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.
He had quit!
What was wrong? It hadn’t been like that in the old days! Sure, there was graft — you can’t change human nature entirely — but small stuff that meant little, not this wholesale business. But murder was murder and the old laws of war or peace always offered safety to women and babies. Was it the laws, the tricks the crooks’ shysters were skilled in under the guise of legality? Was it the way they were enforced, or the present administration?
Grogan had accused him of unbecoming conduct. What in hell had he done to rate that? Slap a baby killer? Was that unbecoming of an officer? The Old Man had called him a law violator! Huh! What was he paid a salary for?
Unable to find the answers to his muttered queries, Barnaby shrugged and raised his chin. Darkness had settled over the city; street lights sputtered into being. He glanced at a corner post and found himself in the district where Sam Duane lived...
Cold sweat dampened his collar. Had Sam got it, too? Sam had a wife and family...! Barnaby fished out a handkerchief and daubed his face. He’d better have a talk with Sam. It was one thing for Barnaby to throw up his job, he had no one to worry about. Somehow he’d just never found the time to get married. It wasn’t that he hadn’t wanted to — he had. He wanted a real home, loved kids, but a copper doesn’t get much time for courting women — not the kind he’d want to mother his kids.
It took him ten minutes to reach the shabby little duplex that Sam Duane called home. A woman admitted him. Her wan features were wrinkled and worn, her body shapeless, and her head wore a crown of pale silver, but to Barnaby, Molly Duane was still the golden-locked colleen she had been the day she married Sam. One look at her patient face warned him.
She smiled and inclined her head to a curtained opening.
“Sam’s in the parlor. Go right in, Clyde.”
Barnaby squared his shoulders, swung on his heel and pushed into the room.
Sam Duane was sitting in a decrepit rocker, his stockinged feet on the windowsill, his chin resting on his chest, clamping his briar between his teeth. He spoke without turning his head.
“H’lo, Skipper. I hoped you’d drop in.”
Barnaby pulled up a chair without invitation and straddled it. He probed through his pockets for his own pipe, found it and rapped it against the heel of his palm.
“Grogan haul you up?” he asked with studied casualness.
Duane bobbed his bald head. “Yep. Back to the goats with a log of wood.” Which is a copper’s descriptive phrase to explain that he was transferred to the suburbs to swing a club as he patrolled a foot beat.
“You quit, eh?” Duane added.
Barnaby thumbed tobacco into his pipe. “Yeah, I...” He stopped as the front door-bell whirred. He heard Molly pad down the corridor, heard the door creak open, then the booming voice of Dennis Hallahan flooded the small home.
Sam lifted his chin. “Come on in, Denny,” he invited. Simultaneously the curtains were brushed aside and Hallahan and another dick named Louis Forsythe came in. The parlor seemed crowded.
Hallahan and Forsythe belonged to the same breed as Duane and Barnaby; born coppers, disillusioned, bitter, but patriotic to a losing cause — justice. To describe them would be to describe any typical old harness bull. Big men, with wide hunched shoulders, powerful biceps and cold, neutral eyes. They hold their heads a certain way after some twenty years of forced aggressiveness, a sort of cross between a Seville bull and an English bull dog. Their mouths grow straight and thin from cynicism, faces furrow and seam from the sight of constant tragedy. They grow to look alike, to think alike, to act alike... A grand breed — a vanishing race.
That was Barnaby, that was Duane, and Hallahan, and Forsythe!
“You gave Grogan some good advice, Clyde,” Hallahan commented. Hallahan had retired a year ago; Forsythe was due to take his pension in another eight months.
Barnaby nodded. “I couldn’t help myself,” he explained slowly. “The sight of him sittin’ there, a beefy, blusterin’ figurehead... well, some-thin’ snapped inside of me and... I quit!”
Hallahan sighed. “It’s too damn’ bad you threw away your pension. This town needs men like you! The city’s in a hell of a shape; the criminal element are in power. What this town needs is a new department. Why a half-dozen old timers could clean this rat’s nest up in forty-eight hours! Why, I remember when Old Mike Duane was chief we...”
He droned on, but ex-Captain Barnaby was not listening.
“... old timers could clean this rat’s nest up in forty-eight hours!”
Old timers? He raised smoldering eyes and looked into the dim-lit faces around him. Forty-eight hours? Two days! And why not?
Forsythe was talking when Barnaby held up a commanding hand for silence. Forsythe paused...
Barnaby’s voice knifed the sudden hush. “Dennis, could you an’ me raise a few old timers for a clean-up?”
No one spoke for nearly five minutes. These were not impulsive youngsters; these were veterans. They knew the seriousness of the suggestive question; knew the potential dynamite packed into the simple phrase.
Hallahan spoke first, almost defensively, for he remembered it was his own words that prompted the query.
“You mean, Clyde, to gun out these hoods?”
Barnaby leaned forward and his voice took on a saw-edge. “I mean to form a real department, to investigate, to convict, to execute.” The idea assumed shape as he spoke. “To clean up; to deal out, not shyster’s law, but justice. Every one of you boys knows the problem — it isn’t enough to find out who commits crime, it’s to make a jury believe it. We know the guilty ones, the thieves, the killers, and the grafters, but we can’t do anything about it. Hallahan, you’re a widower, independent — what do you think?”
Hallahan leaned back in his chair, his eyes watching the blue spiral of smoke that eddied ceilingward from his corncob.
“To deal out justice, not law,” he mused absently. Then a laugh rang from his throat and he sat very straight.
“Think?” he roared. “I think it’s a hell of a good idea! You an’ me...”
“Count me in,” Forsythe interrupted.
Hallahan shook his head. “No, Louis, not you. There’s your pension to think about. You’d lose that. An’ of course Sam is out, too. We can’t use married men with families that might suffer.”
Barnaby nodded in accord. “That’s right,” he growled. “We’ll get no thanks if we succeed. If we fail...” He made an eloquent gesture with his big hands.
Duane never moved his head, but his voice roared out.
“Molly...!”
Steps sounded in the hallway and a moment later, Molly Duane’s head appeared in the opening.
“Yes, Sam?”
Sam turned his face towards her. “Molly,” he said quietly, “the boys are going to form an unofficial police department. They’re goin’ to clean up this town, gun out baby killers an’ the like. They may get themselves killed, Molly. What do you think about it?”
She hesitated just an instant, then: “And you want to go with them, Sam?” she whispered.
Barnaby cut in. “That’s out! Sam ain’t gonna do no such a damn’ fool thing. Why it’s practically suicide an’...”