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.
“Prison! You can’t frighten me, sir. I run a legitimate business.”
“Nuts! You come close to being a professional panderer. Don’t tell me you have a license, it doesn’t cover complicity in fraud!”
Helbourne’s neck reddened. “I won’t be bulldozed by any such tactics, officer!”
“Lieutenant. Lieutenant Teccard.” He surveyed the cheap furniture, the unpainted rack of pigeonholes along one wall.
“It makes no difference to me if you’re the commissioner, himself. I have influential connections at City Hall, too. And my records are always open for inspection by authorized parties.”
“O.K. I’m an authorized party. I’ll have a look at any letters that’ve come in here the last week or so.”
The fat man waved vaguely at the row of green-painted files. “Help yourself. It would take me a couple of months to locate ’em. I don’t file by dates.”
“I’ll make a start at it.” Teccard pulled out a steel drawer marked L. He ran his thumb along the tabs until he came to one with the letters LO, took out all the folders in that section. “How many letters you rake in, per day, mister?”
“You mean the preliminaries?”
“What the hell is a preliminary?” There was a folder with the name Mary Lownes at the top. It was empty, except for an envelope in Helen’s handwriting, addressed to Herald of Happiness — and a clipped-out advertisement.
Helbourne picked up a proof-sheet of a page. “Subscribers are allowed one free advertisement to each subscription, plus as many answers to other advertisements as they wish. Our only restriction is, these replies to ads must be addressed to the box-number of the Herald.” He pointed to one. “Any letters coming in, addressed to that box-number, are copied and sent along to the advertiser, no charge. Without the name or address of the sender, naturally.”
Teccard slid the folders back in place. “The old come-on. What do you tap them for giving out with the address?”
The proprietor of the Herald frowned. “Our fee is five dollars.”
“At each end of the transaction? Five from the snappy skirt who wants the address of some dope who’s given her a line of mush? And another five from the dope himself, if he wants to get in touch with her direct?”
“I don’t like the way you put it, Lieutenant.”
“Catch them coming and going, don’t you! Next thing you know, you’ll catch five years in the pen.” Teccard drifted toward the rack of pigeonholes. There were letters and folded carbon copies in most of them. Under each space was pasted a copy of some Herald advertisement.
Helbourne watched him sullenly. “I’m not responsible for what my subscribers do after I’ve performed an introduction.”
“Hell you aren’t! You’re wide open for prosecution. You were warned some New York crut has been rooking old maids from upstate, using you as a go-between.” There was a cubbyhole with two letters, over an advertisement reading:
YOUNG LADY OF BREEDING
seeks companionship of amiable, sober businessman, under fifty, with quiet tastes. One who would appreciate a better-than-average table and a comfortable home. Not wishing to be supported, as have slight means of own. Able and active, though slight spinal injury. Brunette, thirty-one, former trained nurse. Box LL27.
Helen was a brunette — the age and the references to the spinal injury and having been a nurse clinched it. Teccard reached for the letters.
The fat man caught his arm. “You’ll have to get a court order, if you’re going to ransack my mail, Lieutenant.”
Teccard disengaged the pudgy fingers. “One side, mister. A minute ago you told me to help myself. I am. You want any trouble, I’ll see you get plenty.” He crackled the letters open. The first one read:
Dear Miss Box LL27.
Your ad made a great deal of an appeal to me. I am a farmer, widower five years now, age forty-six. It’s a seventy-acre fruit farm, paying good, too. I have a piano, radio, Chevrolet, nice furniture. The part about better than average cooking appealed to me. Do you play the piano? Hoping to hear from you,
Very sincerely yours,
HERMAN SCHICHTE
Rural Route Six
Pathanville. N.Y.
The lieutenant stuck it back in the pigeonhole. “Park your pants in a chair, mister. It makes me nervous to have anyone reading over my shoulder.”
Helbourne sat down. His mouth was open and he was panting as if he’d been climbing stairs. He kept rubbing his palms on his knees while he watched Teccard run through the other letter.
Your message in the Herald was like music heard far off over the water at night. Perhaps I am wrong, dear LL27, but I sense in your heart an aching desire for the finer things which life too often denies those best fitted to enjoy them. If I have understood you rightly, your appeal for companionship strikes a very sympathetic chord in my own soul. I am thirty-five, dark and, though no Adonis, not bad to look upon, I have been told. I have a comfortable business and am fond of travel, theater and books. Possibly you would care to write me so we could exchange photographs and perhaps — quien sabe — perhaps, some day, rings to symbolize even more than companionship!
With eager anticipation,
Your friend,
HAROLD WILLARD
971 East 88th Street
New York City
Teccard put the letter in his pocket. East Eighty-eighth wasn’t so far from the pier where that grisly bone had been found.
“This Harold Willard,” he said. “Let’s see the other letters you’ve had from him.”
Helbourne shook his head quickly. “That’s the only one. I never heard of the man before. I can’t keep track—”
“Yair. I heard that one. You recognize his signature?”
“No. Not at all.”
“You sent the copy of this drool along to Box LL27?”
“Not yet. It was going out today,” Helbourne said.
“Don’t send it. And don’t send out copies of any letters that come to you from New York City. Not until I’ve had a look at them. Understand?”
“Yes, sir.” Helbourne held his head sideways, as if he expected the lieutenant to take a punch at him. “Is there... ah... any cause for you to believe the writer of that letter — has been involved in these... ah... irregularities you are investigating?” Teccard stuffed a copy of the Herald into his coat pocket. “Only that he writes phoney as hell. You ought to have your butt booted for handling that kind of sewage. And if I find you’ve passed on any more of it, I’m coming back and rub your nose in it.”
It was dusk when the sedan reached the Twenty-third Precinct station house. Teccard was glad to get out of the chill wind whistling across Harlem from the river. “Cap Meyer around?” he inquired of the desk sergeant.
“You’ll find him in the muster room, with a couple boys from Homicide, Lieutenant.”
Teccard strode into the back room. Four men stood about the long table under a green-shaded bulb. Three were in plain-clothes, the fourth was in uniform. There was a black rubber body-bag at the one end of the table, at the other a piece of wax paper with as grisly a collection as the Identification man had ever seen.
“What you got, Meyer?”
The captain turned. His face was a curious greenish-yellow in the cone of brilliance. “I wouldn’t know, Teccard. But whatever it is, you can have it.”