacBride, “but there’s nothing of the crusader about me. I’m sore, and I’ll bust up this racket if it’s the last thing I do. That poor kid, Kennedy — her name’s Betty... God Almighty! Government of the people, by the people and for the people! What a bromide!”
He pulled an empty cigar box from his desk, took a pen and a piece of paper, and on the paper printed, in large letters: