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.
The sedan was not quite where he had left it. It seemed to have been lifted off the ground and dropped about four feet to the right. It listed to that side. The top was blown out and jagged ends of metal thrust spear points up into the air. One door sagged crazily and another was missing. The bullet-proof glass had vanished. Something red dripped on the right running-board, dripped and formed a sluggishly widening puddle. Jules’ lips were pressed together in a thin hard line. Three men had been in that car. That left only O’Reilly to pay for Angela’s death. And there was that score against dear brother Andrew...
Jules looked down at his left hand. A steel ring an inch across was on the forefinger and from that ring dangled a steel pin.
“Well, well,” he said, and threw back his head and laughed with little sound. “That grenade must have ruined my guitar. I’ll have to buy a new one.”
Smoke in Your Eyes
Hugh B. Cave
Hugh B(arnett) Cave (1910–2004) was born in Chester, England, but his family moved to Boston when World War I broke out. He attended Boston University for a short time, taking a job at a vanity publishing house before becoming a full-time writer at the age of twenty. At nineteen, he had sold his first short stories, “Island Ordeal” and “The Pool of Death,” and went on to produce more than a thousand stories, mostly for the pulps (at one point, in the 1930s, his work appeared in more than fifty different magazines in a single year) but also with more than three hundred sales to national “slick” magazines such as Colliers, Redbook, Good Housekeeping, and The Saturday Evening Post. Although he wrote in virtually every genre, he is remembered most for his horror, supernatural, and science fiction. In addition to the numerous stories, he wrote forty novels, juveniles, and several volumes of nonfiction, including an authoritative study of voodoo. His best-selling novel, Long Were the Nights (1943), drew on his extensive reportage of World War II in the Pacific and featured the adventures of PT boats and those who captained them at Guadalcanal. He also wrote several nonfiction books chronicling World War II in the Pacific theater.
Cave was the recipient of numerous awards, including the Living Legend Award from the International Horror Guild, the Bram Stoker Lifetime Achievement Award from the Horror Writers Association, and the World Fantasy Life Achievement Award.
“Smoke in Your Eyes” was published in the December 1938 issue.
The girl in a red cape pursues trouble and stumbles onto a plot where life means little.
John Smith gazed with exaggerated tolerance at his fair companion. Of course it was not difficult to exercise patience with a young lady so scandalously lovely. He was, in fact, used to it.
“Ever so many men, Angel,” he declared, “smoke long black cigarettes. Even I do at times.”
“The heat, Mr. Edgerson, has made you lazy. Otherwise you’d jump at a thing like this.”
Smith’s other name was Philip Edgerson. He hated it because it brought to mind too many memories of birthdays, Christmases and people sick in bed. He was head of a greeting card company. Now he put down his cocktail and leaned back.
They were dining in Polinoff’s, and it had not been a good idea. Polinoff’s on an August afternoon was far too hot, too stuffy, for the enjoyment of pig knuckles and spiced red cabbage.
“I’m thinking of abandoning Trouble, Incorporated, Angel.”
“Said he, lying,” she retorted.
“No, I mean it. Look, I’ve paid rent on that ninth-floor cell for eleven months now, and not a customer. Not a single client. A man’s hobby, as I see it, should be more productive than that.”
“It has been,” Angelina said simply.
“Not financially.”
“Mr. Philip Edgerson,” she said, “makes quite enough money to support the hobby of John Smith. It’s the heat, that’s all.”
“I suppose it is.”
He reached out then and picked up the letter she had read to him. It was a neat little thing, written delicately in green ink on ten-cent-store paper which bore the gilt initials M.A.B. It read:
“Dear Miss Kaye,
“This is the third time I have tried to write to you, but on each previous occasion my courage has left me before I could finish. This time, however, I am determined to go through with it. You see, I am really desperate.
“Please do not be angry with me if this is a long letter. I know that you urge those who write to you to be brief, but I have so much to tell.
“I am nineteen years old, Miss Kaye, and was married just a little over a year ago to the dearest boy in all the world. Teddy was so loving then and so considerate. We saved money and planned for the future and were just as happy as two birds in a nest. And now all that is changed.
“I am not really sure when the trouble began. Now that I look back on it, I realize that Teddy acted queerly for days, even weeks, before he actually began staying out nights and leaving me alone. During that period he was awfully quiet and seemed always to be wrapped up in his thoughts. I thought he was worried about his job, and I tried to be tender with him, but he refused to confide in me. He even told me once that it was none of my business.
“Then, Miss Kaye, he began staying out late at night, sometimes until two or three o’clock in the morning, and I was sick with worry. When I spoke to him about it he told me to leave him alone and stop nagging him, but I wasn’t nagging him; I was just frantic that our love would die and he would drift away from me.
“It went on this way for almost a month, Miss Kaye, and then he began bringing these men to the house. Three or four times a week they came, and they were nice enough, I suppose. At least they always said hello to me, but instead of sitting in the parlor like ordinary friends, they and Teddy would go upstairs to Teddy’s den and close the door and stay up there until all hours. Sometimes there would be three of them, sometimes more.
“Well, Miss Kaye, I do not pretend to be any judge of character, but I am positive in my own heart that these men are not good for Teddy. They are not his kind. They are older, for one thing, and they seem very wise in the ways of the world. One of them, whom the others seem to look upon as a sort of leader, is a foreigner, at least twenty years older than my husband, and he smokes long black cigarettes continually, and the house reeks from it. And furthermore, if these men were proper companions for Teddy, he would introduce me to them, wouldn’t he? But he hasn’t. He just said, ‘Boys, meet the wife.’ Which hurt me terribly.
“Please, Miss Kaye, tell me what to do to win my husband away from these men. I am worried to desperation for fear I will lose him, and for fear he is getting mixed up in something that will bring trouble to us both.
“Anxiously yours,