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.
“Build a fire, Juan, it’s chilly,” he grinned. And to me, “Sit down, Angel Face, and let me look at you before you go.” The other two threw me into a corner of a big sofa, and I just stayed that way, limp like a rag doll. He just stared and stared. “Gosh, you’re swell!” he said.
Rocco said, “What’re we waiting for? It’s broad daylight already.”
Milton was idly holding something into the fire, a long poker of some kind. “She’s going,” he said, “but she’s going as my property. Show the other angels this, when you get up there, so they’ll know who you belong to.” He came over to me with the end of the thing glowing dull red. It was flattened into some kind of an ornamental design or cipher. “Knock her out,” he said, “I’m not that much of a brute.”
Something exploded off the side of my head, and I lost my senses. Then he was wiping my mouth with a handkerchief soaked in whiskey, and my side burned, just above the hip, where they’d found that mark on Ruby Rose Reading.
“All right, Rocco,” Milton said.
Rocco took out his gun again, but he shoved it at the third guy hilt first. The third one held it level at me, took the safety off. His face was sort of green and wet with sweat. I looked him straight in the eyes. The gun went down like a drooping lily. “I can’t, boss, she’s too beautiful!” he groaned. “She’s got the face of an angel. How can you shoot anything like that?”
Milton pulled it away from him. “She double-crossed me just like Reading did. Any dame that doublecrosses me gets what I gave Reading.”
A voice said softly, “That’s all I wanted to know.”
The gun went off, and I wondered why I didn’t feel anything. Then I saw that the smoke was coming from the doorway and not from Milton’s gun at all. He went down at my feet, like he wanted to apologize for what he’d done to me, but he didn’t say anything and he didn’t get up any more. There was blood running down the part of his hair in back.
Burns was in the room with more guys than I’d ever seen outside of a police parade. One of them was the doorman from Milton’s place, or at least the dick that Burns had substituted for him to keep an eye on me while I was up there. Burns told me about that later and about how they followed Milt’s little party but hadn’t been able to get in time to keep me from getting branded. Rocco and the other guy went down into hamburger under a battery of heavy fists.
I sat there holding my side and sucking in my breath. “It was a swell trick-finish,” I panted to Burns, “but what’d you drill him for? Now we’ll never get the proof that’ll save Chick.”
He was at the phone asking to be put through to Schlesinger in the city. “We’ve got it already, Angel Face,” he said ruefully. “It’s right on you, where you’re holding your side. Just where it was on Reading. We all heard what he said before he nose-dived anyway. I only wish I hadn’t shot him,” he glowered, “then I’d have the pleasure of doing it all over again, more slowly.”
Chosen to Die
Leslie T. White
Leslie Turner White (1901–1967) was born in Ottawa, then moved to California, where he was a lifelong member of the law enforcement community. He became a largely self-taught expert in fingerprinting, electronic eavesdropping, photography, trailing suspects, and other nascent tools of crimefighters.
He had headline-making experiences in the tong wars, battles with communists, and numerous other major criminal activities in California, all recounted in his autobiography and fictionalized in such novels as Homicide (1937), The River of No Return (1941), and his most important book, Harness Bull (1937), which included a four-page glossary of “S’language” — terms used among members of law enforcement organizations. The novel served as the basis for the famous motion picture Vice Squad (1953), released in Great Britain as The Girl in Room 17, directed by Arnold Laven with a screenplay by Lawrence Roman; it starred Edward G. Robinson.
In “Chosen to Die,” private investigator Duke Martindel is married to Phyllis, a smart lawyer he met while she was a law student and he was still a member of the police department. They got married the day she passed her bar exam. Phyllis, though still young, has largely retired, mainly taking on a case only when her husband gets in trouble.
“Chosen to Die” was first published in the December 1, 1934, issue of Detective Fiction Weekly.
It was the prettiest murder frame Martindel had ever found himself in — gilt-edged, steel-barred and time-locked against cracking. But those who had stuck him there hadn’t taken into consideration the fact that their dupe’s wife was the smartest criminal lawyer in town — and just enough in love with her husband to play mouthpiece for him and not double-cross or chisel in the usual way.
Chapter One
Robbers’ Plea
Phyllis Martindel was jerked from the depths of a sound sleep with an abruptness that left her breathless and moist with perspiration. She cocked her head, listening, but the apartment seemed all too silent, like a morgue peopled with the dead. Propped upon one elbow, she sought to force her eyes to pierce the darkness but the tarnished silvery glow that seeped through the single window mellowed into opaque shadows before it reached the bedroom door. She leaned over and touched the broad shoulders of her husband and seemed to absorb some of his great strength from the contact. Her heart ceased its mad fluttering as she tried to recall what had awakened her.
Then she felt, rather than heard, the door swing open!
The limp hand suddenly became a bony talon that tightened on her husband’s flesh. “Hey! What’s the idea?” he grumbled thickly.
She shrank against him. “Duke! There is... there is someone in the apartment!”
He gave her a playful bunt with his head and then his lazy voice drawled out of the darkness beside her. “Say, Phyl, just because you’re married to a detective don’t be so damn suspicious. Oh, well, if there’s anyone here tell ’em to g’wan away and come back at a decent—” He stopped abruptly as the sudden glare of a flash blinded him.
“Keep your hands away from that pillow, Duke!” a tense voice commanded from the shadows behind the source of light. “Get ’em in plain sight on top the covers!”
Duke Martindel arched his neck and blinked into the beam. Very slowly he spread his big hands on top of the counterpane, then shot a sidelong glance at his wife. “Darling,” he grinned wryly, “is this guy calling on you or me?”
A shadow moved across the wan light of the window. The shades were carefully drawn, then a wall-switch clicked and the room was flooded with light. Martindel pushed himself erect and stared at his guests.
They both had guns on him, but there the similarity ceased. The big man at the foot of the bed had apparently dressed hurriedly for his visit, for even the up-turned collar of his black topcoat failed to hide the fact that he wore no tie. Close-cropped gray hair bristled from the brim of a derby that shaded his tiny close-set eyes — eyes that reminded Martindel of twin bullet holes in a cantaloupe. His square jaw and heavy jowls were tinted a deep purple by a stubble of beard and he carried a scar that coursed upward from the corner of his thin mouth to the crisscrossed sack under his right eye. It was the first time Duke Martindel had ever seen stark fear in Sam Skuro’s eyes.
“Get up, Duke!” growled Skuro. “You’re goin’ places.”