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.
Irene dropped slowly to her knees and crawled back through the hole. She tried to rouse Duret. Failing this, she began to drag him through the narrow passage. The pain of movement, or the rush of fresh air to his lungs, aroused the detective to consciousness as Irene drew him clear of the hole.
Duret looked about him in surprise. His eyes turned up to look deep into Irene’s. Her gaze dropped.
“You came back for me,” he said tenderly. His tone changed. “Listen, go to the cellar. And go with caution. See if Le Loup is there. Put on a coat to cover your torn dress, then come back to me.”
Irene ran up the ramp to the sidewalk and went swiftly to the hideout. She climbed the stairs and procured a coat and flashlight from her room. Back downstairs, she crept into the cellar. She saw Le Loup doubled over the lever by the trapdoor, the handle of his own great knife protruding from his stomach.
Irene ran back to Duret. The detective seemed surprised, and smiled at her return.
“He is dead!” she said quietly.
The detective nodded. He lifted his eyes whimsically. “Now tell me, why did you do that thing to me?”
She flushed and turned away.
“And why did you later save my life?” he added.
Irene laughed harshly. Words surged from her heart and she told him of her band of thieves. She told him, too, of her identity, of the pinch of snuff, and of her plot to kill him.
“Then why did you not let me bleed to death?” Duret demanded.
“Ah, give me no credit for that. Alone I would have gone mad in that place!”
“Why did you wander off from your father’s room that night?” Duret asked.
She shrugged her shoulders. “My mother was dead; my father was dead; the police took away my two baby sisters, and I was afraid they would come back and take me. I went far that night. I was in St. Henri shivering on a corner when a crippled beggar came upon me. He took me to his cellar. Later this beggar told me it was a detective named Duret who had shot my father. I swore to kill this Duret.”
Duret’s face blazed with anger. “This beggar, what did he want of you?”
“Nothing. He was kind to me. He provided me with food, shelter, and clothes, and he taught me the tricks of the underworld. I cooked for him. He was old, and I relieved his loneliness.”
“He did you an awful wrong!” Duret said fiercely. “There is a pencil and notebook in my pocket. Thank you.”
Duret wrote rapidly. “Go now to the hotel in the market-place and telephone for help to be sent me. Then go to this address. There you will find your father and your sisters. He was not killed, but dangerously wounded that night...”
A convulsive sob shook Irene. She cried, “Papa! Papa!” and swayed upon her feet.
Duret looked alarmed. “Get help for me quickly!” he said in a sharp voice. Irene steadied, and Duret continued. “Later, we found your father steady work; he is well and prosperous. We combed the city for you at that time, but your beggar had hid you well!
“Stay with your father and say nothing of this business. The police will not question you. My report will deal only with the snuff factory and the cellar. Later I shall come to see you and we may discuss your future. Now leave me and send help quickly. I am weak and tired.”
“And you mean, Duret, that you do not arrest me?”
Duret smiled whimsically. “Arrest you over a trifling pinch of snuff? Hardly!”
Killer in the Rain
Raymond Chandler
The fourth short story published by Raymond Chandler (1889–1959), “Killer in the Rain” was never reprinted during his lifetime. As with “Curtain,” which had its magazine appearance the following year, Chandler had “cannibalized” the story for his first novel, The Big Sleep. Six characters and much of eleven chapters in the novel were lifted in whole or in part from “Killer in the Rain,” generally being fleshed out to provide more fully developed characters.
Names were changed. None of Chandler’s short stories featured Philip Marlowe, the hero of all seven of his novels, though whether named Carmody, Dalmas, Malvern, Mallory, or unnamed, as in the present story, they were interchangeable with his famous creation.
The wild young woman who is the catalyst for all that transpires in both the novel and this story is named Carmen Dravec here, but she is Carmen Stern-wood in The Big Sleep. Drug-addicted, alcoholic, perhaps a bit dim, almost certainly a sociopath, the beautiful Carmen was played by the now-forgotten Martha Vickers in the 1946 Warner Bros, movie that starred Humphrey Bogart as Marlowe. The novel added a sister who tried to protect the reputation of her younger sibling by getting the detective to end his investigation.
“Killer in the Rain” was originally published as a novelette in the January 1935 issue of Black Mask.
He came to his feet, his hand on the gun, but the gun not in his hand. I dodged past him and turned as two men came into the room
I
We were sitting in a room at the Berglund. I was on the side of the bed, and Dravec was in the easy, chair. It was my room.
Rain beat very hard against the windows. They were shut tight and it was hot in the room and] had a little fan going on the table. The breeze from it hit Dravec’s face high up, lifted his heavy black hair, moved the longer bristles in the fat path of eyebrow that went across his face in a solid line. He looked like a bouncer who had come into money.
He showed me some of his gold teeth and said:
“What you got on me?”
He said it importantly, as if anyone who knew anything would know quite a lot about him.
“Nothing,” I said. “You’re clean, as far as I know.”
He lifted a large hairy hand and stared at it solidly for a minute.
“You don’t get me. A feller named M’Gee sent me here. Violets M’Gee.”
“Fine. How is Violets these days?” Violets M’Gee was a homicide dick in the sheriff’s office.
He looked at his large hand and frowned. “No — you still don’t get it. I got a job for you.”
“I don’t go out much any more,” I said. “I’m getting kind of frail.”
He looked around the room carefully, bluffing a bit, like a man not naturally observant.
“Maybe it’s money,” he said.
“Maybe it is,” I said.
He had a belted suede raincoat on. He tore it open carelessly and got out a wallet that was not quite as big as a bale of hay. Currency stuck out of it at careless angles. When he slapped it down on his knee it made a fat sound that was pleasant to the ear. He shook money out of it, selected a few bills from the bunch, stuffed the rest back, dropped the wallet on the floor and let it lie, arranged five century notes like a tight poker hand and put them under the base of the fan on the table.
That was a lot of work. It made him grunt.
“I got lots of sugar,” he said.
“So I see. What do I do for that, if I get it?”
“You know me now, huh?”
“A little better.”
I got an envelope out of an inside pocket and read to him loud from some scribbling on the back.
“Dravec, Anton or Tony. Former Pittsburgh steelworker, truck guard, all-round muscle stiff. Made a wrong pass and got shut up. Left town, came West. Worked on an avocado ranch at El Seguro. Came up with a ranch of his own. Sat right on the dome when the El Seguro oil boom burst. Got rich. Lost a lot of it buying into other people’s dusters. Still has enough. Serbian by birth, six feet, two hundred and forty, one daughter, never known to have had a wife. No police record of any consequence. None at all since Pittsburgh.”