Tag Archives: The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps

A Pinch of Snuff – Eric Taylor (1929)

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Well this is a grim pinch of business.  After the breezy Perfect Crime, I was not expecting this.

Apparently Montreal had a seedy underbelly in 1922.  Since it is specified as “to the east”, Montreal must be lying on its side. [1]  In a single-room apartment, a family of five is sweltering despite it snowing outside.  I don’t know, crack a window maybe?  Did that technology not exist in 1922?

Paterfamilias Armand is chugging a beer, taking stock of his life and wanting to sell short.  He sees his “youngest brat”, who they can’t afford to name, has run out of milk the same time he ran out of gin.  He sees his wife Gabrielle “bony, hollow-chested with bent shoulders, reproachful eyes, and mute lips — a hag at 30.”  Daughter Irene, diagnosed as undernourished, is looking for crumbs in an empty breadbox.  Maybe he keeps the window shut to avoid being tempted to jump.

At 9 pm, Armand grabs his jacket and leaves.  He is going to rob the “wholesale provision warehouse.”  He is so poor that he has to “beg an empty sack” from the corner grocery store to carry the loot in.  Not only does this dolt instantly provide a direct evidence trail back to the clerk who can identify him — please, career criminals, for the sake of the environment, get a reusable bag.

Armand is not the first person to hit this warehouse so a patrolman spots him immediately.  Armand takes off running.  The officer pursues him, and shoots him in the leg.  Despite this injury, the cop is unable to catch up to him before he arrives back home 20 minutes later.  He collapses in the arms of his crying wife.  Finally the cop arrives and trips over a gin bottle.  Armand tries to choke him, but is interrupted by what seems to be a gas explosion.

The passage is so clumsily written, I’m not sure what happened.  There did not seem to be much damage, but it was enough to finish off Armand.  Gabrielle “crossed the floor to her man . . . and stood above him.”  So I guess she is OK.  No, wait, “she clutches her chest” and keels over dead, I guess with a heart attack.  A policeman carries out Armand’s two baby daughters, but Irene just slips away into the crowd

Irene manages to walk a few miles and “that night she fell in with a crippled beggar.”  Wow, that is doubly un-PC; lucky he was white or the description could have taken a really ugly turn.  Irene tells him her story.  Rather than, say, calling Child Protective Services, the man tells his own amusing anecdote to the child.  He had stolen some loot.  Running from the police, he fell on the train tracks where his legs were sliced off by a freight train.  Sadly this did not happen in the US where he could have sued for millions.  The bum offers to kill the cop who shot her father.  She says if he will find the name, she will kill him herself.

Irene hangs out with the legless homeless man for 3 years until she is 16 because who wouldn’t?  He taught her all manner of crime — shoplifting, purse-snatching, burglary — though her education is woefully deficient in the art of quick getaways.  And he gave her the name of the cop who shot her father — Jean Duret.  After the beggar’s death, she put together a gang and established a headquarters at the abandoned snuff factory.

One day, a friend of her fence shows up looking for a place to hide out.  Irene feels obligated to take him in.  Once he commits a murder, however, her hospitality wanes.  She goes to the crime scene and leaves a clue that will lead Detective Duret — her father’s killer — to the snuff factory.

Her plan gets bollixed up in a way that would make a pretty good movie.  There is even sort of a happy ending.

Although it started out depressing and grim, after Armand’s death, it got a lot more fun.

Footnotes:

  • [1] This made sense at 3 am.
  • First published in the June 1929 issue of Black Mask.

The Perfect Crime – C.S. Montanye (1920)

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I

Two men just met in an unsavory waterfront saloon.  Rider Lott pulls out a small case and pinches out a bit.  You’re thinking snuff but no, he places it in a nostril and snorts it right up Broadway.  He offers a hit to his new friend, “Walk in a snow storm, brother?”  Martin Klug says, “It’s dope, isn’t it?”  Lott replies, “Happy dust.”

Lott tries to figure Klug’s particular brand of mayhem by looking him over (i.e. judging a crook by his cover).  He quickly reels off colorful guesses such as “gay-cat, blaster, dip, leather snatcher, flash-thief, peterman, derrick swinger, river rat, rattler grab, and freight car crook” although the cocaine might have caused him to mix a few Pornhub categories in there before getting around to an actual crime.

Klug wisely cops to the last one before Lott starts listing off watersports.  Lott says he himself is an author and inventor.  He wants write a book about his invention — the Perfect Crime.  He is currently workshopping Chapter 1:  Get high and reveal your plan to a complete stranger in a bar.  Lott says, “Crime doctors and criminologists say it is impossible to commit a crime without leaving a clue.”  He basically believes the law of averages requires someone will get away clue-free; might as well be him.

A voluptuous blonde joins them.  Lott introduces her as “Beatrice the Beautiful Brakeman’s Daughter” but doesn’t reveal what makes the brakeman so beautiful.  It is pretty humorous when she says, “My name isn’t Beatrice and I never saw you before.”  Lott questions why such a hot babe is in such a dive.  She lost her job as an upstairs maid 3 weeks ago, so apparently can no longer afford the the glamorous, jet-set life of a domestic servant.

Rich old Mrs. Cabbler had entrapped her by leaving a $10 spot on the dresser.  Not-Beatrice had long dreamed of buying fancy elbow-length white gloves.  She couldn’t resist the $10 ($130 today).  Mrs. Cabbler demanded the cash back and fired her without pay.  Not-Beatrice feels the Bern and says, “Mrs. Cabbler has more money than she knows what to do with.  Money isn’t much use to a person 70 years old.  Young people should have the money!” [1] Conveniently, she keeps it in a trunk under the bed.

Lott sees a 70 year old woman literally sleeping on a fortune to be the perfect test of his Perfect Crime theory.  Not-Beatrice still wants to buy fancy gloves, and Martin wants a new pair a shoes . . . these are the least ambitious crooks in history.  Lott would use his cut to publish his perfect crime book which he muses, “Will be of wonderful assistance to young, ambitious crust-floppers, grifters, and heavymen.”  I’m not sure he didn’t lapse in porn-speak again.

They meticulously plan the crime.  Lott says the Perfect Crime should be committed by a single person — yet he plans this heist for two people.  Not-Beatrice, with no experience in crime (other than swiping the $10), must go to lead the other person to the cash.  Her accomplice will be chosen based on his experience, skill-set, and coolness under fire . . . nah, Lott says he and Krug will just draw straws.  Worst criminal mastermind ever!

Lott draws the long straw so will rob Mrs. Crabbler with Not-Beatrice.  Lott instructs them, “Use no violence of any kind.  Take no chances, leave no clues.  Take great pains to cover every step, and don’t be in a hurry.  After you have the money, if you will go back and check over every move you have made in search of suspicious or incriminating clues left behind, and then remove them, you will have accomplished the Perfect Crime.”

II

After the crime, the three meet up at the 10th Avenue apartment of Not-Beatrice’s sister.  Klug assures Lott that they left behind no clues.  Unfortunately, Mrs. Crabbler woke up during the robbery so they had to kill her.  Lott is peeved at this, but his $3,000 cut raises his spirits.  Not-Beatrice is not too choked up over the “old hag” dying.  In addition to her $3,000 cut, she bogarted a fine pair of white gloves from the old woman.

Lott and Klug fight over who will get Not-Beatrice.  Well actually, she chooses Lott and Klug attacks him.  Lott brains him with a whiskey bottle, and kills him.  This must be 2nd Chapter stuff — leave a dead body at the home of the sister of one of the perps.

It finally comes out that when Not-Beatrice stole the nice new gloves, she threw her old gloves away in the old woman’s trash can.  D’oh!  Within seconds, the police traced the laundry marks to this address.

Not much new going on here.  For a story called The Perfect Crime, the actual crime is stunningly mundane.  Still, it is pithy and good-humored.

Other Stuff:

  • [1] On the other hand.  Although, the shocker here is that Newsweek still exists.
  • First published in the July 1920 issue of Black Mask.
  • Cocaine was big business until the Jones-Miller Act of 1922.  In what can only be explained by a collapse in the time/space continuum, the two politicians made cocaine illegal rather than 1) taking campaign contributions from Big Pharma to keep it legal, and 2) then taxing it.
  • This is the 2nd post entitled The Perfect Crime.  See also, The Utterly Perfect Murder.

Pigeon Blood – Paul Cain (1933)

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The woman was bent far forward . . .

Now that’s how you start a story!

It regresses to the mean quickly as she is only leaning over the steering wheel with squinty eyes looking at the road ahead and checking the mirrors for the car following her.  Her eyes get the opposite of squinty as they begin firing on her.  One shot blows out a tire, and a parting shot thuds into the back of the seat beside the woman.

The brave drive-by missers speed away, leaving the woman fortuitously stranded by a gas station.  She gives the mechanic her card and cabs her way back to Manhattan.  They see from her card that she is Mrs. Dale Hanan [1] of the Park Avenue Dale Hanans.  The mechanic recognizes her his the name.  “She’s Hanan’s wife — the millionaire.  Made his dough in oil” which is why his bread is so yummy.  His partner says, “That’s swell.  We can soak him plenty.”

Her cab stops at  63rd and Park Avenue.  Hey, there’s the Regency — I’ve stayed there!  She calls her husband and tells him what happened.  An hour later, he is paying a visit to Mr. Druse.  Hanan tells Druse that Jeffrey Crandall just tried to kill his wife.  Hanan says his ex-wife Catherine has gone through about $115k of her inheritance gambling.  She has further run up a debt of $68k.

Hanan says his wife still has a set of rubies named “Pigeon Blood” by the worst marketing department on earth.  The plan was for Crandall to steal the rubies, Catherine to collect the insurance to pay him back, and Crandall to give her back the rubies.  Which sounds great, although, I’m not sure why Crandall needed to be involved at all.  Anyhoo, Crandall gave her back some phonies, doubling his take.  She threatened to rat him out to the insurance company even if she had to go to jail.  That’s when his boyz started shooting at her.  Druse agrees to help out for the low, low sum of $35k.  What the hell, that’s $650k in 2018 dollars!

Druse goes to her place and finds her drunk, with a dead man in her apartment.  The dude tried to sneak up the fire escape so she brained him with a niblick.  They leave the apartment.  Druse asks how long she and Hanan have been divorced.  Like every woman I talk to, she takes about 3 seconds to tell him she is married.

They go to Druse’s luxurious penthouse apartment.  It is as fabulous as you would expect from a guy who takes $650k cases.  It lacks an infinity pool, but has an infinity carpet — the living room is open to the dark city skyline outside, without even a railing.

Druse leaves Catherine and uses a phone downstairs to call Hanan.  He tells Hanan his wife Catherine is dead — what a scamp!  Then he goes to see Crandall and gives him the same story.  Crandall turns out to be pretty honest as gangsters go.  The rubies had already been switched out when he stole them.

Druse regroups with the Hanans back at his crib.  Druse lays out the whole story and someone inevitably goes over the edge of that open-air living room.  The story is pretty standard, but the image of that death is staying with me.  That would be worth the price of admission in a movie.

And by “price of admission” I mean a month’s Netflix fee because God knows they haven’t earned their $7.99 in months.

Other Stuff:

  • [1] I refuse to watch The Handmaid’s Tale because of the producers’ hysteria that it could become reality any day.  On the other hand, the old convention of sticking Mrs. In front of the husband’s full name is about as close to Offred as you can get.
  • Druse has a Filipino boy working for him at his pad.  We know this because the phrase “Filipino boy” appears 13 times in 3 pages.
  • Paul Cain was last heard from in One, Two, Three in this same collection.  So either he is a great writer, or he has a lot of stuff in the public domain.
  • First published in the November 1933 issue of Black Mask.
  • Also that month:  Duck Soup released.

The Sad Serbian – Frank Gruber (1939)

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A racket to mulct the multitudes is plenty reason for murder.

Mulct?  Yep, real word.

Sam Cragg is the kind of guy who will repo a car at a funeral, i.e. efficient.  He busts Anthony Druhar at his grandmother’s funeral.  His entire family can only come up with $32, so Cragg agrees to stop by his house the next day for the balance.

It is a good day for Cragg as he finds Druhar dead, with his head twisted around backwards.  So I guess he gets the $32 and the car.  There is a piece of paper sticking out of Druhar’s pocket.  Cragg reads, “For value received, I promise to pay Tony Druhar five thousand dollars — WC ROBERTS.”  So, a pretty good day for WC Roberts, too.

A moment later, a character futurely known as Prince gets out of a cab.  “He is wearing a black, single-breasted coat which is open showing a fawn colored waist-coat.  Under it is a pair of striped trousers and below that, believe it or not, white spats.  On his head, he’s got a pearl gray Homburg.  He’s carrying a pair of pig-skin yellow gloves and a cane.”  He introduces himself as Prince Peter Strogovich.  He was just about to give Druhar a job.

The cops show up and briefly detain Cragg and the Prince, but neither is a suspect.  On an unrelated case the next day, their paths cross again.  Cragg sees him leaving a candy store that Cragg is heading for.  Inside “sits the biggest woman I’ve ever seen in my life.  She’s six foot two or three inches tall and big all around.  She weighs 290 or 300 and none of it is flabby fat.”  She asks what he is looking for and he says — heehee — “a dick magazine.”

He sees the Prince exit the saloon across the street where he must have only had a shot.  The Prince hires Cragg to locate a man who owes him money — WC Roberts!  He says that his cousin was the King of Serbia, Peter Karageorgovich.

Cragg goes to an address the Prince (because I ain’t gonna keep typing Karageorgovich) gave him.  He asks the super where to find WC Roberts.  The man laughs and pulls out his own $5k note signed by WC.  He says the Irish are buying them for $5, but the Polacks and Serbians are paying up to $20.  He says the Prince is in cahoots with WC and directs Cragg to a big Serbian hootenanny that night.

The Prince is giving a speech about how Edison and Westinghouse and Ford stole ideas from WC Roberts.  The notes are to fund lawsuits against them.  The giant woman is on the stage with them.

Blah, blah, blah.  And I mean that in the nicest possible way.  The story takes enough twists and turns that your time would be better spent reading the story rather than reading this blog.  But really, what wouldn’t be?  It zips right along and is filled with characters like the Prince, the giant woman, Cragg’s boss & secretary.  Cragg sets a trap involving a children’s book and the post office.

It all good fun.  Hopefully Frank Gruber shows up again in the anthology.

Other Stuff:

  • First published in the March 1939 issue of Black Mask.
  • Also that month, Howard Carter suspiciously succumbs to King Tut’s curse a mere 17 years after finding the tomb.  And some Hitler stuff.

Pastorale – James M. Cain (1938)

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1.

It looks like Burbie is about to be hung for thinking himself “so damn smart.”  And this was the year before Gone With the Wind, when damn meant something.

When Burbie was 16, he ran away with a travelling show.  Ten years later, he returned with all his fingers so thought he knew it all.

Lida was just like him.  She made her living “selling dry goods to the men” and fortunately was not a prostitute.  She married an older fella about a year before Burbie returned.  He starts meeting her in the cornfield to play hide the cob after her husband goes to bed each night.  Eventually they decide they will have to kill him.

Burbie enlists another ex-con, Hutch, to help him do the deed.  He tells Hutch there is a literal pot of money just awaitin’ to be stolen.  While Lida is at the store, they go to the house and kill the old man.

2.

Hutch gets angry when he discovers the pot of money contains only $23 in pennies, nickels, and dimes, and a couple of those are Canadian.  Burbie claims he thought there was $1,000 in the pot.  He magnanimously volunteers to let Hutch have the whole thing even though neither of them knows that word.  When some visitors drive up, they replace the empty pot and take the old man’s body with them as they sneak out the back way.  They pick up some tools and drive out to the woods.  Finally, one of the stories I post about gets it right:

So Burbie dug the grave.  He dug for two hours, until he got so tired he couldn’t hardly stand.  But he ain’t hardly made no hole at all.

The excuse here is that the ground is frozen.  But for most dudes, that’s probably about right pace at any time of year.  They throw the body into the shallow grave.  When the head is still sticking out, Hutch beats it down with a shovel.  LOL.

On the way back, Burbie admits that he has been plowing Lida’s crop circle, Hutch turns the truck around.  He forces Burbie to cut off the old guy’s head so they can take it to Lida.  He plans to put the head in a box with a ribbon and surprise Lida when she opens it.

3.

Burbie is not thrilled at this idea.  The first chance he gets, he tosses the severed head out of the truck.  The bad luck continues as it lands on the frozen ice of a river.  The crack of the ice — the old guy must have had one of them Ted Kennedy 50-pounders — alerts Hutch.  He tries to kill Burbie, but he literally runs home, and hides beneath the covers of his bed.

The next day, a gruesome sight is found at the river.  There is still a human head sitting out on the ice, Hutch’s horse [1] is”damn near froze to death” and Hutch himself is at the bottom of the river “stiff as a board.”  I guess he had the $23 of change in his pockets.  The head ties Hutch to the murder, but Burbie gets away with it.

Some time later, however, he feels compelled to tell his life story to a group of people, including the constable.  He was so proud of all the women, all the liquor, Lida, and Hitch alone being nailed for the murder that he just couldn’t hold it in.

A short, fun romp.

Other Stuff:

  • [1] OK, they were in a horse-drawn carriage.  But truck was so much easier to type.
  • First published in the March 1938 issue of The American Mercury.