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.
Where was the yacht?
The suspicion born in the D.A.’s office that it was only a stall grew into a certainty. Real fear gripped her. What was this all about? Should she turn back?
No! She remembered her boast and screamed it into the surrounding void.
“Damn the Ghost! I’ll get him or I won’t come back!”
As if in answer to her screamed challenge a black shadow seemed to sweep out of the sun.
Her eyes jerked to the side, her body went rigid.
Beside her floated a low-winged black Lockheed Sirius monoplane.
Her gaze probed through the pilot’s goggles, locked with the pale smoldering eyes of — the Ghost!
He waggled his wings and motioned over the side with a long-armed gesture.
Dizzy held up the readied ’chute.
The Ghost nodded and she flung it clear.
A cold dash of warning from some seventh sense sent her up in a steep zoom and she fell off on one wing.
And none too soon for a spatter of holes ripped through the doped linen of one wing. The Ghost was heeled too.
She banked to see the man pull his ship out of a zoom that had been intended to rake her bus from prop to tail assembly, and dive for the opened ’chute. He caught it deftly on a hook suspended from the undercarriage and hauled it rapidly aboard.
Dizzy rammed forward on the stick, the wind droned through the wires as she dropped down and threw a burst of steel into the Sirius. It dropped off clumsily on one wing and pulled itself up heavily.
With that maneuver the insane daring of the Ghost’s final gesture came clear. The Sirius with its cruising radius of 4,300 miles was fueled to capacity. The Ghost gambled to blast the ransom plane out of the sky with a single burst, pick up the money ’chute and head for Europe.
Dizzy thrilled in spite of herself at the very audacity of the thing, its colossal bluff.
Then the red mantle of hate dropped over her.
She dropped the Boeing down out of the sky and swept alongside the black ship. This would be a fair fight and to the death. She would get him, if she could, and on the level.
Dizzy tore off goggles and helmet, noting with satisfaction the cringe of recognition that swept across the Ghost’s face.
She shook her fist at him and motioned him to dump his gas.
He accepted the challenge and a sheet of spray gushed downward. The black ship, lightened of its load, leaped upward.
They were on even terms now.
Dizzy tripped her guns and the man answered the salute — the salute of death, for one of them at least and perhaps both.
They flung their ships at each other, guns flaming.
Steel seared Dizzy’s cockpit, rocking the Boeing. She dove, zoomed up in a loop and stood on her head pumping chattering hail into the Sirius.
The Ghost wing-slipped out of the way and they clawed down the sky to get at each other’s bellies, then roared upward, guns raving.
Dizzy’s instrument-board went to pieces. Stunned, the Boeing slipped into a spin, the Ghost on its heels waiting to rip in the coup de grace.
The girl threw the stick into neutral and, when her crate steadied, sat on her tail and clawed for altitude.
Sirius steel tore into the Boeing. Dizzy pulled into a reversement and for an instant the black crate was glued to her ring-sights. She pressed the trips. Steel gutted the black ship.
It wabbled. She was under it, ripping, tearing.
The Sirius nosed over into a spin, flame streaming behind.
The Boeing nosed in for the kill, wires screaming, guns raving.
A black wing collapsed and the Sirius spun faster, down, down.
Dizzy leveled off, banked and leaned over the side.
Below her a flaming ball cometed down through the dusk to be extinguished, suddenly, in a mighty geyser of spray—
Dizzy was limp and trembling when she pulled back on the stick and gunned the Boeing into a staggering climb. The motor missed, caught again and roared on as she leveled off and stuck its nose into the faint afterglow that streaked upward into the gathering darkness.
She rode the air alone, sky-victor in a riddled ship. Ominous metallic growlings broke the smooth beat of the motor from time to time. The instrument-board was shot away, but she realized that her gas must be running low.
The compass needle wabbled perilously on its luminous dial.
She nursed the game crate on — on.
The motor began to miss badly. Her eyes strained into the blackness below, but she remembered the deserted sea and gave up hope of distinguishing a light. A thin, complaining whine from the iron guts of the motor.
Bullet through the oil tanks, she thought. This can’t last much longer.
But she kept on, content to take death as it should come, but still fighting. The score was even — victory hers even though she would never enjoy its spoils.
The whine of the motor was rising in a screaming crescendo — she felt the Boeing settle.
Her hands unloosed the buckles of the safety-belt, grazed the butt of a Very pistol. Her fingers closed about it and tore it out of its holster.
Pointing the Very gun over her head a rocket of light shot upward, burst in a shower of colored stars.
With a final shrill of protest the motor clanked into silence.
She nosed the ship down in a long easy glide.
The face of Spanish Lil sneered up out of her mind. Dizzy gritted her teeth. That score would have to go unsettled.
The Very pistol spurted another streamer of light that rocketed into twinkling stars.
The ship nosed down, a darker blackness rising to meet it. Wave crests slapped at the undercarriage, a spurt of spray dashed upward from the dead prop and the Boeing settled gently in the arms of the sea.
Uncomprehendingly, at first, Dizzy Malone’s eyes took in the little white room, the stiffly-uniformed nurse, the white iron bed; came to rest on the face of the man bending over her — Tom Louden.
Realization filtered gradually into her mind.
Tom grinned.
“Feeling better?”
Dizzy nodded feebly.
“I may get myself into a jam for... ah... commandeering that sea sled but — it was worth the chance. And I was just in time.”
“Thanks,” she whispered. “You took a chance for me, huh? Well, I’m just dizzy enough to take one myself — now. I’ll chance the straight and narrow, if you — think—”
Tom Louden’s face bent closer... closer—.
The Duchess Pulls a Fast One
Whitman Chambers
The author of more than twenty crime and mystery novels, as well as an active screenwriter, Whitman Chambers (1898–1968) is surprisingly neglected today. He created several private eye characters for the pulps and novels; perhaps the failure to produce an especially engaging series character has militated against his continuing popularity.
Among his most successful works are The Come-On (1953), which was filmed in 1955; he was the co writer of the screenplay with Warren Douglas. A good and complex film noir, it starred Anne Baxter and Sterling Hay den; Russell Birdwell was the director. Hayden also starred in Manhandled, filmed in 1949, which also featured Dan Duryea as the quintessential small-time hood and Dorothy Lamour; Lewis R. Foster directed the Paramount feature. In 1960, Chambers wrote a novelization based on his own screenplay.
Among the many pulp stories Chambers wrote in the 1930s, he created Katie Blayne, known as “the Duchess,” for Detective Fiction Weekly. Unlike many of her contemporaries, Katie was no one’s assistant, wife, secretary, or partner. A reporter for The Sun who dated a man on a rival newspaper, she investigated crimes while digging out facts for her articles. She is good-looking and aggressive but often relies on intuition to solve a mystery; it was said that she could “produce hunches faster than a cigarette machine turns out coffin nails.”