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.
When she stepped on the starter, the car’s real class became apparent, for under her hand pulsed the steady flow of a V-16 Cadillac. The long, grey hood covered a sixteen-cylinder motor mounted on the very latest in chassis.
The gears meshed and the iron brute rolled away with scarcely a sound.
Dizzy swung the wheel and they turned south into Seventh Avenue, then west to skirt the uppermost extremity of Times Square, south on Ninth, then west again and the grey snout of the roadster buried itself deep into the heart of the sink of gangland — Hell’s Kitchen.
Before an inconspicuous brownstone front in the odd Forties the car drew up. The motor hissed into silence.
Dizzy climbed the battered stone steps and let herself into an ill-lit hallway. Two steep flights of stairs — another door. It yielded to her key and she stepped into her purple paradise and snapped on the lights. Behind her the door swung to with the solid clang of steel meeting steel and the snap of a double lock.
The room was a perfect foil for Dizzy Malone’s blonde, gaming beauty, and truly a purple paradise. It ran the gamut of shades of that royal color, from the light orchid of the silk-draped walls to the almost-violet of the deep, cushion-drenched divans that lined three walls. Into the fourth was built a miniature bar whose dark, blood-purple mahogany gleamed dully in the subdued light of innumerable silken-covered lamps.
Cigarette tables on tall, slender legs flanked the divans; a massive radio was half-concealed by an exquisite Spanish shawl, worked with intricate mauve embroidery and surmounted by a silver vase holding a gigantic spotted orchid. There was not a book to be seen — not even “Indian Love Lyrics,” acme of chorine literary taste and attainment; or Nietzsche’s “Thus Spake Zarathustra” which is now considered passe by Broadway beauties; or Durant’s “History of Philosophy,” displayed, but never read.
Dizzy’s purple paradise was, indeed, an institution.
She crossed its thick, soft carpet with a hurried step and entered the bedroom.
It was done entirely in the same color-scheme as the outer room, but, unlike it, was strictly private.
Dizzy tossed her hat on the square, purple bed that stood on a raised dias in the center of the room. From two wardrobes that squatted against the wall she took the flimsy garments she figured to need and spread them in readiness on the chaise-lounge stretching in luxurious abandon beneath the heavily-shaded casement window.
Then the clothes Dizzy had on fell at her feet in a crumpled shower and she stood, stretching her arms above her head, in provocative marble-pink nakedness.
But not for long. There was work to be done.
Throwing a smock about her slender shoulders, she sat down before a make-up table that would have done credit to the current reigning dramatic favorite, and switched on the blinding frame of electrics that threw its mirror into a pool of dazzling brilliance.
For several minutes her gaze concentrated on the reflected image of herself, then she rubbed the make-up off with cold cream and set to work.
Dark shadows blended in skillfully around her eyes, made their grey depths even deeper, faint penciled lines gave them a slanting oval appearance. She blocked her eyebrows out with grease paint and drew fine, arching ones over them. Deft dabs of rouge close up under the eyes and flanking her nose aided in completely changing the round, youthful contour of her face. It was the long, smouldering, passionate countenance of the Slav. She clinched the impression by drawing out her lips in two, thin crimson lines.
Dizzy gazed at the reflection and grinned. Even she failed to recognize herself. The make-up was perfect.
To complete the illusion, she combed the smooth waves of her blonde bobbed hair flatly down on her little head, then searched through the drawers until she found a flaming red wig.
It was a work of art, that wig, and so expertly made as to defy discovery of its artificiality.
Carefully Dizzy fitted it into place.
An exclamation of delight slipped between her lips.
Perfect, indeed!
Satisfied, Dizzy dressed slowly, choosing a scanty gown that hinted broadly at the palpitating curves beneath. Its vivid, jealous-eyed green threw into hot relief the flaming flower of her hair.
Throwing a light wrap about her, she descended the stairs to her roadster, eased in behind the wheel and gunned the grey hulk toward the river. She swung north on deserted lower West End Avenue, breezing along easily. There was no hurry and she had no desire to run into the drunken crush that marked the three o’clock closing hour of most of Broadway’s night clubs.
The blocks slipped past.
At Cathedral Parkway she turned right, passed Morningside Park, and left into Lenox Avenue, the great pulsing artery of Harlem.
Into the maze of side streets the roadster nosed and came to a stop at last before a row of lightless, grimy stone fronts.
Dizzy climbed out and walked around the corner to where an awning stretched across the sidewalk.
In its shadow towered an ebony doorman.
He scrutinized her closely but at the mention of the name she snarled into his ear, he began to bow and scrape frantically. Flinging the locked doors behind him open, he admitted her to deep-carpeted stairs.
Down them she went, and at the bottom there rushed to meet her the hot music, the din, the flashing movement and color that was the underworld’s basement-haven — Sugar Foot’s.
Her eyes swept the crowded room in the split second before it was plunged into darkness punctured by a spotlight that picked out a brown-skinned girl in the center of the dance floor. The orchestra throbbed into a barbaric African rhythm and the girl flung herself into a writhing, shuddering dance.
Under cover of it, Dizzy threaded her way to an empty corner-table near the door, which she had spotted in that brief instant, before the lights went out.
When the lights flooded on again she was seated behind the table facing the room. She leaned one elbow negligently on its checked calico-top and joined in the applause. To all appearances she had been there for hours.
A boisterous waiter came and hung over her shoulder.
“Scotch!” Dizzy snapped.
There was that in her tone which sent him away on the jump, respectful, in spite of the aura of flaunted lure that clung about her.
In a moment he was on his way back, skipping, sliding, weaving his way across the dance floor in perfect time to the music. He lowered his tray and placed the drink before her, a tall glass, soda, ginger ale, a bowl of cracked ice, and melted away again.
Slowly, lingeringly, Dizzy mixed the drink, sipped it and settled to the business of looking over the crowd that jammed the stifling room to capacity.
Everyone was there — sporting gents flush from the race-track; sinister underworld figures, suave, shifty-eyed; a heavyweight contender with his wizened-faced manager; a florid police sergeant from the tenderloin; the principals of a smash colored review; a sprinkling of tight-lipped gamblers and individuals who fitted into no particular category. All their women — good, bad, and so-so.
But nowhere on the dance floor could Dizzy find the sunken, grey, cadaverous face of the Ghost, or the long, gangling stretch of his emaciated limbs. He would surely be there. He loved to dance, almost as much as Dizzy herself.
The saxophones sobbed their quivering “That’s All!” and the dancers made for their tables.
The lights went out — the spotlight fell upon a black Amazon in a glittering, skin-tight gown. Swaying sensuously to the beat of the music, she broke into a wailing, throbbing blues. Wild applause.
Lights again — the beat of the music quickened — couples left the tables for the dance floor and locked themselves in shuddering embraces to the fervent tempo of the band.