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.
A young fellow wearing pince-nez put his tongue into his cheek and asked, “Why and how does a cat purr?”
“Oh-oh!” Quade craned his neck to stare at the young fellow. “I see we have a student with us. Well, young man, you’ve asked a question so difficult that practically every university professor in this country would be stumped by it. But I’m not. It so happens that I read a recent paper by Professor E. L. Gibbs of the Harvard Medical School in which he gave the results of his experiments on four hundred cats to learn the answer to that very same question. The first part of the question is simple enough — the cat purrs when it is contented, but to explain the actual act of purring is a little more difficult. Contentment in a cat relaxes the infundibular nerve in the brain, which reacts upon the pituitary and bronchial organs and makes the purring sound issue from the cat’s throat... Try that one on your friends, sometime. Someone else try me on a question.”
“I’d like to ask one,” said a clear, feminine voice. Quade’s eyes lit up. He had already noticed the girl, the only female in his audience. She was amazingly pretty, the type of a girl he would scarcely have expected to find at a poultry show. She was young, not more than twenty-one, and she had the finest chiseled features Quade had ever seen. She was a blonde and the rakish green hat and green coat she wore, although inexpensive, looked exceedingly well on her.
“Yes, what is the question?” he asked, leaning forward a bit.
The girl’s chin came up defiantly. “I just want to know why certain poultry judges allow dyed birds to be judged for prizes!”
A sudden rumble went up in the crowd and Quade saw the sawed-off man in the tan smock whirl and glare angrily at the girl.
“Oh-oh,” Quade said. “You seem to have asked a delicate question. Well, I’ll answer it just the same. Any judge who allows a dyed Rhode Island Red to stay in the class is either an ignorant fool — or a crook!”
“Damn you!” roared the little man, turning back to Quade. “You can’t say that to me. I’ll — I’ll have you thrown out of here.” He started pushing his way through the crowd, heading in the direction of the front office.
“If the shoe fits, put it on,” Quade called after him. Then to the girl, “Who’s he?”
“A judge here. Stone’s his name.”
“Well, let’s get on with the show,” Quade said to the crowd. “Next question?”
Quade had lost nothing by his bold answer to the girl’s question. The audience warmed to him and the questions came fast and furious.
“Who was the eleventh president of the United States?”
“What is the Magna Charta?”
“Who was the 1896 Olympic 220-meter champion?”
“How do you cure scaly legs in chickens?”
“How far is Saturn from the Earth?”
Quade answered all the questions put to him, with lightning rapidity. But suddenly he called a dramatic halt. “That’s all the questions, folks. Now let me show you how you can learn all the answers yourselves to every question that has just been asked — and ten thousand more.”
He held out his hands and Charlie Boston tossed a thick book into them which he had taken from the suitcase they had brought with them. Quade began ruffling the pages.
“They’re all in here. This, my friends, is the ‘Compendium of Human Knowledge,’ the greatest book of its kind ever published. Twelve hundred pages, crammed with facts, information every one of you should know. The knowledge of the ages, condensed, classified, abbreviated. A complete high-school education in one volume. Ten minutes a day and this book will make you the most learned person in your community!”
Quade lowered his voice to a confidential pitch. “Friends, I’m going to astonish you by telling you the most ridiculous thing you’ve ever heard: The price of this book. What do you think I’m asking for it? Twenty-five dollars? No, not even twenty... or fifteen. In fact, not even ten or five dollars. Just a mere, paltry, insignificant two dollars and ninety-five cents. But I’m only going to offer these books once at that price. Two-ninety-five, and here I come!”
Quade leaped down from his platform to attack his audience, supposedly built up to the buying pitch. But he was destined not to sell any books just then. Charlie Boston tugged at his coat sleeve.
“Look, Ollie!” he whispered hoarsely. “He got the cops!”
Quade raised himself to his toes to look over the chicken coops. He groaned. For the short man in the tan smock was coming up the center aisle leading a small procession of policemen.
Quade sighed. “Put the books back into the suitcase, Charlie.” He leaned against a poultry coop and waited to submit quietly to the arrest.
But the policemen did not come toward him. Reaching the center aisle, the man in the tan smock wheeled to the left, away from Quade, and the police followed him.
Quade’s audience saw the police. Two or three persons broke away and started toward the other side of the building. The movement started a stampede and in a moment Charlie Boston and Quade were left alone.
“Something seems to have happened over there,” Quade observed. “Wonder what?”
“From the mob of cops I’d say a murder,” Boston replied dryly.
The word “murder” was scarcely out of Boston’s mouth than it was hurled back at them from across the auditorium.
“It is a murder!” Quade gasped.
“This is no place for us, then,” cried Boston. “Let’s scram!”
He caught up the suitcase containing the books and started off. But Quade called him back. “That’s no good. There’s a cop at the door. We’ll have to stick.”
“Chickens!” howled Boston. “The minute you mentioned them at the hotel I had a hunch that something was going to happen. And I’ll bet a plugged dime, which I haven’t got, that we get mixed up in it.”
“Maybe so, Charlie. But if I know cops there’s going to be a lot of questioning and my hunch is that we’ll be better off if we’re not too upstage. Let’s go over and find out what’s what.”
He started toward the other side of the auditorium. Boston followed, lugging the suitcase and grumbling.
All of the crowd was gathered in front of a huge, mahogany cabinet — a mammoth incubator. The door of the machine was standing open and two or three men were moving around inside.
Quade drew in his breath sharply when he saw the huddled body lying on the floor just inside the door of the incubator. Gently he began working his way through the crowd until he stood in front of the open incubator door.
The small group came out of the incubator and a beetle-browed man in a camel’s hair overcoat and Homburg hat squared himself off before the girl in the green hat and coat. The man in the tan smock, his head coming scarcely up to the armpits of the big man, hopped around like a bantam rooster.
“I understand you had a quarrel with him yesterday,” the big man said to the girl. “What about?”
The girl drew herself up to her full height. “Because his birds were dyed and the judge — the man behind you — refused to throw them out. That’s why!”
The bantam sputtered. “She — why, that’s a damn lie!”
The big detective turned abruptly, put a ham-like hand against the chest of the runt and shoved him back against the incubator with so much force that the little man gasped in pain.
“Listen, squirt,” the detective said. “Nothing’s been proved against this girl and until it is, she’s a lady. Up here we don’t call ladies liars.”
He turned back to the girl and said with gruff kindness, “Now, miss, let’s have the story.”
“There’s no story,” declared the girl. “I did quarrel with him, just like I did with Judge Stone. But — but I haven’t seen Mr. Tupper since yesterday evening. That’s all I can tell you because it’s all I know.”