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.
She looked arch. “Pardon me?” This was a come-on; there had to be some come-on, she thought. Marlene Dietrich had always had one in those films that played down by the Bund.
“But, my dear Rita,” said the man, which gave the perfect rhythm to everything.
She nodded, and he went on: “Shall we go upstairs to the balcony?”
“All right.”
“You have the papers?”
“Yes,” she said.
She allowed him to escort her up a flight of steps to a room over the main part of the club. It was rather dark, and the windows faced the street. He turned on a light, but it was only a colored Oriental lantern. His face seemed softer, somehow flushed in this illumination.
She lifted the packet of papers from her breast and handed them to him. He inspected them briefly in the half-light, and then he looked up smiling.
“Everything is here, I believe,” he said.
“Then I can go? I can have some money, and then I can go—”
He bowed slightly, from the waist. “But of course.”
It was then that she saw the small automatic in his hand. She turned to run from it. But another man was walking slowly up behind her.
“We’ve waited for this a long time, Rita,” one of them said.
She saw now what it was. These men were agents from a government which opposed the one for which Rita Turner had been working. They had deliberately set a trap for her.
Bitterly in that flashing, horrible second, she remembered the entire telephone conversation. She had thought she was leading the man out; in reality he had been leading her; he had tipped her to Frenchie’s to get her here. He had believed she was Rita, and he believed it now; the rest of these men believed it.
Rita must have been an elusive secret agent whose identity had never been entirely revealed, but the papers Anna had just handed the man with the iron-gray hair were sufficient to sign her death warrant.
This realization came to Anna quickly, suddenly, even as the men were closing in on her, and it did her ego no good to look back upon it and reflect that the real Rita Turner would never have fallen so blindly into an enemy trap. It was only she, Anna, the fool, playing a game she knew nothing about.
“It is too bad, Rita,” she heard one of the men saying.
She knew it would do no good to protest that Rita Turner was already dead. They would merely laugh at her, deride her protestation. She saw from their expressions that Rita Turner must have been dangerous to them, for they meant now to kill Anna. They intended wasting no time or effort.
Anna saw a knife flash, and knew in a moment that it would pierce her throat. There was no way she could turn. There was nothing she could do. She hadn’t time even to cry out, for all the good that would do her...
For a moment there was only silence here in the half-light, and the men closed in so that they facaded up about her in a wall. And in this moment Anna was looking back at murder and wondering now what had finally happened to the Frenchman who had stabbed the man and laughed — for she knew now about crime and punishment, and that punishment wasn’t something in storybooks so that little boys would go to Sunday school.
She knew, too, that there was no escape for murder, even in war. She knew that she had come to her last second on earth, and even in that there was too much time, to reflect, to listen to the echo of laughter down the long memory of years, to hear the screams of dying Chinese which would seem like a song now by comparison.
She saw again the baby sitting in a pool of blood, and a sailor, A.W.O.L. from his ship in a suit of clothes that were half torn off his back.
And she knew suddenly why the sailor downstairs had followed her. He had fallen in love with her at the club, poor fool, and he had ditched off from his ship to come and marry her; to come and marry her because he knew that she was a White Russian and she couldn’t get out of Shanghai unless she was a Navy wife!
He had been sorry for her, and he had been willing to marry her so that she could be evacuated honestly as Anna on the big transport that was going to America by way of Hong Kong.
It was all clear now, in this final instant of life, that he had been following her to tell her, to marry her and take her away; and if she had remained at her apartment, if she had not gone to commit murder, this would have happened, and she now would be safe and free!
She remembered the sailor saying: “Babe, I love you like seven hundred dollars on Christmas day,” and then she felt the point of the knife at her throat; and as she slid to the floor, the only sound that came through the silence was the familiar whistling of someone leaning in the front of the building outside whistling: “The Lady Is a Tramp.”
Ask Me Another
Frank Gruber
Frank Gruber (1904–1969) was born in Elmer, Minnesota, and worked as a bellhop, ticket taker at a movie theater, writer and editor of trade journals, and creative writing teacher at a correspondence school before he became a full-time writer. He was still in his twenties when he sold his first story, beginning a career that produced more than four hundred stories, sixty novels, and more than two hundred film and television scripts, mainly in the mystery and Western fiction genres. Among his mystery novels are The Silver Jackass (1941, as Charles K. Boston), The Last Doorbell (1941, as John K. Vedder), The Yellow Overcoat (1942, as Stephen Acre), and, under his own name, more than thirty others, including Simon Lash, Private Detective (1941), about a bibliophile private eye, filmed by PRC as Accomplice in 1946, starring Richard Arlen as Lash. He also wrote more than a dozen novels featuring the amateur detective Johnny Fletcher and his partner, Sam Cragg, a pair of always broke con men who made their debut in The French Key (1940), which Gruber wrote in seven days yet which made most of the year’s top-ten lists; it was filmed by Republic in 1946, with Albert Dekker as Fletcher and Mike Mazurki as Cragg. Perhaps his most beloved character, however, is Oliver Quade, the Human Encyclopedia, whose seemingly infinite knowledge of even the most arcane subjects helps him solve crimes in a long series of pulp stories. Ten of the tales were collected in Brass Knuckles (1966).
“Ask Me Another” was published in the June 1937 issue.
Oliver Quade was reading the morning paper, his bare feet on the bed and his chair tilted back against the radiator. Charlie Boston was on the bed, wrapped to his chin in a blanket and reading a copy of Exciting Confessions.
It was just a usual, peaceful, after-breakfast interlude in the lives of Oliver Quade, the Human Encyclopedia, and Charlie Boston, his friend and assistant.
And then Life intruded itself upon the bit of Utopia. Life in the form of the manager of the Eagle Hotel. He beat a tattoo upon the thin panels of the door. Quade put down his newspaper and sighed.
“Charles, will you please open the door and let in the wolf?”
Charlie Boston unrolled himself from the blanket. He scowled at Quade. “You think it’s the manager about the room rent?”
“Of course it is. Let him in before he breaks down the door.”
It was the manager. In his right fist he held a ruled form on which were scrawled some unpleasant figures. “About your rent, Mr. Quade,” he said severely. “We must have the money today!”
Quade looked at the manager of the Eagle Hotel, a puzzled expression on his face. “Rent? Money?”
“Of course,” snapped the manager. “This is the third time this week I’ve asked for it.”
A light came into Quade’s eyes. He made a quick movement and his feet and the front legs of the chair hit the carpeted floor simultaneously.