Modern Masters of Noir
Page 1
Jerry eBooks
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Introduction and collection copyright © 1993 by Ed Gorman
The acknowledgments listed on pages 9 to 10 constitute an extension of
this copyright page.
All rights reserved
First Carroll & Graf edition 1993
Carroll & Graf Publishers, Inc.
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ISBN for hardcover edition: 0-88184-865-4
ISBN for paperback edition: 0-88184-919-7
Manufactured in the United States of America
Dark Crimes 2
Modern Masters of Noir
Acknowledgments
Dedication
Introduction
Ed Gorman
The Dripping
David Morrell
And Miles to Go Before I Sleep
Lawrence Block
Miranda
John D. Macdonald
Deceptions
Marcia Muller
The Long Silence After
Ed Gorman
The Dead Past
Nancy Pickard
All the Same
Bill Pronzini
The View
Brian Garfield
Hector Gomez Provides
John Lutz
The Steel Valentine
Joe R. Lansdale
The Triangle
Teri White
The Luckiest Man in the World
Rex Miller
The Party
William F. Nolan
Predators
Edward Bryant
In the Fast Lane
Thomas F. Monteleone
The Perfect Crime
Max Allan Collins
Paint the Town Green
Robert Colby
Jody and Annie on TV
John Shirley
Snow Angels
Loren D. Estleman
The Memorial Hour
Wade Miller
Pretty Boy
Billie Sue Mosiman
Secrets
Gary Lovisi
Acknowledgments
For permission to reprint the stories and novels in this anthology, grateful acknowledgment is made to:
“The Dripping” copyright © 1972 by David Morrell. First published in Ellery Queens Mystery Magazine.
“And Miles to Go Before I Sleep” copyright © 1965 by Lawrence Block.
Miranda was first published in Fifteen Stories in October 1950. Copyright © 1982 by John D. MacDonald Publishing, Inc. Reprinted by permission of the George Diskant Agency.
“Deceptions” copyright © 1987 by Marcia Muller. First published in A Matter of Crime I.
“The Long Silence After” copyright © 1991 by Ed Gorman. First published in Dark at Heart edited by Karen and Joe R. Lansdale.
“The Dead Past” copyright © 1989 by Nancy J. Pickard.
“All the Same” copyright © 1972 by H.S.D. Publications, Inc. Revised version copyright © 1992 by Bill Pronzini. First published in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“The View” copyright © 1983 by Brian Garfield. First published in Ellery Queens Mystery Magazine, July 1983.
“Hector Gomez Provides” copyright © 1985 by Renown Publications, Inc. First published in Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, August 1985.
“The Steel Valentine” copyright © 1989 by Joe R. Lansdale. First published in Bizarre Hands Collection.
Triangle copyright © 1982 by Teri White. First published by Ace Charter, New York.
“The Luckiest Man in the World” copyright © 1989 by Rex Miller. First published in Masques III.
“The Party” copyright © 1967 by H.M.H. Publishing Co. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Predators” copyright © 1987 by Edward Bryant. First published in Night Visions 4. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“In the Fast Lane” copyright © 1981 by Thomas F. Monteleone.
“The Perfect Crime” copyright © 1988, 1991, 1992 by Max Allan Collins.
“Paint the Town Green” copyright © 1977 by Davis Publications, Inc. First published in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine.
“Jody and Annie on TV” copyright © 1992 by John Shirley.
“Snow Angels” copyright © 1991 by Loren D. Estleman.
“The Memorial Hour” copyright © 1960 by Wade Miller, renewed 1988. First published as “Jackie” in Ellery Queens Mystery Magazine in March 1960. Reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd.
“Pretty Boy” copyright © 1991 by Billie Sue Mosiman. First published in Invitation to Murder.
“Secrets” copyright © 1993 by Gary Lovisi.
To Laura Langlie who does 95% of my work
and receives .00006% of the credit
Introduction
Like most forms of popular fiction, noir has evolved and changed over the past decade and a half.
No longer does Bogie stand at his lonely window, staring out at a world he frequently despises. Nor does the conventional private eye take us through his conventional private eye routines; and the conventional femme fatale . . . well, she doesn’t invite us upstairs any more, either.
The new noir is as likely to be set in a trailer park as a gambling casino; in a small Texas town more often than New York; and feature not a slick mobster but a child molester as villain.
This isn’t to disparage what has gone before. The other night I watched Out of the Past for perhaps the fiftieth time in my life . . . and I was struck again by how powerful and true a drama it is, especially in the almost reluctant way that Robert Mitchum reveals his true self to us. Many other films and books from that era also retain their power.
But new generations have led noir from the early pulp tradition to the mainstream realities of today. Loren Estleman’s Amos Walker is a good example. Yes, he’s a Chandleresque private eye superficially, but when you look carefully at his cases they encompass the same literary material that a Joyce Carol Oates, say, or Richard Ford or Raymond Carver have dealt with—the world of nightly news and morning newspapers. The real world. Drugs, random violence, heartbreak and an escalating sense of despair. Or try Nancy Pickard’s elegant and elegaic “The Dead Past.”
Same thing.
Unlike volume one, DARK CRIMES 2 is a contemporary version of noir. Even John D. MacDonald’s beautifully told tale from the forties, Miranda, has a decidedly contemporary feel.
Much as I like the material of the forties and fifties, today’s noir fiction is just as good, just as exciting and is, I think, a little more ambitious in its purpose.
You’ve got some good stories awaiting you.
—Ed Gorman
The Dripping
by David Morrell
David Morrell is one of today’s most compelling adventure writers. But his fame as the creator of Rambo overshadows his quieter work, the kind mistakenly called “horror” by too many people who should know better. This is a fine, dark tale.
First published in 1972.
That autumn we live in a house in the country, my mother’s house, the house I was raised in. I have been to the village, struck more by how nothing in it has changed, yet everything has, because I am older now, seeing it differently. It is as though I am both here now and back then, at once with the mind of a boy and a man. It is so strange a doubling, so intense, so unsettling, that I am moved to work again, to try to paint it.
So I study the hardware store, the grain barrels in front, the twin square pillars holdin
g up the drooping balcony onto which seared wax-faced men and women from the old people’s hotel above come to sit and rock and watch. They look the same aging people I saw as a boy, the wood of the pillars and balcony looks as splintered.
Forgetful of time while I work, I do not begin the long walk home until late, at dusk. The day has been warm, but now in my shirt I am cold, and a half mile along I am caught in a sudden shower and forced to leave the gravel road for the shelter of a tree, its leaves already brown and yellow. The rain becomes a storm, streaking at me sideways, drenching me; I cinch the neck of my canvas bag to protect my painting and equipment, and decide to run, socks spongy in my shoes, when at last I reach the lane down to the house and barn.
The house and barn. They and my mother, they alone have changed, as if as one, warping, weathering, joints twisted and strained, their gray so unlike the white I recall as a boy. The place is weakening her. She is in tune with it, matches its decay. That is why we have come here to live. To revive. Once I thought to convince her to move away. But of her 65 years she has spent 40 here, and she insists she will spend the rest, what is left to her.
The rain falls stronger as I hurry past the side of the house, the light on in the kitchen, suppertime and I am late. The house is connected with the barn the way the small base of an L is connected to its stem. The entrance I always use is directly at the joining, and when I enter out of breath, clothes clinging to me cold and wet, the door to the barn to my left, the door to the kitchen straight ahead, I hear the dripping in the basement down the stairs to my right.
“Meg. Sorry I’m late,” I call to my wife, setting down the water-beaded canvas sack, opening the kitchen door. There is no one. No settings on the table. Nothing on the stove. Only the yellow light from the sixty-watt bulb in the ceiling. The kind my mother prefers to the white of one hundred. It reminds her of candlelight, she says.
“Meg,” I call again, and still no one answers. Asleep, I think. Dusk coming on, the dark clouds of the storm have lulled them, and they have lain down for a nap, expecting to wake before I return.
Still the dripping. Although the house is very old, the barn long disused, roofs crumbling, I have not thought it all so ill-maintained, the storm so strong that water can be seeping past the cellar windows, trickling, pattering on the old stone floor. I switch on the light to the basement, descend the wood stairs to the right, worn and squeaking, reach where the stairs turn to the left the rest of the way down to the floor, and see not water dripping. Milk. Milk everywhere. On the rafters, on the walls, dripping on the film of milk on the stones, gathering speckled with dirt in the channels between them. From side to side and everywhere.
Sarah, my child, has done this, I think. She has been fascinated by the big wood dollhouse that my father made for me when I was quite young, its blue paint chipped and peeling now. She has pulled it from the far corner to the middle of the basement. There are games and toy soldiers and blocks that have been taken from the wicker storage chest and played with on the floor, all covered with milk, the dollhouse, the chest, the scattered toys, milk dripping on them from the rafters, milk trickling on them.
Why has she done this, I think. Where can she have gotten so much milk? What was in her mind to do this thing?
“Sarah,” I call. “Meg.” Angry now, I mount the stairs into the quiet kitchen. “Sarah,” I shout. She will clean the mess and stay indoors the remainder of the week.
I cross the kitchen, turn through the sitting room past the padded flower-patterned chairs and sofa that have faded since I knew them as a boy, past several of my paintings that my mother has hung up on the wall, bright-colored old ones of pastures and woods from when I was in grade school, brown-shaded new ones of the town, tinted as if old photographs. Two stairs at a time up to the bedrooms, wet shoes on the soft worn carpet on the stairs, hand streaking on the smooth polished maple bannister.
At the top I swing down the hall. The door to Sarah’s room is open, it is dark in there. I switch on the light. She is not on the bed, nor has been; the satin spread is unrumpled, the rain pelting in through the open window, the wind fresh and cool. I have the feeling then and go uneasy into our bedroom; it is dark as well, empty too. My stomach has become hollow. Where are they? All in mother’s room?
No. As I stand at the open door to mother’s room I see from the yellow light I have turned on in the hall that only she is in there, her small torso stretched across the bed.
“Mother,” I say, intending to add, “Where are Meg and Sarah?” But I stop before I do. One of my mother’s shoes is off, the other askew on her foot. There is mud on the shoes. There is blood on her cotton dress. It is torn, her brittle hair disrupted, blood on her face, her bruised lips are swollen.
For several moments I am silent with shock. “My God, Mother,” I finally manage to say, and as if the words are a spring releasing me to action I touch her to wake her. But I see that her eyes are open, staring ceilingward, unseeing though alive, and each breath is a sudden full gasp, then slow exhalation.
“Mother, what has happened? Who did this to you? Meg? Sarah?”
But she does not look at me, only constant toward the ceiling.
“For God’s sake, Mother, answer me! Look at me! What has happened?”
Nothing. Eyes sightless. Between gasps she is like a statue.
What I think is hysterical. Disjointed, contradictory. I must find Meg and Sarah. They must be somewhere, beaten like my mother. Or worse. Find them. Where? But I cannot leave my mother. When she comes to consciousness, she too will be hysterical, frightened, in great pain. How did she end up on the bed?
In her room there is no sign of the struggle she must have put up against her attacker. It must have happened somewhere else. She crawled from there to here. Then I see the blood on the floor, the swath of blood down the hall from the stairs. Who did this? Where is he? Who would beat a gray, wrinkled, arthritic old woman? Why in God’s name would he do it? I shudder. The pain of the arthritis as she struggled with him.
Perhaps he is still in the house, waiting for me.
To the hollow sickness in my stomach now comes fear, hot, pulsing, and I am frantic before I realize what I am doing—grabbing the spare cane my mother always keeps by her bed, flicking on the light in her room, throwing open the closet door and striking in with the cane. Viciously, sounds coming from my throat, the cane flailing among the faded dresses.
No one. Under the bed. No one. Behind the door. No one.
I search all the upstairs rooms that way, terrified, constantly checking behind me, clutching the cane and whacking into closets, under beds, behind doors, with a force that would certainly crack a skull. No one.
“Meg! Sarah!”
No answer, not even an echo in this sound-absorbing house.
There is no attic, just an overhead entry to a crawl space under the eaves, and that opening has long been sealed. No sign of tampering. No one has gone up.
I rush down the stairs, seeing the trail of blood my mother has left on the carpet, imagining her pain as she crawled, and search the rooms downstairs with the same desperate thoroughness. In the front closet. Behind the sofa and chairs. Behind the drapes.
No one.
I lock the front door, lest he be outside in the storm waiting to come in behind me. I remember to draw every blind, close every drape, lest he be out there peering at me. The rain pelts insistently against the windowpanes.
I cry out again and again for Meg and Sarah. The police. My mother. A doctor. I grab for the phone on the wall by the front stairs, fearful to listen to it, afraid he has cut the line outside. But it is droning. Droning. I ring for the police, working the handle at the side around and around and around.
They are coming, they say. A doctor with them. Stay where I am, they say. But I cannot. Meg and Sarah, I must find them. I know they are not in the basement where the milk is dripping—all the basement is open to view. Except for my childhood things, we have cleared out all the boxes and barrels a
nd the shelves of jars the Saturday before.
But under the stairs. I have forgotten about under the stairs and now I race down and stand dreading in the milk; but there are only cobwebs there, already reformed from Saturday when we cleared them. I look up at the side door I first came through, and as if I am seeing through a telescope I focus largely on the handle. It seems to fidget. I have a panicked vision of the intruder bursting through, and I charge up to lock the door, and the door to the barn.
And then I think: if Meg and Sarah are not in the house they are likely in the barn. But I cannot bring myself to unlock the barn door and go through. He must be there as well. Not in the rain outside but in the shelter of the barn, and there are no lights to turn on there.
And why the milk? Did he do it and where did he get it? And why? Or did Sarah do it before? No, the milk is too freshly dripping. It has been put there too recently. By him. But why? And who is he? A tramp? An escapee from some prison? Or asylum? No, the nearest institution is far away, hundreds of miles. From the town then. Or a nearby farm.
I know my questions are for delay, to keep me from entering the barn. But I must. I take the flashlight from the kitchen drawer and unlock the door to the barn, force myself to go in quickly, cane ready, flashing my light. The stalls are still there, listing; and some of the equipment, churners, separators, dull and rusted, webbed and dirty. The must of decaying wood and crumbled hay, the fresh wet smell of the rain gusting through cracks in the walls. Once this was a dairy, as the other farms around still are.
Flicking my light toward the corners, edging toward the stalls, boards creaking, echoing, I try to control my fright, try to remember as a boy how the cows waited in the stalls for my father to milk them, how the barn was once board-tight and solid, warm to be in, how there was no connecting door from the barn to the house because my father did not want my mother to smell the animals in her kitchen.