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.
Sackler raised his eyebrows. “Deal?” he said. “Key?”
“Key,” I said. “Deal. Maybe I’m not quite as dumb as you think I am.”
He looked at me for a long time. Then he put his hand in his pocket and took out a key. He said: “I imagine it’s safe to throw this out the window here.”
I said that I guessed it was. He flung it into the ditch.
I drove another five miles. Then I said: “There’s a couple of minor items I’d like to discuss with you.”
He nodded a trifle grimly. “I was afraid of that, Joey.”
“First,” I said, “I’d like a bonus.”
“A bonus, Joey? How much?”
“Thirty-three bucks,” I told him. “Cash money.”
For once he was very quiet at the mention of money. Finally he said, in the tone of a man suffering great physical pain: “I think that can be arranged, Joey.”
“Good,” I said. “Then there’s the matter of a ten-dollar-a-week raise.”
Now he looked like a man with the black cholera. “Joey,” he exclaimed. “That’s over five hundred a year. That’s a lot of money, my boy.”
“It’s only one-fifth of twenty-five hundred,” I told him.
There was another long silence. Then, “Suppose, Joey, I didn’t see my way clear to letting you have it?”
I made a clucking sound with my tongue and shook my head sadly.
“It’s my conscience,” I told him. “My damnable conscience. It’s driving me to perform my civic duty. To tell Headquarters how you told Colby what you’d figured before you told Wolley. How you explained to Colby how you’d figured he must be in a bad financial jam in order to have murdered Capek. How you pointed out that his peculations were bound to come out when you had him pinched for murder.”
“Yes, Joey,” said Sackler weakly. “Anything else?”
“Why, yes,” I said. “It occurs to me that you offered him an easy out. Instead of being pilloried in the press, instead of bearing the sneers of his upper-crust friends, you offered to let him commit suicide. For a consideration.”
“A consideration, Joey?”
“Twenty-five hundred and fifty dollars,” I said. “Of course, you couldn’t let him kill himself before the check was cashed. It wouldn’t have been legal. That’s why you called our attention to the time when we heard the shot that killed Colby. Your check was in the bank by then.”
I looked at him and observed with vast satisfaction that for the first time in our joint careers I had him on the run.
“To ensure his not dying before you cashed the check you locked him in the attic and gave him a gun with no ammunition. Moreover, you referred to him as Smith so that Wolley wouldn’t arrest Colby, at once, thus wrecking your deal. Then when you had the dough in your pocket you sent me up with a bullet, all as per private and strictly extralegal agreement with Colby.”
“Joey,” he said, “you figured all that out yourself?”
“I did, indeed,” I said. “And my reward will be five hundred and twenty dollars spread over the coming year, plus thirty-three bucks in cash — now.”
He sighed heavily. He thrust his hand into his pocket and took out some bills. He handed them over to me, then delivered a speech which, coming from Rex Sackler, has always seemed a classic to me.
“Joey,” he said reproachfully, “sometimes I think there is nothing you wouldn’t do for money.”
The Color of Honor
Richard Connell
Richard (Edward) Connell (1893–1949) was born in Dutchess County, New York, and went to Harvard, where he edited the Daily Crimson and the Harvard Lampoon. He took a job as a reporter for the New York American, then became an advertising copywriter. After serving in World War I, he became a full-time freelance writer, moving to Hollywood in 1925 to work in the film industry, writing stories for several films as well as a large number of short stories for the pulps and the top American slick magazines.
His most famous story, and one of the most anthologized stories ever written, was “The Most Dangerous Game,” the now-familiar tale of a man, Sanger Rainsford, who falls off a ship traveling up the Amazon River and saves himself by swimming to an island, where he is greeted by General Zaroff. Ensconced in a luxurious mansion, Zaroff is a dedicated hunter whose passion for the sport has driven him to pursue the ultimate game — man — and Rainsford is the prey. The story has been filmed numerous times, sometimes credited, as with The Most Dangerous Game (1932, RKO, starring Joel McCrea and Fay Wray), A Game of Death (1945, RKO, with John Loder), and Run for the Sun (1956, United Artists, with Richard Widmark and Jane Greer). Films based on other Connell stories include F-Man (1936, Paramount, with Jack Haley) and Brother Orchid (1940, Warner Brothers, with Edward G. Robinson, Ann Sothern, and Humphrey Bogart).
“The Color of Honor” was published in the June 1923 issue.
This Southern Klan story — by one of America’s best-known writers — needs no comment from us, except this: a number of people have told us Courtnay would not have acted as he did in this story. What are your ideas about it?
I
When Cater Courtnay was eleven years old his father whipped him with a blacksnake whip until he could hardly stand because the boy, in some juvenile game with some lads from a nearby plantation, had cheated. Afterward the father talked to his son in the paneled library of the old house.
“You see your great-uncle, Carroll Courtnay, up there?” said the father, pointing to a picture, done in oil, of a darkly handsome man in a grey uniform.
The boy nodded; he was very white but not once through it all had he sobbed.
“General Lee trusted him,” went on the father.
“He trusted him, son, because he knew the stuff the Courtnays are made of. At Shiloh your great-uncle could have saved himself from death by one little act of dishonor — most men wouldn’t have thought it dishonorable at all — but, of course, he didn’t. He remembered that he was a Courtnay, and Courtnays do not cheat, or lie, or do any dishonorable action. They stand by their word, and by their kind. You are a Courtnay, son — the last of the name, when I am gone — and while the breath of life is in you you must not forget the proud name you bear.”
The boy nodded again.
“Now, shake hands with me, Cater,” said the father. “I hope I didn’t hurt you much.”
The boy held out his hand to his father. His father never again had any occasion to whip him for cheating.
When Cater Courtnay was nearing thirty, and was still unmarried, his father died and from him Cater inherited many broad acres of rich cotton land, and the great pillared house in its grove of live oaks. He was a serious young man, tall, sun-bronzed, almost saturnine of aspect, and he took seriously his duties as overlord of the estate, with almost feudal powers over the men and women who lived on it and worked for him.
One night in the early autumn he sat in the library talking with a guest, a man from the North, whom he had known in college.
“But I tell you, Godwin, you can never understand,” said Cater Courtnay, his voice low, intense.
Godwin puffed at his pipe before he answered.
“Men are men,” he said finally.
Courtnay shook his head impatiently.
“There are white men,” he said, “and there are black men.”
“But,” returned Godwin, “they are both men. Color doesn’t count. Underneath there’s no difference.”