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.
“Where’s his four thousan’ bucks?” Mr. Delancy demanded.
He and the pawnbroker turned accusingly on their prisoner. T. McGuirk, shivering in his nudity, flushed with embarrassment.
“I ain’t got no money with me,” he explained. “Lefty’s holdin’ it. He was comin’ here later to buy the diamond I picked out.”
This remark, which T. McGuirk made quite on the spur of the moment, evidently gave Mr. Gluckstein considerable food for thought. His respect for Lefty Lannigan was great, his fear even greater. And he well remembered the gunman’s ire at a little unpleasantness over these same Lady Vernon jewels. There was evidently more to this affair than Mr. Gluckstein had at first supposed. He was quite at a loss to explain it; but whatever it was, Lefty Lannigan must not be involved.
T. McGuirk, still shivering, remarked indignantly:
“Yous is wery, wery wrong, a-treatin’ me this way. Gimme my clothes.”
He began dressing, mumbling to himself.
“I’m a-gonna tell Lefty how yous is a-treatin’ me over nothin’.”
Mr. Delancy passed a hand over his blue chin reflectively. The situation was too complicated for him.
“You better put them other sparklers back,” he cautioned, waving his hand at the five diamonds on the table. “We might lose another if we ain’t careful.”
The pawnbroker mechanically replaced them in the safe.
T. McGuirk was still dressing, some distance from the table, when Mr. Delancy suddenly thought of the little tobacco bag lying there. He examined it eagerly, but it yielded nothing but tobacco.
“Maybe the diamond got knocked on the floor,” suggested T. McGuirk hopefully. “But I didn’t see none, only them five.”
The pawnbroker was already on his knees, searching about with a pocket flashlight. Mr. Delancy joined him. T. McGuirk, now completely dressed, sat down and watched the proceedings with interest.
For fifteen minutes the search went on. The room was ransacked thoroughly. Mr. Gluckstein verified his count of the diamonds in the safe. He searched his own pockets, and those of Mr. Delancy. The result was always the same. There had been six of Lady Vernon’s diamonds brought in by Lefty Lannigan and purchased from him by Mr. Gluckstein — but now there were only five.
T. McGuirk sat meekly watching. On the floor near the table leg lay the cigarette he had rolled. He picked it up. But before he had time even to reach for a match, Mr. Delancy seized the cigarette with a cry of triumph.
“Here’s where he put that sparkler, Ike! We’re fools!”
The pawnbroker hastened to his side as he tore the little cylinder apart ruthlessly. There was nothing but tobacco within it.
T. McGuirk’s glance was rebuking.
“I ain’t seen no sparkler, I’m telling you. Yous is wery wrong, accusin’ me this way.”
The exasperated Mr. Delancy seized him by the collar; but this time T. McGuirk yelped shrilly.
“You take your hands off’n me. S’elp me, I’ll yell for the cops. An’ when I get ’em in here I’ll tell ’em all about everything. I can’t help it if yous is so careless with Lady Wernon’s diamonds.”
The pawnbroker shuddered. Mr. Delancy released his victim, and remarked hopelessly: “Get him out of here, Ike, before I kill him. He’ll land the bulls on us sure.”
“I wanta go,” T. McGuirk asserted. “Lefty’s waitin’ for me anyhow. I don’t wanta buy no diamonds off’n you.”
He cast about for his hat, but Mr. Gluckstein confronted him.
“If we let you go now you could shut your mouth about this? You could get out of here an’ stay out an’ right away forget you were ever in here?”
“Wery good idea,” assented T. McGuirk readily. “I never seen no sparklers in here. I never heard of no Lady Wernon. Just lemme out. I deman’ to be let go!”
Half a minute later, with a push from Mr. Delancy that propelled him headlong down the steps into the darkness of the alley, T. McGuirk made his exit.
Lefty Lannigan, with a curiosity that would not let him rest, chanced to be loitering at the corner waiting for his friend’s appearance. T. McGuirk came shuffling along, still mumbling vehemently to himself.
“Hello, Timothy. You didn’t get killed?”
T. McGuirk stopped.
“Did you get the diamond, Timothy?”
There was a shade of irony in Mr. Lannigan’s tone.
“Sure I got it. Lady Wernon’s — the biggest one. Wery easy job — wery easy, in-deed.”
Mr. Lannigan stared, incredulous.
“How’d you get it? Show it up.”
But T. McGuirk shook his head.
“Not here. Come on — let’s eat.”
In the semi-private alcove of a cheap Chinese restaurant off the Bowery, T. McGuirk faced his burly friend over the marble table.
“I was rollin’ a cigarette — see?”
He suited the action to the word, rolling the little cylinder deftly and moistening it with his tongue. Then, with a bland smile, he removed a pivot tooth from his upper jaw. He held it out triumphantly. It was a realistically yellow false tooth with a gold top and a pivot sticking up. T. McGuirk turned it over in his palm. The back of the tooth was hollowed out and filled up with wax. And imbedded in the wax lay the missing diamond.
“You gets the sparkler on your tongue,” T. McGuirk explained. “An’ the tongue puts it in the tooth. It’s wery easy — wery easy in-deed. All you needs for a job like that is system. System an’ brains, an’ no rewolwer.”
Wait for Me
Steve Fisher
Stephen (Gould) Fisher (1912–1980) served in the U.S. Navy for four years from the age of sixteen, then settled in New York City to write full-time, becoming one of the most prolific and successful authors of his time, with hundreds of stories sold to both the pulps and the slicks, twenty novels, and more than one hundred scripts for motion pictures and television series.
His classic noir novel I Wake Up Screaming (1940) was his breakthrough when it was made into what is generally regarded as Hollywood’s first film noir. The 1941 movie starred Victor Mature, Betty Grable, Carole Landis, and Laird Cregar; it was remade in 1953 as Vicki, with Jeanne Crain, Elliott Reid, Jean Peters, and Richard Boone. Fisher was the screenwriter for numerous mystery films in the 1940s, including the uncharacteristically dark final film in the popular Thin Man series, Song of the Thin Man (1947), Johnny Angel (1945, with George Raft, based on a Charles G. Booth novel, Mr. Angel Comes Aboard), Lady in the Lake (1947, based on Raymond Chandler’s novel), I Wouldn’t Be in Your Shoes (1948, based on a Cornell Woolrich story), Berlin Correspondent (1942, an anti-Nazi thriller), and Dead Reckoning (1947), a classic crime tale starring Humphrey Bogart and Lizabeth Scott. His early navy background lent authenticity to such war film screenplays as Destination Tokyo (1943, starring Cary Grant) and the aircraft carrier film Flat Top (1952); his other great war movie is To the Shores of Tripoli (1942).
“Wait for Me” was published in the May 1938 issue.
A murdered spy evokes Death in Shanghai.
Her name was Anna, and she was beautiful, with golden blond hair that came to her shoulders and turned under at the ends, and a face like an angel, soft and aglow with color; gray-green eyes, and the slim traces of sunlight that were eyebrows.