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.
All this while she watched me with wide gray eyes that were calm and tender, but now they clouded a little and a pucker of pain drew her brows together.
I yanked my head away and got the car in motion.
Just before we swept into Redwood City one of her hands came up to my forearm, rested there for a second, patted the arm twice, and withdrew.
I didn’t look at her, nor, I think, did she look at me, while she was being booked. She gave her name as Jeanne Delano, and refused to make any statement until she had seen an attorney. It all took a very few minutes.
As she was being led away, she stopped and asked if she might speak privately with me.
We went together to a far corner of the room.
She put her mouth close to my ear so that her breath was warm again on my cheek, as it had been in the car, and whispered the vilest epithet of which the English language is capable.
Then she walked out to her cell.
The Jane from Hell’s Kitchen
Perry Paul
While the better pulps offered a pretty good living to those writers who could work fast and produce hundreds of thousands of words a year, there was a definite hierarchy, well known to the top guns of the fiction world — as well as to the least of the hacks, the beginners, and the wannabes.
Black Mask was the gold standard, but a few other magazines, like Argosy and Dime Detective, as well as such “hero” pulps as The Shadow and Doc Savage, paid equally well. Down at the bargain basement level were such trashy publications as Gun Molls magazine. Literary quality was pretty much nonexistent, though stories usually galloped along at a blazing pace, substituting action and violence for subtlety and characterization.
Major writers would send them stories only when they had been rejected by the better pulps. Lesser writers never could crack the top publications and generally failed to earn a living at their chosen profession. They vanished as quickly as they appeared, and they are largely unremembered today. Perry Paul is such a figure. A former crime reporter who created two series for Gun Molls, the other being “Madame,” a mystery moll of the underworld, nothing else could be discovered about him.
“The Jane from Hell’s Kitchen” first appeared in the October 1930 issue of Gun Molls.
Things happen quickly to Dizzy Ma lone — because Dizzy was a real gun moll — a jane with a purple paradise and a red past — but a sport
Chapter I
Dizzy Malone
The grizzled district attorney stood over a newspaper spread out on his desk, scare heads staring up at him in crude challenge.
The district attorney, scourge of New York’s underworld, glanced nervously from the headlines to the watch on his wrist and showed his teeth in a smile of cynical satisfaction.
Behind him the door opened noiselessly — a flash of chiffon and silk — the door closed and a girl backed her quivering body against it, her mouth open, panting.
Her high, pointed heels ground into the heavy rug as she struggled for self-control. Her lithe, supple body tautened. Her lips hardened into a thin scarlet line. The grey eyes, shadowed by a tight-fitting crimson bit of a hat, tempered to the glitter of new steel.
Sensing an alien presence, the district attorney’s head came up sharply.
“ ‘Local D.A. scouts gangster vengeance motive!’ ” the scarlet lips jeered.
The man sprang round to face the door with the agility of a jungle beast of prey.
“Dizzy Malone,” he gasped, “the same, gorgeous body and all!”
The girl swung her slender hips across the room until she faced the man.
James Mitchell, veteran district attorney of New York, looked down at her lovely blonde bravado with the expression of a man charmed against his will by some exotic yet poisonous serpent.
Dizzy Malone was like that. She went to men’s heads. Her moniker was a stall. They called her Dizzy because she most decidedly wasn’t any way you looked at it.
“Well, when did you get back to your purple paradise in Hell’s Kitchen?” the district attorney demanded. He was a tough baby. He knew all the dodges. He talked gangster talk and every crook in New York feared him. “I thought you lammed it to Europe with the Ghost when he finished his rap up the river.”
The girl’s sensitive nostrils quivered.
“Yeah? You thought so!” she sneered. “Well, I didn’t. The Ghost saw to it that I missed the boat. He’d decided to change his luck, I guess. Anyway, Spanish Lil went with him. Her hair is black, mine’s blonde. And that’s why—”
“Say, wait a minute!” Mitchell interrupted. “I’m not running any lovelorn bureau. What’s the idea? How did you get in here, anyway?”
“That’s my business!” she flared. “Now collapse, stuffed-shirt, while I put on the loud speaker!”
The D.A. opened his mouth — and closed it again. When Dizzy made up her mind to talk, she talked, and everyone else listened.
“Now, get a load of this,” Dizzy snapped. “It’s about that guy Burke, the D.A. from Chicago, that’s disappeared. I gotta hunch who lifted him.”
It was Mitchell’s turn to sneer.
“So you want to squeal, huh, Dizzy?”
“Squeal?” Dizzy panted. “You... you—!”
She crouched like a feline killer ready to spring. Coral-tipped fingers that could tear a man’s face to ribbons, tensed. Her lips curled back from her teeth in a fighting snarl of defiance.
“Now calm down, Dizzy. Calm down.”
The girl’s rage did a quick fade-out, leaving in its place a cold, calculating grimness that was a sure danger signal.
“No more cracks like that then, big boy.” Her voice grated slightly on a note of savage restraint. “Get this through your smart legal mind — I came here to make you a proposition, not to turn anyone up. Get that straight!”
“All right, Dizzy,” the D.A. growled, glancing hastily at his watch. “Shoot.”
“You gotta job to do, Mitchell. I gotta job to do. You help me. I help you. See?”
The district attorney waited.
“Now about this D.A. from Chicago. His disappearing act puts you in a tough spot, doesn’t it? Looks like a smart game to me. He gets a phoney wire to come see you. He hops the Century and walks into this office the next morning. You don’t know what it’s all about. You didn’t send any wire. Burke walks outa here and disappears. You get a letter demanding a big ransom for his return. Your job is to get Burke back and turn up the guy that pulled the job. Right?”
“Right, Dizzy.”
“My job’s a little different. A guy — yes, it was the Ghost — put the double-x on me. I was his moll. We worked a good racket. We piled up a stake, a big one. We were all set to beat it for the sticks, get married and settle down respectable, and forget about rackets. My man was clever, he never let the coppers get anything on us. Then some fly dick framed a rap on him.”