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.
His hands flopped away from his face. A remote hope came into his eyes. “Listen,” he said tightly. “The money’s still there. You take it and let me go.”
I smiled. “Wouldn’t you like that? Because the lad who has the seventy grand will be burned as the killer.” I stroked the barrel of the gun and added reflectively: “For my part, that bag could be full of rattlesnakes instead of currency of the realm and it would be the same thing.”
He didn’t say anything.
I looked at him for a moment and then asked: “What’s your name, mister?”
“Thomas K. Allenby,” he muttered.
“Think of that,” I said, and I backed into the living room and, keeping him covered with the gun, reached for the phone...
It was an experience having coppers shake my hand.
“That solves two murders at one shot,” Detective-Lieutenant Goldblatt told me. “Finding that seventy grand on Perry Pike proves that he was the one knocked off Norval Avery in Queens last month, and you handed us Pike’s murder all wrapped up and sealed. That was an honest and courageous thing you did, Mr. Turner.”
Nuts, I thought. But I didn’t say it out loud. I smiled with becoming modesty. I shook hands with cops and posed for newspaper cameramen. Then I went to a restaurant to catch up on my eating. It wasn’t much of a dinner because my financial status couldn’t afford better.
But the bean soup and corned beef hash tasted better than I’d eaten in even the best of jails. And when I washed it down with coffee and lit a cigarette, I felt pretty good.
Willie, I told myself, you’ve got your freedom and your health, which is a lot more than Norval Avery and Perry Pike and Thomas K. Allenby have. Willie, I said to myself, who the hell wants seventy grand anyway?
The Man Who Chose the Devil
Richard Deming
Richard Deming (1915–1983) was born in Des Moines, Iowa, and received his B.A. from Washington University, St. Louis, and his M.A. from the University of Iowa. Soon after, he served as a captain in the army during World War II, then worked for the American Red Cross in Dunkirk, New York, from 1945 to 1950, after which he became a full-time freelance writer.
It was an understood verity of the pulp-writing community that practitioners had to be prolific in order to survive financially, and Deming was one of the most prolific of the later toilers of the craft. He came to the field as it was dying and moved to the new markets for such professionals, including the digest magazines, such as Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine and Manhunt, and paperback originals, of which he wrote more than sixty under his own name, as Max Franklin, and as a ghostwriter for Ellery Queen’s Tim Corrigan series. He wrote novelizations of popular crime shows of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, including Starsky and Hutch and Charlie’s Angels under the Franklin byline and, as Deming, Dragnet and The Mod Squad. His short-fiction output exceeded two hundred titles, and he provided stories for several television series, including Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer, Suspicion, and the Gruen Guild Playhouse. His novel The Careful Man (1962) was filmed as Arrivederci, Baby! (1966, written, produced, and directed by Ken Hughes, starring Tony Curtis).
“The Man Who Chose the Devil” was published in the May 1948 issue.
’Twas mighty odd for my satanic fat friend Longstreet to be swearing oaths on a sacred locket — oaths which would surely send him straight to hell. But perhaps that was the idea.
Chapter One
When i thought about it afterward, it seemed the fat man must have been puzzled that I paid no attention to his standing on my foot. But I was actually unaware of it until I tried to slide off the bar stool and found one foot pinned to the floor.
Of course, he didn’t realize there was no feeling in my right limb, that instead of flesh it was an intricate contrivance of cork and aluminum strapped to a stump below my knee. The government paid me $180.00 a month for not having a right leg. They were also going to buy me a brand-new car — when they got around to it.
Just before I tried to leave my stool, I caught a glimpse of Anton Strowlski in the bar mirror. The dapper gunman approached with one hand negligently carried in the pocket of his tailored suitcoat. Since I had never rubbed against Anton, I knew he wasn’t looking for me, but I automatically grow observant when gunmen, even friendly gunmen, get behind me with their hands in their pockets.
Anton’s expression was casual, his eyes on no one in particular. But something in the face of the fat man standing next to me, as it was reflected in the bar mirror, caused me to shift my glance from the gunman to him. The fat man’s face was expressionless, but his eyes unwinkingly followed the image of Anton Strowlski.
It was then I decided to move from my stool. Not that I expected anything to happen in as public a place as the Jefferson Lounge, but some inbred caution prompted me to want a large section of the Jefferson’s air-conditioned atmosphere wedged between myself and the fat man. And I found myself stuck to the floor.
The fat man stood half-faced away from me, his left elbow propped on the bar and his left foot solidly crushing the full weight of his two hundred forty pounds on my right shoe. With one eye still on Anton, I tapped his arm.
The gesture caught Anton’s attention and he flashed me a quick glance, nodded in recognition and made an abrupt right wheel toward the far end of the bar.
Without moving his body, the fat man turned at me a florid face which would have meant a fortune to a burlesque comedian. High-domed, round-cheeked and pug-nosed, and with bright, heavy-lidded eyes over which satanic eyebrows arched upward at the ends, instead of down, it was the face of a rollicking satyr.
I pointed at the floor. “If you don’t mind, I’ll take my foot with me.”
His lips drew back over dazzling mail-order teeth, and a chuckle worked its way up from his gargantuan paunch, coming out baritone and amused. Without moving his foot, he turned his back.
I began to get sore, but not enough to slug him. The Jefferson Lounge frowns on commotion. It even frowns if you drop your money on the bar instead of laying it down noiselessly. It features organ music and quietness, apparently ashamed of being a saloon and trying to disguise the truth under a church-like atmosphere. I tapped my fat drinking mate again.
“Your foot is on mine,” I explained clearly.
“I know.” He turned his back again.
“Move it,” I said to his back, without raising my voice.
His big head swiveled at me for the third time. Satanic brows quirked upward and his ready-made incisors sparkled again.
“You move it.”
His bright eyes glinted mischievously, completely lacking the contentiousness of a stew picking a fight. I saw he was dead sober, yet for some reason, which I vaguely linked with the presence of Anton Strowlski, was deliberately trying to start a scene. So I gave him one.
Sliding my stool to the left, I let the side of my chest drop across it, grasping the seat with both hands for support. Rapidly crossing my left leg over my right until the sole of my foot rested against the inside of his far knee, I pushed.
His right leg buckled, throwing him off balance, and he grabbed at the bar with both hands. At the same time he involuntarily moved the foot imprisoning mine a step backward. Snapping erect, I smashed the heel of my released right foot into the underside of his left knee. He sat down with a crash that shook the room and stopped the organist in the middle of a bar.