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.
“Get out of here while I change my clothes!” she yelled. “I’ll give it a tumble. But if it makes any difference to Steve — I’m going to tell it right.”
“Aw, shut up and change your clothes,” I said.
I went out and banged the door.
I hadn’t even kissed her. I could have done that, at least. She wouldn’t have minded any more than the rest of the knocking about I gave her.
We rode the rest of the night, first in separate cars to hide hers in my garage, then in mine. We rode up the coast and had coffee and sandwiches at Malibu, then on up and over. We had breakfast at the bottom of the Ridge Route, just north of San Fernando.
Her face looked like a catcher’s mitt after a tough season. She had a lower lip the size of a banana and you could have cooked steaks on the bruises on her arms and neck, they were so hot.
With the first strong daylight we went to the City Hall.
They didn’t even think of holding her or checking her up. They practically wrote the statement themselves. She signed it blank-eyed, thinking of something else. Then a man from KLBL and his wife came down to get her.
So I didn’t get to ride her to a hotel. She didn’t get to see Skalla either, not then. He was under morphine.
He died at two-thirty the same afternoon. She was holding one of his huge, limp fingers, but he didn’t know her from the Queen of Siam.
Don’t You Cry for Me
Norbert Davis
Norbert Davis (1909–1949) was born in Morrison, Illinois, and moved with his family when he was a teenager to California, where he earned a law degree at Stanford University. By the time he had graduated, however, he had already established himself as a successful pulp writer and, having always desired the writer’s life, never bothered to take the bar exam.
While he is most remembered today for his detective fiction (and rightly so), he also wrote other pulp fiction, including Westerns, romances, and adventure stories, as well as humor for the top slick magazines. He joined a group called the Fictioneers, Southern Californian fiction writers who met regularly to discuss writing and marketing tips; Raymond Chandler was an occasional participant. Davis’s best-known characters are the private-eye team of Doan and Carstairs — the latter being a giant Great Dane, who, after closely reading their five cases, has proven to be the smarter half of the team. They appeared in two short stories — “Cry Murder” and “Holocaust House” — and three novels: The Mouse in the Mountain (1943), Sally’s in the Alley (1943), and Oh, Murderer Mine (1946). The Doan and Carstairs stories are notable for being among the funniest of the “hard-boiled” genre of their time. Toward the end of his career, Davis abandoned the pulps, and then the slick magazines began to reject his stories. He split up with his wife, his agent died, and he was diagnosed with cancer. It was all too much, and at the age of forty he committed suicide.
“Don’t You Cry for Me,” one of Davis’s thirteen Black Mask stories, was published in May 1942.
The brawny piano-player had had his run-ins with the ghoulish Gestapo in the beer halls of Europe, but when he promised Myra Martin’s mother to find the girl in the Mecca of the movie-struck, he ran afoul of a plot as fantastic as any Hitler pipe-dream.
John Collins Was playing the Beale Street Blues and playing it soft and sad because that was the way he felt. The notes dripped through the dingy dimness of the room like molasses and provided an appropriate accompaniment to his thoughts. He had a hangover.
He was short and squat and immensely wide. He looked a little bit like a frog — a friendly one. His hair was blond and as softly fuzzy as a baby’s on top, and he had a scar on his right cheek.
The door-bell trilled faintly through the music. Collins stopped playing and sighed. He didn’t really feel in the mood for company, but he got up and went across the rumpled living-room into the little entry-hall and opened the front door.
“Yes?” he said.
“You’re Mr. John Collins, aren’t you?”
The soft California dusk had gathered shadows against the front of the bungalow, and the woman was part of them, small and faintly rustling, dressed in black. Her voice was breathless and high, shaking slightly.
“Yes,” said Collins.
“May I... see you for a moment?”
“Certainly. Come in.”
Collins went back into the living-room and turned on the lamp with the pink shade. There were three empty highball glasses and an overflowing ashtray on the coffee table in front of the chesterfield, and he said: “The place is in a mess. Excuse it, please.”
“You’re — not married?”
“No,” said Collins.
She sat erect and prim on the edge of the chesterfield just outside the throw of light from the pink lamp, and she was like a faded portrait painting against the cheap garishness of the room. She wore white silk gloves and a white scarf fastened with a cameo brooch and a black bonnet of a hat with a black half-veil. There were lines in her cheeks, and her hair glinted silvery-white. Collins caught the faintly old-fashioned odor of lilac toilet water through the smell of stale tobacco and old gin that hung in the room like a shroud.
“I’m Mrs. Della Martin,” she said. “From Brill Falls, South Dakota.”
“Oh?” said Collins blankly.
“I’m Myra Martin’s mother.”
“Is that so?” Collins asked, mentally running through the list of his feminine associates. He couldn’t locate any Myras.
“She wrote me about you.”
“That was nice of her,” Collins said, wondering if it was.
“She said you were a detective.”
“A what?” Collins inquired, startled.
“She said you knew how to locate people. She said you’d done a lot of that work in Prague and in Warsaw and in Berlin — finding people for their relatives over here. That is, before we declared war, of course.”
“Oh, that was just amateur stuff,” Collins said. “I happened to be playing in beer halls and cafes, and I did some investigation for friends in my spare time.”
“Myra said it was very dangerous work.”
Collins fingered the scar on his cheek. “I did have a run-in or two with the Gestapo. Nothing much.”
“Would you — could you locate someone here in Hollywood? Will you find Myra for me, Mr. Collins?”
Collins stared at her. “What?”
Mrs. Martin twisted her slim gloved hands together. “Myra left Brill Falls a year ago to come to Hollywood to get into the motion pictures. She’s very beautiful, and she’s always been interested in theatricals. And then she won a Most-Beautiful-Back contest and got her name and picture in the papers, and several agencies and acting schools wrote her.”
“Yes,” said Collins. “Oh, yes.”
“I have a little dressmaking shop, and I couldn’t come with her, but I wanted her to have her chance. We saved the money for the trip, and she came alone. She was only going to stay two months if she didn’t find some sort of picture work, but after the two months were up she said things looked so encouraging—”
Collins nodded slowly. “Yes.”
“She stayed on and on, and I sent her what money I could. Then six weeks ago, she wrote me that she had her big chance at last, but that it was all a big secret yet, and she couldn’t tell me anything about it. She didn’t write me any more, Mr. Collins.”
“Six weeks—” Collins said.
“She had always written me twice a week before. And then — just nothing. I wrote and telegraphed, and the letters came back, and the telegrams couldn’t be delivered because they couldn’t find her. I... couldn’t stand it, and so I sold my business and came here. I went to the Central Casting Office and the studios. They had Myra’s name on their lists, but they hadn’t heard anything of her for months. I went to the place where she had been living, and there was a horrible foreign man in a fez who owned the place, and he wouldn’t tell me anything except that she had moved out six weeks before and hadn’t left any address.”