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.
“Three Wise Men from Babylon” was first published in the April 1, 1939, issue of DFW.
Gotham’s wackiest scribe. Daffy Dill, puts a small brown fox on the trail of a dog-eared murderer
It was a Friday when the holocaust began. I remember that because Friday was never a good day for me. I don’t like fish, black cats bother me, and the Friday issue of the Chronicle is always, for some reason, the kind that runs a guy ragged around the arches. So it was a Friday, and when I say holocaust, I don’t mean a casual massacre. I was sitting at my desk in that dark and dingy corner of the city room which I call home because nobody else will, and I was writing a follow-up on the suicide of a guy named Milton Swan, when a Western Union boy popped into the city room and began to call my name. McGinty at the sports desk showed the boy over to me, and I signed for the wire and did not tip him.
“Well, well,” Dinah Mason said, “wires from Garbo, hah? I knew I never should have let you go cover that screwy case in Hollywood. I don’t care if Candid Jones did go with you, he’s a pal of yours and if you told him to say that you didn’t carry the torch for any—”
“Did Candid say I’d been a good boy? Bless his little heart,” I said. “And how do you get that way, Angel-Eyes? Don’t you trust me?”
“Sure,” Dinah said. “Like I trust king cobras.”
“You’ve got a nerve,” I said. “You won’t marry me, so why should you worry what cutie I parade in the Tinsel Town? Confidentially, my hollyhock, time goes on, you get older, silver threads among the gold, and your chances may not be so good. You’d better grab me now while you can still handle a husband. And lay off trying to pump Candid on my movie-town activities... Well?”
“Well, what?” Dinah said, preening her platinum hair as she sat there on the edge of my desk. “If you mean will I marry you, the answer is hmm.”
“Nix,” I snapped, irked. “I mean, what are you hanging around for? Can’t you see I’m busy?”
“Yes, darling,” she said. “But you also have not opened that telegram and I’m just dying to see what kind of a sap would spend the mazuma to send you a message via the wires when it would only cost three cents to write the same thing. Open up and let’s have a look.”
I stared at her. “You uncommon buzzard,” I said. “No wonder you got so interested and came over to sling words with me. This wire.”
“From Hollywood,” she said. “Who sent it? Come on.”
I opened the wire and I looked at the date line. It was Babylon, Iowa, and I told her so. That fixed it. “Babylon, Iowa,” Dinah snorted. “Well, personally, I wouldn’t care what it said after that name for a town. It’s all yours and you can have it.”
Well, as it turned out, Dinah did the right thing. It was all mine and I was stuck with it. The telegram said:
DAFFY DILL
N Y CHRONICLE
NEW YORK N Y
WILBUR PENN PROMINENT BABYLON CITIZEN SHOT AND KILLED BY UNKNOWN ASSAILANT TONIGHT AT TEN PM STOP HAVE ATTEMPTED TO REACH PENNS BROTHER NAMED MARTIN PENN SOMEWHERE IN NEW YORK CITY BUT AM UNABLE TO LOCATE HIM STOP APPRECIATE IT IF YOU COULD FIND HIM AND GET STATEMENT FROM HIM CONCERNING MURDER OF HIS BROTHER STOP WILL SPLIT NEWS ON CASE WITH YOU IF YOU HELP STOP WIRE CHARGES COLLECT
JOHN HARVEY
EDITOR BABYLON GAZETTE
Well, that was a hot one. I was to go out and scour New York looking for some punk named Martin Penn to get a statement out of him about a murder in a hick town in Iowa, and the editor of the town rag, Mr. Harvey, was going to be big about it and split news with me concerning his gigantic murder case. As if the readers of the New York sheets would give two hoots about murder in Babylon (Iowa). The picture of me roaming the wintry streets looking for a statement was not at all appealing.
I would have tossed the telegram in the waste basket, if I hadn’t had a conscience. Wilbur Penn shot tonight. That meant the night before and that meant I was holding a night letter, not a straight telegram and that meant Mr. Harvey was a cheap skate.
So I took the telegram in to the Old Man who was sitting forlornly in his doghouse, his green eyeshade hiding his eyes and accentuating the glistening prairie of hairless dome that covered his skull. I dropped the thing on his desk and I said, “Rural editor asks collaboration. How do you like them berries?”
“Don’t bother me,” said the Old Man. “Can’t you see I’m reading?”
He had a copy of How to Make Friends and Influence People in his lap, and I tsk-tsked and shook my head. “Come on, come on,” I said. “You’re too far gone for that book to do you any good. Take a look at this thing and grab a laugh. They’re few enough nowadays.”
The Old Man picked up the wire and read it, and he didn’t laugh.
When he had finished it, he said, “What’s so funny about it? Just because it’s a hick town? A hick paper? There’s nothing funny in that. We didn’t all begin in New York, Mr. Dill, like yourself. Some of us were small-town scribes for years before we got a break and came on here. Do you know where I came from before I hit New York? Wipe that smile off your face. The name of the town was Punxatawney, Pa... So go ahead and cover for John Harvey.”
“Go ahead — and cover — for him?” I said. “You mean you’re going to waste me on this guy’s Babylon killing?”
“I’ve always made it a policy,” replied the Old Man severely, “to cast my bread upon the waters. When a man wires me for help from out of town, I give. Don’t be a sap, Daffy. The day might come when you would wind up in Babylon, Iowa, needing a stake, an ‘in,’ or just plain help. And having helped this guy once, he’ll help you twice.”
“I have no intention of ever going to Babylon,” I said. “The Bible told me it was a sinful, wicked place. It should have said that there was a moocher in the place too.”
“Never mind the wisecracks,” said the Old Man wearily. “Cover for this guy. And just to make sure you do, let me see Milton Penn’s—”
“Martin Penn,” I said sarcastically.
“You let me see his statement before you wire it. It would not be unlike you to forge a statement from Daffy Dill, Esk., rather than go out and find this other guy. Snap into it.”
When I came out of the doghouse, Dinah met me and shook her head. “Boy, you look low.”
“I am low,” I said. “Out of seven and a half million people in this burg, I’ve got to find one guy to ask him for a statement.”
“Far be it from me to simplify your existence,” Dinah said, patting my cheek. “But did you ever think of looking up the lug in a telephone book and asking for his statement via Alexander Bell’s marvelous invention?”
I said, “Wonderful! At rare intervals you show genius.”
“A mere nothing, my dear Watson.”
I went through a Manhattan telephone directory and found one Martin Penn as easily as falling off a log. Martin Penn, it said, 107 Beeker Place r. CRawford 2-2399.
I buzzed the number, but after a few clicks the operator said, “Sorry, sir, your party does not answer. I will call you again in twenty minutes.”