The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps
- Автор: Anderson Lars, Barr Randolph
- Год: 2007
- Язык: английский
- Год: Vintage Books
- ISBN: 978-0-307-28048-0
- Жанр: Криминальные детективы
Электронная книга - «The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps». Краткое содержание книги:
Weighing in at over a thousand pages, containing over forty-seven stories and two novels, this book is big baby, bigger and more powerful than a freight train — a bullet couldn’t pass through it. Here are the best stories and every major writer who ever appeared in celebrated Pulps like Black Mask, Dime Detective, Detective Fiction Weekly, and more. These are the classic tales that created the genre and gave birth to hard-hitting detectives who smoke criminals like packs of cigarettes; sultry dames whose looks are as lethal as a dagger to the chest; and gin-soaked hideouts where conversations are just preludes to murder. This is crime fiction at its gritty best.
No sound came through the door and Mort tried the door knob. The door opened to his touch and he stepped inside, peering through the dim light of the reception room. He saw no one. Silently he walked to a door on his left. That door, he knew, led to Vi’s sumptuous boudoir. That door, too, was closed. He turned the knob softly and the door half opened. He peered into the room.
There, facing him in negligee, sat Vivian Carroll, a look of horror on her face, facing someone else in the room, directly opposite her. A look showed Mort the reason for the fright of the red-haired beauty. Her “caller” was Carlotta Wynn, the gun moll, who sat quietly toying with a shiny gat pointed toward Vi’s body!
“Drop that gat!” Mort’s voice brought a subdued scream from Vi and Carlotta sprang to her feet. “What’s this stuff?” he demanded.
“Hands off, Mort,” retorted Carlotta quietly, but her eyes were snapping dangerously. “You’ve had your party and this is MINE! Come in and shut the door.” She waved the gat toward the red-haired siren and said elaborately:
“Mr. Mitchell, let me introduce Miss Vivian Carroll, alias ‘Chicago Red’ Hardy, the red-haired Siren of The Loop and a few other names! And, also, Mr. Mitchell, the moll who has been trying to put the finger on you for weeks as a small favor for her good friend, the late Mr. Blackie Rango!”
“You lie!” snapped Vi, looking to Mort for protection. “I’ve never been in Chi—”
“Put that gat down, moll,” snapped Mort. “I know this girl and you’re all wrong about her!”
Carlotta laughed sardonically. She threw the gat from her and it clattered on the polished floor, as she faced Mort.
“Mort, you poor fool,” she said, bitingly, “will you never be convinced? That red-headed moll was head of one of the most cruel, savage mobs that Chi ever knew. She blew here because Chi got too hot for her — and she’s making saps out of people here just as she did before. But, I KNOW HER!”
The moll’s eyes flashed with bitter hatred as she spoke and her voice rose shrilly. “I know her — and I’ll never forget her, the snake that she is.”
She turned again passionately to the confused Mort.
“You won’t believe? Then I’ll show you!”
With a quick gesture she seized the right sleeve of her dress and tore it away, exposing her arm. Again she tore at the dress, ripping it open at the shoulder. As the fabric tore she pointed dramatically to the white skin of her upper arm and body.
“Look there,” she cried vengefully, “there’s the mark put on me by that hell-car, that vampire!”
And as Mort looked and Vi stifled the involuntary sob which came, Carlotta bared to them an angry-looking fiery-red brand on her white shoulder — a vivid brand of the fleur de lis, the ancient French brand for a thief!
“Look at that, Mr. Mitchell,” cried the moll. “That’s what your society girl-friend did for me. She laughed while her gorillas put the hot electric needle to my flesh and drew that design there, drew it because that red-headed bum thought I’d stolen the dirty little hop-head she claimed as her ‘Man’! That’s what I owe her.”
She turned on Mort vengefully.
“And you want to save her, to protect her, the moll who put the finger on you! All right, then, take my gat — and I hope the two of you will be happy. I won’t drill her. She’d poison a decent bullet!”
She stopped and looked from the disconcerted Mort to the now relieved Vi. Her voice was lowered and she apparently had expended her anger.
“I’ll go,” she said sadly. She wiped her eyes with her handkerchief and took from her bag a small, silver vanity case. “Might as well go,” she went on monotonously to the two silent ones, and she dabbed at her face with a small powder puff from the compact. She turned to Vi as she used the puff.
“Before I go,” she went on, stepping closer to Vi’s side, “there’s one thing I want to say—” She put the small powder puff back into the vanity case and absently took another small puff from the receptacle, holding it poised in her hand. “Just one thing—!”
She stood facing the now reassured Vivian, the little puff half way to her face.
“You branded me, Vi Carroll,” she cried, quietly, “and I’ve spent time and money to track you down to punish you.” She paused again. Then her voice came like a whip lash.
“AND I’M GOING TO DO IT!”
There was a flash of a bared white arm, and the small powder puff from Carlotta’s compact smacked firmly against the left cheek of the red-haired woman. Vi screamed and Mort Mitchell grabbed the now violent Carlotta.
“We’re even!” Carlotta Wynn’s voice was triumphant now. She looked without pity at the suffering and horrified Vi, who was clawing at the left side of her face, which was turning a blotchy red and then purple.
“I’ve branded you, you hell-cat,” she went on. “Branded you with acid — you rat!”
She turned to the astonished Mort and asked:
“Do you want her or do you want me? She branded me and she double-crossed you. Look at her and see whether I speak the truth!”
They looked, and the sobbing, hysterical Vi answered for Mort.
“Yes,” she said, “I branded you because I hated you — and I hate you, too,” she blazed at the confused mobster. “I’ll get the pair of you. I’ll get you—”
Mort Mitchell interrupted her. He seemed to come to himself, as though recovering from the influence of some insidious drug. He reached out to the little black-eyed moll, Carlotta, and pulled her close to him. He held her coat as she slipped it over her scarred, exposed arm and the two of them, the rod and his moll, moved toward the door. At the threshold Mort turned to the acid-marked Vivian. There was nothing lover-like in the tone of his voice now. It was cold as steel.
As Carlotta hung on his arm, he said:
“Get out of town in two hours, red-head! If you don’t — I’ll be back here to put MY mark on the OTHER cheek — and I don’t want to have to bother to do that, for I’m going to be busy, squaring myself with my own moll. Eh, baby?”
He smiled at Carlotta as he asked the question — and the smile he got in return indicated the answer.
Dance Macabre
Robert Reeves
One of the forgotten authors of the pulp era is Robert Reeves (1911 or 1912–1945), largely because he came to the game late and because his career was cut short by World War II. His first short story was not published in Black Mask until 1942, his last in 1945. Altogether, there were nine stories in Black Mask, two others in Dime Detective, and three novels. His major creation was Cellini Smith, a private eye who appeared in all three of his novels: Dead and Done For (1939), No Love Lost (1941), and Cellini Smith: Detective (1943), as well as in seven of his eleven short stories. Three additional stories featured Bookie Barnes, who got his nickname, not for making books, but because he attended college and actually read books — rare for pulp characters. “Dance Macabre,” Reeves’s second story, is the only one he wrote that did not feature one of his series heroes. It is darker than his other tales since none of his principal characters fall into the standard pulp mode of being tougher or smarter or funnier than everyone with whom they come into contact. The mousy Firpo Cole, a former petty thief and pickpocket, hangs around a nightclub because of a crush he has on one of the dime-a-dance girls, the all-American-seeming Ruth Bailey.