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.
“Years ago I realized that I was doing my brother terrible harm by being what I was, so I changed my name. English found out my true name, so he died. Now nobody knows except you, who recognized my brother’s features in mine.
“If my true name were known my brother’s career would be at an end. He would drift back into obscurity and heartbreak. That is why you must die — because over there we are so poor and have nothing to love but our families.”
He reached in the drawer of the table. I reached in the left tail pocket of my dress-coat. The little Belgian .25 automatic flicked out as Morgan lifted a big revolver.
I fired at his hand a split-second before he could drag back the ponderous action of the .44. My tiny bullet burned him and his hand wavered as he fired. My second shot landed in his chest. So did my third, fourth and fifth. My ears rang with the roar of his big gun. My shoulder felt cold as ice, then began to tingle.
“Skeat,” I said drunkenly, “you’re shot.” I swayed to my feet and clawed my way to the table and the phone that stood on it.
I called a man and told him something. “And bring a doctor,” I added.
In the movies there’s a trick called “iris out.” It’s what you see when blackness creeps over the screen until there’s just a little circle of light left in the center and then the light winks out. That’s what happened to me then.
The little circle of light appeared again. It expanded and was the chest of somebody in hospital white. There was a low, heart-sick wailing somewhere, and lots of people.
The man in white said: “He’s coming to.”
“Did you phone that tip in?” asked somebody.
“Hell, yes,” I said. I could still hear the wailing.
“Good guy! We made a beautiful haul.”
My shoulder smelled of alcohol and had a bulky dressing on it. I looked around.
There was Angonides crouched by the corpse of his brother, wailing: “O Demetrios! O, delph’ Demetrios!”
“He shouldn’t have muscled me,” I said sleepily. “But we’re all square now.”
I felt very tired and contented.
Borrowed Crime
Cornell Woolrich
Cornell (George Hopley) Woolrich (1903–1968) was born in New York City, grew up in South America and New York, and was educated at Columbia University, to which he left his literary estate. A sad and lonely man who desperately dedicated his books to his typewriter and to his hotel room, Woolrich was almost certainly a closeted homosexual (his marriage was terminated in short order) and an alcoholic, so antisocial and reclusive that he refused to leave his hotel room when his leg became infected, ultimately resulting in its amputation. Perhaps not surprisingly, then, the majority of his work has an overwhelming darkness, and few of his characters, whether good or evil, have much hope for happiness — or even justice. No twentieth-century author equaled Woolrich’s ability to create suspense, and Hollywood producers recognized it early on. Few writers have had as many films based on their work as Woolrich, beginning with Convicted (1938), based on “Angel Face,” starring Rita Hayworth, and continuing with Street of Chance (1942), on The Black Curtain, with Burgess Meredith and Claire Trevor; The Leopard Man (1943), on Black Alibi, with Dennis O’Keefe and Jean Brooks; Phantom Lady (1944), on the novel, with Ella Raines and Alan Curtis; The Mark of the Whistler (1944), on “Chance,” with Richard Dix and Janis Carter; Deadline at Dawn (1946), on the novel, with Susan Hayward; Rear Window (1954), on “It Had to Be Murder,” with Grace Kelly and James Stewart; and fifteen others.
“Borrowed Crime” was published in the July 1939 issue.
The doctor lowered his stethoscope with an irritable gesture. “No improvement at all,” he snapped. “He’s losing ground, if anything, staying here!”
The kid’s ribs were sticking out like a fish’s backbone. The doctor turned to him and spoke more gently than he had to the man and woman. “Put on your shirt, sonny; don’t catch cold.” He eyed the row of medicine bottles ranged above the bed, swept his arm at them impatiently. “Throw them out; they’re not doing the boy a bit of good! I gave you my diagnosis over two months ago. He’s got to be taken out West, where the air’s dry and the sun’s hot. I can’t do anything for him; you’re just wasting your time and mine by sending for me.”
The woman had begun to cry soundlessly into her apron, with the terrible resignation of the poor. The doctor banged his instrument case shut, stalked ill-humoredly out of the room.
Swanson slouched dejectedly after him. “But, Doc, I ain’t got—” He faltered.
The doctor stopped short in the outer doorway, looked around at him short-temperedly. “I know,” he said, “you haven’t got the money! That’s the hell of it. It’ll take a thousand dollars.”
The boy had started to cough again in the room they’d just come from. The woman closed the door, but it came through anyway.
It seemed to infuriate the doctor even more. Maybe he was a conscientious man, hated the feeling of helplessness a case like this gave him. “Hear that?” he exclaimed. “You better find some way of getting that kid out of here, or you won’t have to hear it very much longer!”
Swanson kept staring at him helplessly. “If there was only some way...”
The doctor looked him squarely in the eye. “If it was my child, I’d find a way; you bet your bottom dollar!” he said wrathfully. “Go out and hit somebody over the head for it! Hold up a bank! I don’t care where you get it, but see that you get it!”
He went stomping down the tenement stairs outside, swearing audibly all the way down. His bad temper didn’t mislead Swanson any; he knew he was a sympathetic, honest man.
He closed the door and went in again, hanging his head. The kid had stopped coughing now — until the next time. His wife came out of the room, carrying a cloth half-hidden so he wouldn’t see it. He knew those cloths, knew what color they were apt to show if you unfolded them.
He sat down at the table in the shabby room, held his head in both hands, staring down at nothing; at the soiled oilcloth and the newspaper resting on it. He had no chance of borrowing; money was only loaned to those who already had something, who could offer security. Even a loan-shark wouldn’t have considered him a worthwhile risk — he had no job that could be milked later on.
Even the doctor’s sinister suggestion, although it had only been angry rhetoric, was beyond his scope. Bank robbery was an organized business nowadays; what chance had a solitary, unarmed amateur against all their guards and tear bombs and alarm systems? And you didn’t find a thousand dollars on the first man you held up on the streets these days.
The paper had been there under his eyes the whole time. It was no use looking at the Help Wanteds any more. He’d tried too long and hard, broken his heart, smashed his head against the stone wall of conditions as they were. Besides, even if by a miracle he could land something tomorrow, what hope had he of getting anything that would pay a thousand dollars even in a year’s time? He flung it tormentedly away from him, with its black scarehead: No Clue Yet in Ranger Slaying.