Роберт Беллем - Pulp Frictions

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Pulp Frictions: краткое содержание, описание и аннотация

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Enter a world of seedy nightclubs, dangerous, dimly-lit street and cool, wisecracking dicks pitting themselves against armies of ruthless gangsters. This is pulp fiction, a genre spawned amid the disillusionment of post-World War I America — and now reaching new heights of popularity. 
Writers like Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett turned that unique blend of rapid-fire action, violence and cynical humour into an art form that is being recreated by a fresh wave of young writers whose stories have all the drama and atmosphere of their predecessors’. 
This page-turning collection, brought together by a true aficionado of the hardboiled story, includes, of course, Chandler and Hammett, but also Mickey Spillane, Ross MacDonald, Ed McBain and James Hadley Chase from the vintage years and from the current generation James Ellroy, Elmore Leonard and Quentin Tarantino, to name just a few of the twenty great writers featured here. Even Stephen King, doyen of the world of horror, has turned his hand to pulp fiction and is represented in this book. 
The world of the hard-drinking, fast-action, apparently indestructible private eye, personified by Chandler’s creation, Philip Marlowe, was never more vibrant. It’s all here, and more, in a book that no fan of the genre can afford to miss.

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‘You think it will be different now?’

Eighty-one grand seed money; a wiser, more contemplative Hearns. Maybe I’d even dye a little grey in my hair. ‘Right. Once I clear up a little legal trouble I’m in, I’m going to suggest a long vacation in Acapulco, maybe a trip to Rio. She’ll see the difference in me. She’ll know.’

I looked back at the highway, downshifted for a turn, and felt a tap on my shoulder. I turned to face Bad Bob and caught a big right hand studded with signet rings square in the face.

Blood blinded me; my foot hit the brake; the car jerked into a hillside and stalled out. I swung a haphazard left; another sucker shot caught me; through a sheet of crimson I saw Murikami grab the money and hotfoot it.

I wiped red out of my eyes and pursued. Murikami was heading for the bluffs and a path down to the beach; a car swerved in front of me and a large man jumped out, aimed, and fired at the running figure — once, twice, three times. A fourth shot sent Bob Murikami spiralling over the cliff, the money bag sailing, spilling greenbacks. I pulled my roscoe, shot the shooter in the back, and watched him go down in a clump of crabgrass.

Gun first, I walked over; I gave the shooter two good measure shots, point blank to the back of the head. I kicked him over to his front side and from what little remained of his face identified him. Sergeant Jenks, Bill Malloy’s buddy on the Alien Squad.

Deep shit without a depth gauge.

I hauled Jenks to his Plymouth, stuffed him in the front seat, stood back and shot the gas tank. The car exploded; the ex-cop sizzled like french-fried guacamole. I walked over the cliff and looked down. Bob Murikami was spread-eagled on the rocks and shitloads of sunbathers were scooping up cash, fighting each other for it, dancing jigs of greed and howling like hyenas.

I tailspinned down to Tijuana, found a flop and a bottle of drugstore hop, and went prowling for Maggie Cordova. A fat white lezbo songbird would stick out, even in a pus pocket like TJ — and I knew the heart of TJ lowlife was the place to start.

The hop edged down my nerves and gave me a savoir faire my three-day beard and raggedy-assed state needed. I hit the mule act strip and asked questions; I hit the whorehouse strip and the strip that featured live fuck shows twenty-four hours a day. Child beggars swarmed me; my feet got sore from kicking them away. I asked, asked, asked about Maggie Cordova, passing out bribe pesos up the wazoo. Then — right on the street — there she was, turning up a set of stairs adjoining a bottle liquor joint.

I watched her go up, a sudden jolt of nerves obliterating my dope edge. I watched a light go on above the bottle shop — and Lorna Kafesjian doing ‘Goody, Goody’ wafted down at me.

Pursuing the dream, I walked up the stairs and knocked on the door.

Footsteps tapped towards me — and suddenly I felt naked, like a litany of everything I didn’t have was underlining the sound of heels over wood.

No eighty-one-grand reunion stash.

No Sy Devore suits to make a suitably grand Hollywood entrance.

No curfew papers for late-night Hollywood spins.

No PI buzzer for the dramatic image of the twentieth century.

No world-weary, tough-on-the-outside, tender-on-the-inside sensitive code of honour shtick to score backup pussy with in case Lorna shot me down.

The door opened; fat Maggie Cordova was standing there. She said, ‘Spade Hearns. Right?’

I stood there — dumbstruck beyond dumbstruck. ‘How did you know that?’

Maggie sighed — like I was old news barely warmed over. ‘Years ago I bought some tunes from Lorna Kafesjian. She needed a stake to buy her way out of a shack job with a corny guy who had a wicked bad case on her. She told me the guy was a sewer crawler, and since I was a sewer crawler performing her songs, I might run into him. Here’s your ray of hope, Hearns. Lorna said she always wanted to see you one more time. Lor and I have kept in touch, so I’ve got a line on her. She said I should make you pay for the info. You want it? Then give.’

Maggie ended her pitch by drawing a dollar sign in the air. I said, ‘You fingered the B of A heist. You’re dead meat.’

‘Nix, gumshoe. You’re all over the LA papers for the raps you brought down looking for me, and the Mexes won’t extradite. Givesky.’

I forked over all the cash in my wallet, holding back a five-spot for mad money. Maggie said, ‘Eight-eighty-one Calle Verdugo. Play it pianissimo , doll. Nice and slow.’

I blew my last finnsky at a used clothing store, picking up a chalk-stripe suit like the one Bogart wore in The Maltese Falcon. The trousers were too short and the jacket was too tight, but overall the thing worked. I dry-shaved in a gas station men’s room, spritzed some soap at my armpits, and robbed a kiddie flower vendor of the rest of his daffodils. Thus armed, I went to meet my lost love.

Knock, knock, knock on the door of a tidy little adobe hut; boom, boom, boom, as my overwrought heart drummed a big band beat. The door opened — and I almost screamed.

The four years since I’d seen Lorna had put forty thousand hard miles on her face. It was sun-soured — seams, pits, and scales; her laugh lines had changed to frown lines as deep as the San Andreas Fault. The body that was once voluptuous in white satin was now bloated in a Mex charwoman’s serape. From the deep recesses of what we once had, I dredged a greeting.

‘What’s shakin’, baby?’

Lorna smiled, exposing enough dental gold to front a revolution. ‘Aren’t you going to ask me what happened, Spade?’

I stayed game. ‘What happened, baby?’

Lorna sighed. ‘Your interpretation first, Spade. I’m curious.’

I smoothed my lapels. ‘You couldn’t take a good thing. You couldn’t take the dangerous life I led. You couldn’t take the danger, romance, the heartache and vulnerability inherent in a mean-street-treading knight like me. Face it, baby: I was too much man for you.’

Lorna smiled — more cracks appeared in the relief map of her face. She said, ‘Your theatrics exhausted me more than my own. I joined a Mexican nunnery, got a tan that went bad, started writing music again, and found myself a man of the earth — Pedro, my husband. I make tortillas, wash my clothes in a stream, and dry them on a rock. Sometimes, if Pedro and I need extra jack, I mix Margaritas and work the bar at the Blue Fox. It’s a good, simple life.’

I played my ace. ‘But Maggie said you wanted to see me — “one more time”, like—’

‘Yeah, like in the movies. Well, Hearns, it’s like this. I sold “Prison of Love” to about three dozen bistro belters who passed it off as their own. It’s ASCAP’d under at least thirty-five titles, and I’ve made a cool five grand on it. And, well, I wrote the song for you back in our salad days, and in the interest of what we had together for about two seconds, I’m offering you ten per cent — you inspired the damn thing, after all.’

I slumped into the doorway — exhausted by four years of torching, three days of mayhem and killing. ‘Hit me, baby.’

Lorna walked to a cabinet and returned with a roll of Yankee greenbacks. I winked, pocketed the wad, and walked down the street to a cantina. The interior was dark and cool; Mex cuties danced nude on the bar top. I bought a bottle of tequila and slugged it straight, fed the jukebox nickels and pushed every button listing a female vocalist. When the booze kicked in and the music started, I sat down, watched the nudie gash gyrate, and tried to get obsessed.

The Egyptian Lure

Carroll John Daly

The ‘founding father’ of all hardboiled dicks was Race Williams, a fearless, cynical, impatient, aggressive and even brutal man who at a stroke became the archetype of all his kind. Described as about 30 years of age, almost six feet tall with brown hair and black eyes, he had previously worked as a newspaperman, insurance investigator, undercover man for the racing commission and police detective in New York, Chicago and California before setting up as a private eye. Regarded at first as a kind of ‘lone urban cowboy Race could be sentimental about women in trouble; but although he was on the side of the law in fighting gangsters, crooked politicians and criminals of all kinds (including many evil foreigners whom he viewed as a threat to the political welfare of America), he still had an uneasy relationship with the police. Throughout his career, officers of the law were forever warning him about the reckless way in which he gunned down suspects without so much as a second thought. He was deadly accurate with a revolver, once firing two guns simultaneously and only making a single hole in the forehead of his target. Williams made his debut in the May 1923 issue of Black Mask, the detective story magazine which was the first home for hardboiled fiction, in a case entitled ‘Knights of the Open Plain’ in which the villains he pursued were members of the Ku Klux Klan. Soon, however, he was at work in the more familiar territory of city streets... and detective fiction would never be the same again.

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