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.
The doorbells said that Maxwell Green lived on the fourth floor. I tried the vestibule door but it was locked, so I broke the glass with my gun butt and opened the door from the inside. I went up the stairs like a madman, and I heard Poppa Hanley’s siren approaching down the street. It was a nice thing to hear, believe me.
When I reached the fourth floor I was in a blind panic. I went from door to door looking for the name Green and finally found it and tried the knob. The door was locked.
From across the hall I charged at that door and hit it with my shoulder. I weigh one eighty and I was glad of it then because I knocked that lock clean out of its socket, split that door in half and nearly rooked my shoulder.
I didn’t fall. I was careful not to fall. I balanced my weight when I hit the door so that I was standing in a fixed position with my gun hand ready when I came to a stop.
I was right.
John Harvey was standing there. He had forced Mr. Maxwell Green into a chair and in Harvey’s hand was a .32 caliber Colt revolver with the hammer back and his index finger flexing on the trigger.
I think if John Harvey had been able to hear, he might have shot me dead when I hit that door. But he couldn’t hear. He saw the expression on Maxwell Green’s face, and only because of that did he know something was amiss. By the time he turned, he was rattled, and when he saw me, he was more rattled.
He fired twice at me before he had his gun all the way around. He put two bullets through the window, only one of them had an urn in front of it and there was a hell of a crash.
I didn’t want to kill that guy because he knew too much that Hanley wanted to know in the way of explanation, but what can you do when someone is throwing lead at you? You don’t aim carefully down the barrel and then break a kneecap. You just keep fanning the trigger and aiming low from instinct and hoping your next one will put him down. But he stands there too long; you think he’s never going to fall. He stands there and you see the red spit of his gun and a bullet cracks by your ear. Close, that means. They only crack when they’re close to your ear. Otherwise, it’s a buzz and that means it’s away from you.
Harvey went to one knee after my third shot and I was already down, hit in the side. It was as though the dog had bit the hand that fed it, for Harvey had not hit me. Maxwell Green had. He picked up a book end and flung it at Harvey and missed and hit me. He nearly broke a pair of ribs.
The next thing I knew Harvey was limping past me and had reached the door. I couldn’t do a thing about it. I was trying to get a breath into my lungs and couldn’t. The damned brass book end had knocked the wind clean out of me and I just couldn’t manage to get a breath of fresh air.
Harvey made the door at exactly the same time that Poppa Hanley made it. They were both going in opposite directions. I tried to yell to Poppa to stop the lug, but you don’t have to tell Poppa what to do. He can scent trouble very easily, and he can scent a killer even more facilely.
Poppa just pulled up without a word and rapped Harvey across the jaw with a gun barrel and then followed it with a lovely left hook which dropped the Babylon editor right in my lap where I rapped him one more for not getting in the way of that book end and getting clipped with it instead of me, who is frail and fragile when it comes to such things.
That was the business. Harvey wasn’t out and he made a try at his gun, tried to jam it into his ear and pull the trigger, but Poppa kicked it out of his hand and growled, “Can’t face the Musica, eh?”
Which, I thought later, was really a very good crack, and I told Dinah so when I saw her. Maxwell Green seemed to know what it was all about.
“Yeah,” Poppa Hanley told him, “the first one he knocked off was Martin Penn. He came to New York on Tuesday instead of taking a fishing trip as he said, and he bumped Martin. Then he went back home and bumped Wilbur Penn, Martin’s brother. He telegraphed Daffy merely to insure his being in Babylon when the body was discovered. Having done that, he told his assistant he was taking the train for this town. Instead, took the plane, got here early, knocked off Fenwick Hanes, and he planned to knock you off this morning.”
“Why, he called me last night and made an appointment with me this morning,” Green exploded. “To kill me!”
“That’s right,” I said, “and you’re a lousy shot with a book end, incidentally.”
“Knowing all that,” Poppa Hanley said, “have you got any ideas on why this deaf plug-ugly was pulling this round robin of homicides? Not just to keep the police department on its toes, certainly.”
Maxwell Green sat back in his chair and sighed. “Yes,” he said. “I think I know the answer.”
“Then give, mister. I want to wrap this thing up for the D.A. before this guy thinks up some excuse a dumb jury will like.”
Maxwell Green said slowly, “Wilbur Penn was the man whom Harvey wanted to get.”
“All right,” I said. “But you and Martin Penn and Fenwick Hanes were all too smart. I mean, you knew that Harvey would be the one to kill Wilbur. Three wise men of Babylon. So to kill Wilbur Penn, John Harvey had to kill four men.”
Green nodded. “But I don’t doubt he would have enjoyed the extra work involved,” he said bitterly. “Four years ago, John Harvey and Wilbur Penn were in love with the same woman, but she married Harvey. Well, that was all right. They had a youngster, a little girl, cute little trick. But it seems that Margaret Harvey, John Harvey’s wife, came into some money. Her uncle left her nearly one hundred thousand dollars. And Harvey began to run around with other women.
“Next thing, Margaret Harvey was found dead. Gas in the kitchen. Wilbur was county attorney at Babylon then, and when he found Margaret, he also found a live canary in the same kitchen. Now, a canary doesn’t live through a gassing that kills a grown woman.
“Wilbur could have put Harvey in the electric chair, but he didn’t. He didn’t because of Margaret’s daughter. Wilbur got quite fond of her. And Margaret’s will left her money to her daughter, so John Harvey had outfoxed himself.
“Wilbur told Harvey the truth, told him that if he ever stepped out of line again, or ever tried to regain custody of the daughter — whom, incidentally, Wilbur took over, with Harvey’s consent, of course — he, Wilbur, would prosecute Harvey to the full extent of the law. And if anything happened to Wilbur, the rest of us, all former law partners, would take up the task.”
“I get the setup,” I said. “This little rat without any hearing got desperate for money. He wanted to get his daughter back, contest the will, and get some of the mazuma. To do that, he had to knock off Wilbur, but he also had to knock off the three men Wilbur Penn had put wise to the mess.”
Green nodded.
Well, it was easy to prove. I had to make a trip to Babylon and it wasn’t as bad a town as it sounds. Harvey’s daughter, little Meg, was a cute trick, and she was too young to know what was going on. She’s living now with Uncle Maxwell, as she says, and John Harvey is only a memory.
Dinah still kids me about the allergy I have for book ends, but if you’ve ever been cracked in the ribs with a well-flung one — or maybe you’re happily married — you’ll bear with me and understand.
The Adventure of the Voodoo Moon
Eugene Thomas
Detective Fiction Weekly, one of the most successful of the mystery pulps, liked to run two or three true crime stories each issue. Easily one of the most popular featured a female spy named Vivian Legrand, who was no sweetheart. Beautiful, intelligent, and resourceful, she was also a liar, blackmailer, and thief who was responsible for her own father’s death. Her exploits, which were reported by Eugene Thomas (1894-?), began to appear so regularly that doubt was cast upon their veracity — with good reason. Without apology, DFW continued to run stories about the woman dubbed “The Lady from Hell,” now acknowledging that the tales were fictional. Were any of the stories true? Was there really a woman named Vivian Legrand? There is little evidence either way, but only the most gullible would accept the notion that all the stories published as true had any genesis in reality.