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
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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.
On the other side a breeze from the open window puffed the curtains lightly past the figure of Devine that lay half across the sill. It didn’t move.
Flaherty went over and lifted it back from the fire-escape, then reached out and pulled in the yellow leather bag Devine had pushed before him. Under two shirts on top, crisp piles of greenbacks were stacked row on row to the bottom.
Flaherty grunted, caressed them a second with his long fingers. “What a haul,” he said. “And I’d have to be a copper.”
Mike Martin’s puffy red face showed over his shoulder. “What’s all the shootin’, Flaherty? Who the hell is that?”
“Ain’t you heard?” said Flaherty. “It’s Santa Claus.”
Mike cursed. “Honest to gawd,” he said, “some day, Flaherty, I’m gonna lay you like a rug.”
Stag Party
Charles G. Booth
Once an enormously successful novelist and writer of pulp stories, Charles G. Booth (1896–1949) is a name largely forgotten today, his fiction generally unread, while the films with which he was involved have taken on cult status and more.
He won an Academy Award for writing the best original story of the spy thriller, The House on 92nd Street (1945), an early work of documentary realism. His novel Mr. Angel Comes Aboard was filmed as Johnny Angel in 1945, a year after publication, and he wrote the novel The General Died at Dawn, which was filmed with Gary Cooper in 1936.
Born in Manchester, England, he emigrated to Canada before moving to Los Angeles in 1922, eventually becoming a contract writer for 20th Century Fox.
As with much of his fiction, “Stag Party” has a strong sense of place and evokes its time wonderfully. The hero, preparing for a showdown with gangsters in an underworld-run nightclub, dresses in his dinner jacket so that he’ll look his best for the confrontation.
Originally published in the November 1933, issue of Black Mask, “Stag Party” is the first and longest of three novellas featuring McFee of the Blue Shield Detective Agency to be collected in one of the rarest private eye volumes of the 1940s, Murder Strikes Thrice (1946), published by the short-lived paperback publisher Bond.
1
Stirring his coffee McFee — Blue Shield Detective Agency — thought he had seen the girl somewhere. She had dull red hair. She had a subtle red mouth and experienced eyes with green lights in them. That was plenty. But over her provocative beauty, lay a hard sophistication as brightly polished as new nickel.
McFee said, “You ought to be in pictures.”
“I’ve been in pictures.” Her voice was husky. “That’s where you’ve seen me.”
“No, it isn’t,” McFee said. “Sit down. Coffee?”
“Black.”
The girl let herself drop into the chair on the other side of the table. Her wrap fell back. She wore an evening gown of jade green velvet and a necklace of square-cut emeralds. Her eyes were guarded but urgent; desperate, perhaps.
Abruptly, she asked, “Do I look like a fool?”
“I dunno what a fool looks like.” McFee finished his apple pie, sugared his coffee. His movements, the flow of his words, the level staring of his V-thatched, somber eyes were as precisely balanced as the timing of a clock. The girl was restlessly tapping the table pedestal with a green satin pump when McFee asked: Some’dy tell you I was here?”
“Jules — at the door. He’s been with Cato’s ever since I can remember.”
A waiter came, drew the booth curtains, went away. McFee gave the girl a cigarette. A flame came into each of her eyes and she began to pelt him with little hard bullets of words.
“I am Irene Mayo. Ranee Damon and I were dining here one night and Ranee pointed you out. He said, ‘That’s McFee, the Blue Shield operative.’ Jules told us you often dropped in for coffee around midnight—”
McFee muttered, “Coffee and Cato’s apple pie.”
“Yes. That’s what Jules told us. And Ranee said, ‘Irene, if you ever run into a jam get McFee.’ So I knew if you were here—”
“What sort of jam you in?”
“I don’t know.” The girl stared at the ruddy vitality of McFee, shivered. “Ranee and I left my apartment — the St. Regis — around eleven. We were going to the Cockatoo for supper and some dancing, but we didn’t get there.”
“Pretty close,” McFee said.
She nodded. “Ranee had just turned into Carter, from Second, when he saw Sam Mel-rose—”
“That’s funny,” McFee said. He tapped a newspaper beside his coffee cup. “The Trib says Melrose is aboard Larry Knudson’s yacht. Has been all week.”
Irene Mayo flared out, “That’s what Ranee said. That’s why he went after him. Melrose has been evading the Grand Jury ever since they opened up that Shelldon scandal. Ranee said they couldn’t serve him.”
“I dunno that indicting him’ll do any good,” McFee muttered, frowning. “Sam took the town over when Gaylord rubbed out, and he’s got his hooks in deep. Damon saw Melrose and went after him, you said—”
“Into the Gaiety Theatre. Ranee parked on Second. The house was dark — after eleven—”
McFee cut in, “Melrose owns the Gaiety now.”
“Ranee told me. He said he’d be back in fifteen minutes — less, maybe. But he had to see Melrose.” The girl’s green eyes dilated a little. “I waited an hour and fifteen minutes. He didn’t come back. I couldn’t stand it any longer. I went to the lobby doors. They were locked. The box office was locked. I could see into the theatre. It was dark.”
McFee said, “You tried the alley fire exits?”
“I didn’t think of those. But why would Ranee—”
The girl stared at McFee with terrified eyes. “Nothing can have happened — I mean, Melrose wouldn’t dare—”
“I dunno, Sam Melrose—”
McFee saw the girl’s red mouth lose its subtlety in the sharp twitching of the lip muscles. He stood up. “Put that coffee under your belt and stay here till I come back.”
2
McFee crossed Third and went down Carter. A late street car rumbled somewhere along Brant, but the town was quiet. He walked fast for half a block.
Cato’s had been at Third and Carter when the town was young and the Gaiety Theatre had billed Martin Thomas in Othello and William Gillette in Sherlock Holmes. That had been before business moved west and the corner had gone pawn shop and fire sale, and buttoned itself on to Chinatown. Second and Carter’s had been McFee’s nursery. Cato’s hadn’t moved because Signor Cato and Papa Dubois had known the value of tradition to the restaurant business, and because M. Papoulas, the present proprietor, also knew it. But Cato’s had kept its head up. The Gaiety had gone burleycue.
McFee tried the lobby doors. They were tight. The interior of the theatre was black. Light from the street seeped into the lobby. On the walls were life-sized tinted photographs of the girls. A legend under one of them said Mabel Leclair. She Knocked ’Em Cold on Broadway.
An alley separated the Gaiety Building from the Palace Hotel at Second. The Gaiety had two exit doors in the north side of the alley. On the south side the Palace had a service entrance. Instead of turning into the alley, McFee went to where Maggie O’Day had her ten-by-four hole-in-the-wall in the hotel building. She was putting her stock away. McFee bought a pack of cigarettes.
He said, “Seen Sam Melrose lately, Maggie?”
She was a little dark witch of a woman with rouged cheek bones and tragic purple-brown eyes. Like McFee and the Gaiety girls, she belonged to the picture. Always had. In the Gaiety’s Olga Nethersole-melodrama days, she had played minor parts. That had been about the time the late Senator Gaylord was coming into power. Things had happened, and she had gone to singing in Sullivan’s saloon on Second, until a street car accident had crippled her hip. Now she leaned on a crutch in her hole-in-the-wall and shook dice with the dicks and the Gaiety girls. Midnight or later she rolled herself home in a wheel chair she kept in the Gaiety alley.