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.
Kennedy picked up the telephone, sat on the library table and swung his legs. “Central 1000,” he said into the mouthpiece. His world-weary eyes traveled from the dead youth to the dead doctor, and he sighed. “City desk, flower.” He lay down on the table, held the mouthpiece above him.
“Abe,” he said, “this is that famous journalist and bon vivant, Kennedy... So now dust your ears. Old Stephen J. MacBride did it again... I’m telling you! Listen. A young punk named Ralph Avarill accidentally shot and killed Dr. Amos Landau in the latter’s home, 26 Cypress Street... Yeah, the punk meant to kill the skipper, but things got balled up. Then MacBride knocked off the punk. At that moment Jim Cardiac took it into his head to lam, and MacBride high-tailed after him in the well-known MacBride manner. They’re not back yet.
“Meantime, get a load of this nice little bedtime story. Landau told it to me and then died. The punk — Ralph Avarill — killed Dan Rand. He was a hop-head... No, sweetness, not Rand; the punk. The punk was a friend of Cardiac’s, and Landau was a silent backer of Cardiac’s interests. Ostensibly a fine medico, he was also a dealer in dope and an addict himself. He met Dan Rand seven years ago at a boxfight where he attended a boxer who later died from the effect of a blow to the heart. He became Rand’s personal physician.
“When this trouble between Rand and Cardiac began, grew hotter, Cardiac went to his silent partner Landau and wanted him to put Rand out of the way. Landau thought of a better method. He began working on Rand mentally, telling him he was a lunger and advising him to sell out all his business interests here and go West and live the simple life. Well, it didn’t quite work out. It wore Rand down, but he was a sticker. Finally Landau told him he would die if he didn’t leave. But before he told him that — in fact, the evening before — he dropped in at Rand’s apartment and while Rand was out of the room Landau swiped his gun, went home and put it in a sandalwood box until the punk called for it. Next day he told Rand his chances of living were mighty small. He thought Rand would go home and tell his wife and that his telling her would make an open and shut suicide case when the cops found the body...
“What?... Sure, the punk was to tail Rand. And he did. Tailed him all afternoon and finally, at between 9:30 and ten o’clock, walked him to that abandoned warehouse and let him have it with the gun Landau had stolen from Rand’s desk. And when Rand fell, his hand came out of his pocket and he dropped the gun he’d bought. The punk picked it up, left the other — Just a minute.”
MacBride had come darkly into the room. “Tell him Cardiac’s dead, Kennedy. Cohegan objected to the squad car being stolen.”
“Where was Cohegan?”
“Down in a fancy grocery store on the corner, mooching apples.”
Luck
Lester Dent
Lester Dent (1904–1959) was born in La Plata, Missouri, but grew up on a ranch in Wyoming. While working as a Western Union telegraph operator, he learned that a coworker had sold a story to a pulp magazine for the princely sum of $450. As a reader of the pulps, he decided to try it himself and sold an action story, “Pirate Cay,” to Top Notch for the September 1929 issue. Soon after, he moved to New York for a full-time writing job with Dell Publishing, then had the chance to launch a new series for Street & Smith. After staggering success with The Shadow, S&S hoped to duplicate it with a detective who used various gadgets to fight crime, and Dent created Doc Savage under the house name Kenneth Robeson; the first issue hit the stands in March 1933. The series lasted until 1949, with 181 issues, of which 159 were written by Dent.
After Doc Savage, the character for which Dent received the most acclaim was Oscar Sail, the loner boatman who appeared in only two Black Mask stories, “Sail” and “Angelfish,” which have been relentlessly anthologized as outstanding examples of the hard-boiled pulp detective. He began a third story, “Cay,” but when his editor, Joseph Shaw, left the magazine, he abandoned it. Dent wrote the earliest draft of “Sail” in the spring of 1936 on his schooner, Albatross, while anchored at Miami’s City Yacht Basin — where “Sail” is set. He once told Frank Gruber, a prolific pulp writer himself, as well as a historian of the genre, that he had been forced to rewrite both stories so many times that he did not like the final product.
The story in this collection, “Luck,” is an early draft of that first adventure about Oscar Sail. As there were numerous drafts, it cannot be said with authority that this is the first version, but it is safe to say that it is a very early one, and certainly one that Dent preferred to the published story. Thanks to the novelist and noted pulp scholar Will Murray, the agent for the Lester Dent estate, for the history of this important publication.
“Sail” was published in the October 1936 issue of Black Mask. “Luck” has never before appeared in print.
The fish trembled its tail as the knife cut off its head, then red ran out of it and made a mess on the planks and spread enough to cover the wet red marks where two human hands had tried to hold to the dock edge.
Sail put the palm of his own hand in the mess.
The small policeman came from shore. He had shoved through the small green gate with the discreet sign, Private Yachts — No Admittance, at the shore end of the swanky pier, and was under the neat green canopy, tramping in the rear edge of the glare from his flashlight. His leather and brass glistened in the light. He was cautious enough to walk in the middle of the narrow long pier, but did enough stamping with his feet to show he was the law.
When he reached Sail, he stopped. His cap had a cock. His lower lip was loose on the left side, as if depressed by a pipe stem that wasn’t there. He was young, bony and brown.
He asked, “That you give that yell?”
Sail picked up the hook and wet line. He held the hook close to his left palm. He grimaced at the small oozing rip in the brown callus of the palm. It was about the kind of a hole the fishhook would have made.
“Yeah?” the cop said vaguely. “You snagged the hand on a hook, eh? Made you yell?” The policeman toed the fish head’s open mouthful of snake-fang teeth.
“Barracuda,” he said, but not as if that was on his mind.
Red drops came out of the ripped palm, fattened on the lower edge, came loose and fell on the dock. Sail picked the fish up with his other hand. When he stood his straightest, he was still shorter than the small cocky policeman.
The officer splashed light on Sail. He saw the round jolly brown features of a thirtyish man who probably liked his food, who would put weight on until he was forty, and spend the rest of his life secretly trying to take it off. Sail’s hair might have been unraveled rope, and looked as if it had been finger-combed. Some of the black had been scrubbed out of his black polo shirt. Washings had bleached his black dungarees; they fitted his small hips tightly and stopped halfway below the knees. Bare feet had squarish toes. Weather had gotten to all of the man a lot.
The officer hocked to clear his throat. “They don’t eat barracuda in Miami. Not when you catch the damn things in the harbor, anyhow.”
He didn’t sound as if that was the thing bothering him, either.
Sail asked, “You the health department?”
The little policeman filled Sail’s eyes with light. He said, “If that was a crack—” and changed to, “Was it you yelled?”
“Any law against a yell when you get a hook in your hand?”
The policeman popped his light into Sail’s face again. Derision was around Sail’s blue eyes and in the warp of his lips.