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.
“Go on,” said Sergeant Dickinson.
Quade twisted the piece of wire into an elongated question mark. “To move a box or chair up here and climb up on it would be to attract attention,” he went on, “so the killer used a piece of wire to open the ventilator. Like this!” Quade caught the hook in the ventilator and pulled it open easily.
“That’s good enough for me!” said Sergeant Dickinson. “You practically forced that wire on me a while ago and I couldn’t see it. Well — Judge Stone, you’re under arrest!”
“He’s a liar!” roared the bantam poultry judge. “He can’t prove anything like that on me. He just tore that piece of wire from that coop!”
“That’s right,” said Quade. “You saw me pick up the original piece of wire and when I threw it away after trying to give it to the sergeant you got it and disposed of it.”
“You didn’t see me!”
“No, I purposely walked away to give you a chance to get rid of the wire. But I laid a trap for you. While I had that wire I smeared some ink on it to prove you handled it. Look at your hands, Judge Stone!”
Judge Stone raised both palms upward. His right thumb and fingers were smeared with a black stain.
Sergeant Dickinson started toward the little poultry judge. But the bantam uttered a cry of fright and darted away.
“Ha!” cried Charlie Boston, and lunged for him. He wrapped his thick arms around the little man and tried to hold on to him. But the judge was suddenly fighting for his life. He clawed at Boston’s face and kicked his shins furiously. Boston howled and released his grip to defend himself with his fists.
The poultry judge promptly butted Boston in the stomach and darted under his flailing arms.
It was Anne Martin who stopped him. As the judge scrambled around Boston she stepped forward and thrust out her right foot. The little man tripped over it and plunged headlong to the concrete floor of the auditorium. Before he could get up Charlie Boston was on him. Sergeant Dickinson swooped down, a Police Positive in one hand and a pair of handcuffs in the other. The killer was secured.
Stone quit then. “Yes, I killed him, the damned lousy blackmailer. For years I judged his chickens at the shows and always gave him the edge. Then he double-crossed me, got me fired.”
“What job?” asked Dickinson.
“My job as district manager for the Sibley Feed Company,” replied Stone.
“Why’d he have you fired?” asked Quade. “Because you were short-weighing him on his feed? Is that it?”
“I gave him prizes his lousy chickens should never have had,” snapped the killer. “What if I did short-weigh him twenty or thirty percent? I more than made up for it.”
“Twenty or thirty percent,” said Quade, “would amount to quite a bit of money in the course of a year. In his advertising in the poultry papers Tupper claimed he raised over eight thousand chickens a year.”
“I don’t need any more,” said Sergeant Dickinson. “Well, Mr. Quade, you certainly delivered the goods.”
“Not me, I only told you who the murderer was. If it hadn’t been for Miss Martin he’d have got away.”
Quade turned away. “Anne,” he said, “Charlie and I are flat broke. But this afternoon a flock of rubbernecks are going to storm this place and I’m going to take quite a chunk of money from them. But in the meantime... That hot dog wasn’t very filling and I wonder if you’d stake us to a lunch?”
Anne Martin’s eyes twinkled. “Listen, Mr. Quade, if you asked me for every cent I’ve got I’d give it to you right away — because you’d get it from me anyway, if you really wanted it. You’re the world’s greatest salesman. You even sold Judge Stone into confessing.”
Quade grinned. “Yes? How?”
She pointed at Quade’s hands. “You handled that first wire hook with your bare hands. How come your hands didn’t get black?”
Quade chuckled. “Smart girl. Even the sergeant didn’t notice that. Well, I’ll confess. I saw the smudge on Judge Stone’s hands away back when I was putting on my pitch. He must have used a leaky fountain pen or something.”
“Then you didn’t put anything on it?”
“No. But I knew he was the murderer and he knew it... only he didn’t know his hands were dirty. So...”
The girl drew a deep breath. “Oliver Quade, the lunches are on me.”
“And the dinner and show tonight are on me,” grinned Oliver Quade.
Dirty Work
Horace McCoy
Horace McCoy (1897–1955) was born in Pegram, Tennessee, and went to school in Nashville, dropping out at sixteen to get a job. After serving in the U.S. Army Air Corps during World War I, he became the sports editor of the Dallas Journal, a job he held from 1919 to 1930. He moved to Hollywood in 1931 to become an actor and to write motion picture screenplays. McCoy had been selling stories, mostly mysteries, to various pulps, the majority to Black Mask, between 1928 and 1932, after which he devoted himself full-time to film scripts and novels, most of which were filmed. His first book, a noir Depression-era existential novel, They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? (1935), was inspired by his job as a bouncer at the Santa Monica Pier, where dance marathons were held; it was filmed by Sydney Pollack, with Gig Young, Jane Fonda, and Michael Sarrazin fourteen years after McCoy died of a heart attack. No Pockets in a Shroud (1937), about a corrupt American city and a crusading journalist, was published in England more than a decade before its U.S. appearance; it was filmed in France. The noir screenplay for I Should Have Stayed Home (1938) was never produced. Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye (1948) was filmed in 1950 with James Cagney as a near-psychotic criminal. Scalpel (1952) was mostly a medical story filmed as Bad for Each Other (1953), with Charlton Heston and Lizabeth Scott. Corruption City (1959) was a novelization of The Turning Point (1952), which starred William Holden and Edmond O’Brien.
“Dirty Work,” the first Frost of the Texas Air Rangers story, was published in September 1929.
The Rangers take to the air.
Captain Jerry frost walked through the rotunda of the Texas State capitol, past the oils of Crockett and Houston and Hogg, and into the deep-toned offices of the Adjutant-General.
“What’s on your mind, General?” he said, dropping himself into a chair and stretching his long legs.
“This Jamestown business.” The Adjutant-General drummed on the desk with his incredibly long fingers. “It’s quite a mess.” Plainly he was just a little irritated.
Frost grinned. “Yes, sir. It’s quite a mess.” But the Adjutant-General didn’t think it was so funny. He was quite serious.
“Jerry, for the life of me I can’t understand why all police act so stupidly. This purely is a local case, but they can’t handle it. They bump their heads against the wall and cry for the Rangers. I’m sometimes sorry we’ve got such a thing. Now the bigwigs are kicking.” He held up a small packet. “Know what these are? Got any idea what they mean?”
Captain Frost confessed he hadn’t.
“They’re clippings from newspaper editorials in which the people who sit in the offices of the daily gazettes tell us how to run our great commonwealth. The robbery is up to us. I’m sorry, of course, you had to be ordered off leave. You know what that means, don’t you?”
Jerry nodded. Did he know what that meant? Indeed! And since when had the Adjutant-General become so obtuse? He was tempted to laugh. Did he know what that meant? Hell, of course he knew. What did trips to this office usually mean? Dirty work — that’s what. Dirty work.