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.
Speeding north for their plunder before seeking safety, neither Crouch nor Casey was aware of the plans being made for their welcome. Crouch, being of higher mentality, probably thought he had pushed his luck too far, but that was all.
He couldn’t see Withers Field, he couldn’t see Captain Jerry Frost beside the A-3 single-seater, positively the finest thing in battle planes. If Crouch’s ships were lovely, there was no superlative for this. Jerry stood there, his eyes glued on the southern heavens, his propeller swinging idly.
He seemed just a little ridiculous to himself. He couldn’t, for example, grasp that this was 1929. Imagine such a thing with so large a gallery? It was like an opéra bouffe. Still, he tingled. He almost, once, half admitted he liked it.
From out of the distance came a drone. Two planes were seen; they roared onward, still unaware of what awaited them. One dipped downward, the other, which was higher, began a long glide.
The cordon of police started forward.
“Wait a while,” Jerry shouted. “Those ships have got guns on ’em! Take your time!”
But the police disregarded the command. They, too, had waited long. And neither were they self-conscious before the crowd.
Casey was in the first ship, and no sooner had his wheels touched the ground than he realized all was lost. He shot the throttle to his ship and the smoke belched from the exhaust. A policeman fired. The bullet whistled through the fuselage.
Then Casey either tried to zoom, or he lost his head. He later claimed he didn’t know his finger was on the trigger. His guns barked through the propeller and two policemen pitched forward, twitched and lay still. A second later a shot got Casey and his plane dived into the ground.
Crouch had seen and heeded. He had gone into a climb — and he was going south.
Jerry throbbed and pinched. It was the old feeling. Something in him seemed to say, had always said: “Enjoy this, for it may be your last one.” Not fear — and yet it might have been.
He swung his arm out for the chocks to be pulled. His motor whined and then caught with a roar. Something throbbed in his hands and feet and played along his nerves like tiny electrical impulses. He was talking to himself, and there was something terrible in it — prayer and hatred intermingled.
He opened his throttle and his propeller disappeared in a thin circle of light. Like a living thing his ship bounded forward. For a while he bounced along and then he went straight up like an elevator. He climbed 500 feet before it began to stall, then drifted his stick forward and presently flattened out at 140. His bus never even felt it. Tight. Solid. Maneuverable.
He warmed his guns with a burst of twenty. He rather hoped he wouldn’t have to fight. Still, never could tell. Everything was different in the air. Once before, he had been in the same air with Crouch. He had remembered. Maybe there would be a fight after all.
He climbed to 7,500 and buckled on his straps. He had done that before, too. But this was something new. No straining the eyes to the right and to the left and above looking for black specks. No wondering if that was an L.V.G. two-seater — a decoy — with a half dozen Albatrosses lurking above. His man was just in front. Only one.
He crawled up on Crouch’s tail and motioned for him to land. Crouch climbed to the left and got into fighting position. Jerry motioned again. His answer was a burst that raked through the A-3 ailerons.
“O.K.,” Jerry bellowed. “Here we go!”
He half rolled to get on top, so did the other. Jerry touched the trigger and pulled up, dived again. Crouch Immelmanned and straightened out on Jerry’s tail and another burst ripped through the fins. Jerry kicked it off into a slip and leveled out. Crouch was diving away. He was going to run for it. No doubt of that.
Jerry pushed his stick forward until the rush of air gagged him. The rattle of his guns came through the chatter of the motor. Crouch went into another Immelmann and Jerry dived by him. The German was a flyer. But he was not matching skill with the kid he had knocked down that day at Toul. This was another fellow.
Jerry pulled up and went into a climb. He banked sharply and started higher and higher. That was Crouch’s mistake. His ship couldn’t climb with the A-3. Jerry was so close now he could see the wheels on the other’s undercarriage spinning.
Well, there he was. He had him. The trim white belly of Crouch’s ship glinted along the tip of his guns. There he was. There was von Byfield, the great ace. The von Byfield. The one who had followed him down. He could still hear those Spandaus clacking as they raked his body in a steel flail.
Jerry touched his trigger. He could see holes tearing in the linen. He kept his guns open. There was a fan of flame. He noticed his altimeter: 14,000. Too high. And yet... He stalled and whipped out in a spin.
Crouch’s ship hung momentarily like a leaf undecided whether to fall this way or that. Then it dipped its nose and wabbled. The glide became a dive; the dive went into a lazy, aimless spin, wings flopping, to the floor. The plane flattened, whipped out upside down, stalled, snapped out again in a final effort, and then again went downward in that grotesque way. Over and over. Over and over. Jerry watched it, fascinated. It was only a dot now, flashing in the sun as it keeled over. It was coming closer to the floor — closer, closer.
Then suddenly a tiny sheet of flame lashed out, a puff of dust. That was all.
Jerry sideslipped down, landed and taxied slowly in. He climbed out stiff-legged. He looked down and saw his pants were slightly torn. There was a gash in his leather coat. He looked into his cockpit. The floorboards were splintered. He looked up. The center section was riddled. The linen on his fins was ribboned.
Far down the field a group of police and civilians was rushing to the wrecked plane.
“Cigarette?”
Somebody gave him one.
“Match?”
Somebody else struck it. Frost thought those fingers were familiar. Long... white... He looked into the face. The Adjutant-General. He had his arms extended.
“Hurt, Jerry?”
“Nope. Tired.” Quite matter-of-fact. The curious crowded around. The Adjutant-General very plainly was ill-at-ease. It had stirred him tremendously. He wanted to say something nice, but he couldn’t. Men are like that. Especially men who are suddenly overcome with pride. They try to say flowery things, but the words clog up in their throats. They think them right down to the tip of their tongue, and then strange words come out.
It was like that now. The Adjutant-General said: “Well, take a rest. California, Florida. Any place.”
“Nope, Galveston.”
“Galveston?”
“Yep, Galveston. Unfinished business.”
The Adjutant-General nodded. He didn’t understand; he didn’t want to understand. Captain Frost had come through. That was the code of the Rangers. It had been that way when the Conestogas squeaked their way through the Indian country, and it was that way in the day of science and aviation. When all else fails, when there is a knotty problem, when there’s dirty work — the Rangers. Yesterday and today and tomorrow, to the ends of the earth — get him!
Merely Murder
Julius Long
Julius W. Long (1907–1955) was born in Ohio, received a law degree, and was admitted to the Ohio bar, where he practiced. He was a collector of guns (at one time he owned the only Tokarev 7.62 ever offered for sale in The American Rifleman), and his extensive knowledge of firearms was often apparent in his articles for Field & Stream as well as in his crime and mystery stories.
Long wrote many different types of fiction for about thirty magazines, most importantly ghost and fantastic stories for the top magazine in the genre, Weird Tales, to which he was a regular contributor in the 1930s, and mystery stories for Black Mask, Detective Story, Dime Detective, Dime Story, The Shadow, and Strange Detective Tales. One of his Black Mask stories, “Carnie Kill,” was selected for Best Detective Stories of the Year (1945). He wrote only one novel, Keep the Coffins Coming (1947), a murder mystery involving a beautiful woman, her millionaire father, a Communist leader, a German scientist, and several gorillas.