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.
I felt my hair standing on end. I heard Spike’s fast and unsteady breathing. I could feel his body shaking with the tension of nerves about to snap. Let me tell you, it was electric!
Bergstrom stepped to the other door. He threw it open. The room was dark but we heard that rasping voice going on monotonously: “... carbon union in the aliphatic hydrocarbons has apparently the same effect on the boiling point as two hydrogen atoms. But as I was telling you, Kurt, an acetylenic or triple linkage is associated with a rise in the boiling point. However...”
Mrs. Hamlin was on her feet, staring into the darkened room. She screamed: “No! No!”
Bergstrom said patiently, gently: “But yes, Mrs. Hamlin. Surely you recognize John’s voice.”
The woman caught the arm of a chair, steadied herself. “I tell you,” she cried hysterically, “John is dead!”
“No. John iss very much alive.”
Bergstrom reached inside the door, flipped the switch. The bedroom was bright with light. Looking straight across the living room, I could see a figure in the bed. I caught a glimpse of a head swathed in bandages. I saw lips moving. I heard the deadly monotonous voice going on and on.
“... true of the fatty acid series, Kurt, and the corresponding ketones and...”
Then the bedroom door was blocked by the angular figure of Mrs. Hamlin. She swayed against the frame, caught herself, screamed: “No, no, I tell you! It can’t be true! He can’t be alive! I killed him myself with a hammer. I got into the plant with a key to the back door. I’ve had it for months: I crept up behind him. I knocked him down. I poured gasoline over him and struck a match. I saw him burn. I saw him burn!”
All this in a wild screech that sent icy chills up and down my spine. John Hamlin’s voice went on:
“... although, Kurt, the correlation of melting point with constitution has not...”
The tall woman covered her face with her angular hands. She screamed through her bony fingers: “I tell you I killed him!”
Then she dropped in a dead faint.
“... symmetry of the resulting molecule may exert such a lowering effect that the final result...”
“Westoby!” Bergstrom yelled, “Ged out uf bed und turn that damn’ thing off. If I haff to listen to John Hamlin’s voice one minute longer I shall haff hysterics!”
Well, after Mrs. Hamlin had snapped out of her faint and Captain Wallis had taken her away, we were all pretty limp. Bergstrom brought out a bottle and some ice, and we all sat down and tried to come back to Earth. The chemist remarked finally:
“Fortunately, Hamlin had been helping me with my sount devize. I suppose I haff a mile or two uf film on which his voice iss recorded.”
Westoby, who is one of the chemist’s lab men, added: “Lucky, too, the film was stored in the physical laboratory in the south wing, which the fire didn’t touch.”
The Duchess was smiling. “And speaking of luck, wasn’t it a break that I brushed against Mrs. Hamlin’s coat in her hallway the other night?”
“Huh?” Spike grunted. “What’s Mrs. Hamlin’s coat got to do with it?”
“It was wet, darling,” Katie said pleasantly. “There were beads of rain on the fur collar. And Mrs. Hamlin had told us she hadn’t left the house that evening.”
“Look here!” Spike snorted. “Do you mean to tell me you had the play doped from the beginning?”
“I had it doped, as you put it, within an hour or two after I brushed against that wet coat.”
“Well, Duchess, I got to hand it to you. You’re the top.” He drained his glass and stood up. “Bergstrom, you’ve put on a grand show and we’ll give your sound recorder a million dollars’ worth of publicity. Now I’ve got to hit a phone with the story. Okay to use yours?”
“No,” Bergstrom said steadily. “It iss most decidedly nod okay to use mine.”
“Huh?” Spike gasped. “Wha-zat?”
Bergstrom, still smiling, bowed to Katie. And the Duchess rose.
“Mrs. Bergstrom has ordered the operator to accept no out-going calls,” she informed us. “So if you want to give your office the story, Spike, you’ll have to find another telephone.”
She moved toward the door, adding over her shoulder: “If you can, and that will be quite a job!”
“If I can!” Spike bellowed, and started after her. “While I’ve got the use of my legs, I guess—”
Katie threw open the door. Lounging in the hall outside I caught a glimpse of half a dozen of the toughest looking punks I ever saw outside of a penitentiary — or a morning paper’s circulation department. Spike stopped in his tracks.
“Keep them here, boys, until midnight,” the Duchess ordered cheerfully. “And try not to hurt them too badly if they make a break.”
“We won’t hurt ’em, Miss Katie,” a big bruiser grinned. “Not much!”
Well, they didn’t hurt us — because we didn’t make a break. We stayed there till midnight, drinking very good whiskey with Kurt Bergstrom and wondering where we ever got the idea that the Duchess was silly, and dumb, and slow on the pick-up.
Mansion of Death & Concealed Weapon
Roger Torrey
It was rumored that Roger Torrey’s real name was Torres, but he insisted he was of Irish descent and apparently tried to prove it by giving most of his cops and private detectives Irish names. And with so many other pulp writers, famous and not-so-famous, he was a heavy drinker of such mythical stature that he found the perfect woman for him — in a bar. Also a hard-drinking writer, she moved into his hotel room and they established a system of producing fiction that seems to have worked for them. He sat at one desk, she at another, with a bottle of booze nearby. The first person to finish the story on which they were working was permitted to drink while the other had to finish the story before being allowed to have a nip. Torrey, a veteran of the pulps, wrote faster, so generally finished first, then drank and mocked her while getting smashed. A prolific as well as gifted short story writer, Torrey produced fifty stories for Black Mask alone, writing for many other publications as well. He wrote only one novel, 42 Days for Murder, published by the unprestigious house of Hillman-Curl in 1938.
In “Mansion of Death,” Torrey has produced the most atypical story one could imagine in the pages of a pulp: a little old lady takes a hard-boiled detective and leads him around by the nose. It was originally published in the Detective Fiction Weekly issue of May 25, 1940. “Concealed Weapon” is a more common story of a private eye with an invaluable female assistant, first published in the December 1938 issue of Black Mask.
Miss Conklin didn’t have anything against detectives; she simply liked to solve murders her own way
I liked the old lady the first time I saw her... but then, I’ve always gotten along better with old ladies than with the young ones Though maybe that’s because I’ve never worried about the old ones as much. Anyway, she cam(in the office and held out her hand as if she expected me to bow over it, and said:
“I’m Miss Conklin! I talked with you over the telephone, young man.”
I bowed, though I hadn’t intended any such foolishness, and told her I was glad to meet her in person. And she twinkled her bright little blue eyes at me and shook her finger at me and said:
“Now young man! You’re glad to see me because I’m a customer.”