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.
“How’d I get here?” Duke wanted to know.
A familiar voice answered from the foot of the bed. “They started to put you in the meat wagon,” Dombey growled, “but your wife wouldn’t stand for it. Was afraid they’d get their loads mixed, I guess, so you made the trip in an ambulance.”
Duke winced as he tried to move his leg. “Say, where’s Egan? Did you kill him?”
“Naw,” grumbled Dombey. “We’re savin’ him to hang. I’ll try to get passes for us all — we can make a day of it.”
Phyllis shuddered. “Not the Martindels,” she assured the grinning copper. “They are going to Europe.”
Duke groaned. “They can’t hang him without more evidence than we got. Gosh, what a lousy shame you didn’t show up before Arnison was killed.” He frowned at them both. “Say, how did you two happen to show up?”
Dombey chuckled. “Well, it’s a long story, but I figured as long as you didn’t want the date with the swell-lookin’ jane in the drug store, I’d mosey over. I dated her up myself an’ we ambled up here. By a strange coincidence, you was here.”
Duke scowled at his wife. “So,” he sneered, “you don’t trust me? You follow me—”
“Oh, shut up!” Phyllis said.
“About Arnison,” Dombey butted in, “he ain’t dead. Egan’s slug creased his skull, but it didn’t do him no damage. However, me ’n the doc made him think he was slated for the long trail. Did he talk? Ha! Plenty. First, he says—” Dombey stopped as a physician motioned him to silence.
“Our patient has had enough, I’m afraid, Captain,” the doctor said firmly. “The details can wait until—”
“The hell they can!” shouted Duke. “I want to know why Egan framed me!”
Dombey turned at the door. “O.K. You was in the way. Egan wanted a goat for the Washburn kill, so his stoolies tipped him off to the fact that Sam Skuro an’ Gus Nuene were set to crack the bank at midnight. Egan set a watch on the bank job and sent Arnison an’ Nagel out to bump Washburn. According to Arnison, Nagel did the actual kill. Egan had Skuro and Nuene followed so that they couldn’t establish an alibi, but somebody tipped Sam off by telephone and he an’ Gus beat it over to your place.”
“Humph!” grunted Duke thoughtfully. “I’m beginning to see through it. Who killed Foy?”
“Egan. They followed you to Henderson’s home, guessed what you was goin’ to do, so Egan figgured it a good chance to frame you proper an’ so have a sucker for the bank job. He gave Foy the works. Arnison saw him do it. Egan began to get restless when he knew you was working against him, so he decided to let the boys polish you off. Well, so long.” He closed the door.
The doctor took Phyllis by the arm and gently propelled her to the door. “No more questions for this young man,” he announced firmly.
“Just one,” shouted Duke. “Just one, Doc.”
“And that is—”
“How soon can a guy travel to Europe with a leg like this?”
A Pinch of Snuff
Eric Taylor
Eric Taylor was a frequent, though not prolific, contributor to various pulps in the 1920s and 1930s, notably to Black Mask, Dime Detective, and the lower-paying Clues.
While the seal of approval that came with being published in the Golden Age of Black Mask — in the years in which it was publishing Hammett, Whitfield, Cain, Nebel, and its other major stars — would normally have given an author greater opportunity for success, this seems to have eluded Taylor. He never published a novel and never even had a single short story collected in an anthology.
Some of this may be due to the fact that he eschewed the traditional path of most pulp fiction writers, which was to produce a series detective. In the seven stories published in Black Mask, for example, three were about different detectives and three were about thieves, including the story collected here.
Another reason that Taylor may not have enjoyed the financial and critical success of many of his fellow pulpsters is his melodramatic style. The impossibly pitiful early years of the heroine of “A Pinch of Snuff” would have been an embarrassment to producers of stage plays at the turn of the last century, at which audiences were encouraged to hiss at the villain as he twirled his mustache while throwing a waif out of her home to freeze in the winter snow.
“A Pinch of Snuff” was originally published in the June 1929 issue of Black Mask.
A small thing, but it leads to a murderer, vengeance, and a strange discovery
In Montreal they like to show you the view from the top of Mont Royal. To the south, church spires like gracile mile posts guide the eye to the green St. Lawrence, panting here from its fierce flight over the Lachine Rapids, widening for its majestic march to the sea. Beyond the river lies a great plain that meets the sky near the hills along the American border. To the north, the Laurentian Mountains hide uncountable lakes that lie like verde antiques, cool and inscrutable as they await a sportsman’s rod. To the west, gay red roofs peer through the verdant screen of maples, while to the east... But Montreal might prefer that you didn’t look to the east.
A family of five brooded in a single room apartment in an East End flat. The room was hot, steaming, fetid with the snow that melted on Armand’s coat and the baby wash that hung on a length of twine.
Armand sat sullen, his right hand stroking a nearly-empty bottle. He glanced across the room toward his youngest brat and thought it droll that the gin and milk should end simultaneously. His eyes wandered over to Gabrielle. He saw the ugly lines that poverty had etched across the fragile beauty of youth. She had cheated him, he thought. Bony, hollow-chested, with bent shoulders, reproachful eyes, and mute lips — a hag at thirty! Could this be the dancing-eyed, cream-skinned beauty he had wed thirteen years ago?
Irene moved across the room toward the table. Armand scowled. A doctor down at the clinic had informed Armand that Irene was undernourished. A thin arm crossed Armand’s vision and raised the cover of a thin metal box. A savage blasphemy burst from Armand’s lips. His hand struck out. One of Irene’s pale cheeks flushed crimson as she jumped back. Gabrielle turned with a furious protest on her lips. But something she saw in her husband’s eyes choked back the words.
“She knows there is no bread in the box,” Armand said after a minute.
At nine o’clock Armand went out. At a corner grocery, where his credit had been stopped, Armand halted to beg an empty sack. With this beneath an arm he struck south to a district of small wholesale produce merchants.
Before a window, Armand stood in deep thought for a long time. The flakes of snow that were falling grew larger. A few drops of rain fell, and Armand’s decision was made. This mild winter was starving the poor. Mid-January and the river was still unfrozen despite the supplications of a thousand women who prayed for cold that their men might work at the ice-cutting.
Armand broke the window and crawled into a small warehouse. A few minutes later Armand thrust the filled sack through the window he had broken. He dropped to the street and raised the sack to his shoulder.
But recently there had been other raids on the wholesale provision houses. A keen-eyed detective with a reputation to make was watching the district.