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.
Captain Chris had trouble with his coattails and his gun. Andopolis’ little gun made its noise again. Captain Chris turned around faster than he could have without some help from lead, and ran out, still having trouble with his gun.
Sail worked the handle of the fire extinguisher. The plunger made ink-sick! noises going up and down. No tetrachloride came out. There was nothing to show it ever would. Then the first squirt ran out about a foot. The second was longer, and the third wet Andopolis’ chest. Sail raised the stream and pumped. He got Andopolis’s eyes full and rolled.
Andopolis fired once at where Sail had been. Then he got up on one foot and hopped for the door. His directions were a little confused. He hopped against a bulkhead.
Andopolis went down on the floor and began having a fit. It was a brief fit, ending by Andopolis turning over on his back and relaxing.
The wall had driven the ice pick the rest of the way into his chest.
Outside, Nola still screamed, but now she made words, scatteredly.
“Andopolis... killing Blick... tried... me... Andopolis... last night... Abel... knife... we... him... tell... broke loose... me... anchor... Blick...”
Sail ran to the table. The chart on the table had two ink lines forming a V with arms that ran to landmarks on Lower Matecumbe, and compass bearings were inked beside each arm, with the point where the lines came together ringed.
Sail left with the chart by the door opposite the one which he had come in by, taking the chart. He found a cabin. He tore the V out of the chart, folded it flat and tucked it under his neck bandages, using the stateroom mirror to adjust the bandages to hide the paper. He threw the rest of the chart out of a port on the river side.
Captain Chris was standing near dead Andopolis. Torn coat lining was hanging from under the right tail of his coat, but he had his gun in his hand.
“Where’d you go to?” he wanted to know.
“Was I supposed to stick around while you drew that gun?”
“The fireworks over?”
“I hope so.”
Captain Chris put his gun in his pants pocket. “You’re pinched. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
Young Joey came in, not as cocky and not stamping his feet. Two plainclothesmen followed him, then two uniformed officers walking ahead of and behind the old man who sold the charts in the hardware store.
The old man pointed at Sail and said, “He’s the one who asked about the feller who ordered the chart. Like I told you, I gave him—”
“Save it.” Joey glared at Captain Chris. “We still ain’t got nothing on this fat sailor, Paw. The girl says Andopolis is a party fisherman whose anchor pulled up part of a boat.”
The girl had told about everything. Joey kept telling the story until he got to, “So Sail yanked the dame out, and now what’ve we got to hold him on?”
Captain Chris, looking mysterious and satisfied, told Sail, “Get your clothes on or we’ll book you for indecent exposure along with the rest.”
“What rest?”
“Get your clothes on.”
Sail dressed sitting on the hurricane wreckage, brushed off the bottoms of his feet and put on socks and shoes. He looked up at Captain Chris as he tied the shoestrings.
“Kidding, aren’t you?”
“Sure, sure!”
Sail bristled. “You’ve got to have a charge. Just try running me in on an INV and see what it gets you.”
“I’ve got a charge.”
“In a gnat’s eye.”
Captain Chris said with relish, “You’ve been playing the slot machines which are so popular in our fair city. You used a slug made of two hollow halves that fit together and hold muriatic or something that eats the works of the machines and puts them on the fritz. We found a box of the slugs on your boat. We have witnesses who saw you play machines before they went bad.”
Sail wore a dark look toward the squad car. “This is a piker trick.”
Captain Chris tooled the car over a bad street. “You put that gambling joint in Bimini on the bum, too. What’s the idea?”
“Nuts.”
“Now, don’t get that way. I’m jugging you, yes. But it’s the principle. It’s to show you that it ain’t a nice idea to football the cops around. Not in Miami, anyway. You’ll get ten days or ten bucks is all. It’s the principle. That, and a bet I made with Joey that if he’d let me handle this and keep his mouth shut, and you beat me to the kill, I’d jug you on this slot machine thing. Joey wanted you jugged. Now, what’s this between you and slot machines and wheels?”
Sail considered for a while, then took in breath.
“I even went to an institution where they cure things, once,” he said. “Kind of a bughouse.”
“Huh?”
“One psychologist called it a fixation. I’ve always had it. Can’t help it. Some people can’t stand being alone, and some can’t stand being shut up in a room, and some can’t take mice. With me, it’s gambling. Can’t stand it. I can’t stand the thought of taking chances to make money.”
“Just a lad who gets his dough the safe and sane method.”
“That’s the idea,” Sail agreed, “in a general way.”
The Maltese Falcon
Dashiell Hammett
Dashiell Hammett (1894–1961) is arguably the most significant author of the hard-boiled private-eye novel in the history of American letters. Carroll John Daly is credited with inventing the genre, but it is Hammett who popularized it while elevating it to the level of serious literature.
By far his best-known work, and the most famous mystery novel ever written by an American, is The Maltese Falcon. After Hammett had written numerous short stories, novellas and two novels about the Continental Op, the series character that had made him both famous and successful, The Maltese Falcon was a major departure, the protagonist being the newly created but now iconic Sam Spade. Whereas the Op worked for a large firm and had a boss to whom he was answerable, Spade worked only with a partner who was murdered early in the novel, after which he was responsible to no one but himself and his sense of ethics.
Like most of Hammett’s important work, The Maltese Falcon was originally published in Black Mask. It was a five-part serial running from September 1929 to January 1930; Alfred A. Knopf published it in book form on February 14, 1930.
The book was dramatically revised after serialization, with more than two thousand textual differences between the two versions. Some of the changes were made by copy editors at Knopf but the majority appear to have been made by Hammett himself. This is the first time that the original magazine version has been published since its initial appearance eighty years ago.
Chapter I
Spade and Archer
Samuel Spade’s jaw was long and bony, his chin a jutting V under the more flexible V of his mouth. His nostrils curved back to make another, smaller V. His yellow-gray eyes were horizontal. The V motif was picked up again by thickish brows rising outward from twin creases above a hooked nose, and his pale brown hair grew down, from high, flat temples, in a point on his forehead. He looked rather pleasantly like a blond Satan.
He said to Effie Perine: “Yes, sweetheart?”
She was a lanky, sunburned girl whose tan dress of thin woolen stuff clung to her with an effect of dampness. Her eyes were brown and playful in a shiny, boyish face.
She finished shutting the door behind her, leaned against it, and said:
“There’s a girl wants to see you. Her name’s Wonderly.”