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.
“Some’dy ought to pin a medal on you, Handsome,” Cruikshank said.
“I’m not through with this town yet.”
Melrose came in then, a dull burn on either wet cheek bone. He handed McFee the indorsement, sat down and shelved his chin on his chest. He did not speak, did not look at McFee. The latter examined the signature. A clock ticked loudly somewhere. In the next room the Mayor was booming, “Luke Addams is a man in whom I have the greatest confidence. It will be a pleasure—” Dutch Louie and His Pals whipped into a jazz.
Parading his eyes around the room, McFee blinked at the washroom door, let them idle on the ornate desk. He went to the desk, bent over the wire basket and looked through the papers in it. He stood erect and stared at the end of his cigarette. A couple of overcoats hung on the cloak tree, near the desk. McFee put a hand inside one of them and brought forth a long manila envelope with “Shelldon” penciled in one corner. The envelope was open. He glanced into it.
Melrose lifted his head. Rage had contracted his eye pupils, ground them to points of bitter, fierce light. He did not speak.
McFee handed Cruikshank the Shelldon file and the Mayor’s indorsement. “Stick ’em in the Tribune vault a while,” he said.
“Right,” Cruikshank muttered.
15
Littner gave McFee the brown paper parcel. “No. 3 trash collection wagon brought them in,” he said.
“Very nice,” McFee answered. He sat down, the parcel on his knees. He looked at his watch. “Twelve-thirty-five. It’s just twenty-four hours since a lady came to see me, at Cato’s. She said the lad she was with, Ranee Damon, had gone into the Gaiety about an hour before. She said he’d followed Sam Melrose—”
Melrose ejaculated, “He did not. I was on Scudder’s yacht. I got all the alibis—” He stopped there, wiped his mouth on the napkin. “You birds got nothing on me.”
McFee proceeded softly, “The lady and I got into the Gaiety. Damon had been shot. He died. Some’dy had stepped on a tube of grease paint. Crimson. Smeared it around. Damon’s body walked out. I found it in Maggie O’Day’s. Maggie was his mother. She had rolled him home in her wheel chair. Maggie was dead — gas. But there was a bruise on her head. Maybe she fell. Maybe she was slugged. I found a smear of crimson grease paint on a newspaper on the floor. There was no grease paint on Maggie’s shoes or Damon’s. Very well. I figured this way: The party killed Damon stepped on the tube of grease paint, in the dark, bust it open, got all smeared up. Grease paint is bad. Maggie saw that party beating it out the Gaiety. The party followed Maggie home, to see how come. Maggie accused the party of murdering her son and got slugged — with her own crutch, maybe. The gas was to make it look like suicide — grief. The party’s shoe smeared the newspaper. The party didn’t know it, went away. Now grease paint is hard to clean off fabric goods, and when the party saw what’d happened to a nice pair of shoes it looked like a good idea to get rid of ’em. Sounds easy. Only it isn’t. Littner’s men found ’em at the city trash collection dump.”
McFee unrolled Littner’s brown paper parcel. A pair of green satin pumps fell out. He held one of them up. The sole, instep, and right side of the pump were smeared with crimson grease paint.
Melrose blurted, “That lets my boys out.”
McFee lighted a cigarette, looked at the match a while. “I said a lady came to see me at Cato’s. She was wearing green satin pumps — these pumps. When I took her home three hours later she was wearing green snakeskin slippers. She beat it out the Gaiety and phoned headquarters around 1:30. I picked her up on Third at 3:15 — nearly two hours. That gave her plenty time to tail Maggie O’Day home, kill her, get back to the car, drive to her apartment — taking the Shelldon file with her — change her shoes, and get back to Third.”
McFee rolled a match in his ear. “But I couldn’t figure out why Irene Mayo killed Damon. Wasn’t she going to make him Governor, herself the Governor’s lady? So I went back to the Gaiety and ran a string along what looked like the bullet trajectory. There was a horizontal groove in the door jamb level with the line the bullet followed—”
A muffled, sobbing sound interrupted McFee and terminated in a wail of despair. McFee wiped his face and throat with a handkerchief. A bitter, silent moment went by.
McFee said deliberately, “Irene Mayo wrote those ‘Mr. Inside’ notes. She planted that Shelldon file here because Melrose’s blonde had taken Damon with five grand. She wasn’t with Damon last night. She tailed him down to the Gaiety. Melrose wasn’t there. Slick little number. She tried to pull a fast one at her apartment this morning with a ‘Shelldon’ envelope full of blanks. Said she’d found it on Damon while I was in Leclair’s room. Said it had fooled her. Well, she pretty near fooled me.” McFee stared gloomily at his cigarette. “Damon must have given her that gun — Metz’ gun. She didn’t intend to kill him — the lad she was going to make Governor. No. She fired at Leclair. Because Leclair was gumming up the works. You can’t figure women. The bullet ricochetted from the door jamb, took Damon—”
That tortured cry came again, McFee got up, walked towards the washroom door.
A pistol shot reverberated in the room.
McFee took three strides forward. The door leaned open. He caught the redheaded girl in his arms. He carried her to a chair, laid her in it. Littner, Melrose, Cruikshank stood around. People came rushing in, the Mayor booming...
McFee said, “I had a notion she’d do it.” And then, huskily, “I never was much of a lad for hanging a woman.”
The City of Hell!
Leslie T. White
Barely remembered today, Leslie T. White (1901–1967) was a lifelong member of the law enforcement community, beginning as a ranger on some of the large private estates that dotted the landscape in the California of the early part of the twentieth century.
He moved to jobs in the sheriffs office and police department before becoming one of a few highly paid investigators attached to the District Attorney’s office in Los Angeles, where he became a largely self-taught expert in fingerprinting, electronic eavesdropping, trailing suspects, photography, and other nascent tools of crime fighters.
He had headline-making experiences in the tong wars, battles with communists, helping to solve the Doheny murder mystery, and numerous other major criminal activities in California. These experiences served as the basis for his autobiography, Me, Detective, and such novels as Homicide (1937), Harness Bull (1937) and The River of No Return (1941).
His 1943 novel 5,000 Trojan Horses was filmed in the same year by Warner as Northern Pursuit with a screenplay by Frank Gruber; it was directed by Raoul Walsh and starred Errol Flynn. Ten years later, Harness Bull was made into the famous motion picture Vice Squad (released in Great Britain as The Girl in Room 17) with a screenplay by Lawrence Roman; it was directed by Arnold Laven and starred Edward G. Robinson.
“The City of Hell!” was first published in Black Mask in October 1935.
Four honest cops and a city of gunmen and graft
The piercing screams of a woman filled the awed hollow of silence left void by the chatter of a sub-machine-gun and acted as a magnet of sound to suck the big squad car to the scene. Even before the police driver braked the hurtling machine to a full stop, Duane and Barnaby debouched from either side of the tonneau, balanced a moment on the running-boards, and hit the pavement running. Then while the doughty sergeant restrained the hysterical mother, Captain Barnaby went down on his baggy knees beside the broken little body.