Long Live the Dead (4 page)

So are you, Hugh. And for me you create the same sense of fear and dread in a much more accessible, realistic style. But let us quickly finish the
Black Mask
story comments because there are a few new elements you mention when you rate your other
Black Mask
stories. Of the title story, “Long Live the Dead,”
Black Mask
, December 1938, you wrote me: “This is a pretty good crime tale, rather well written, with interesting characters.” But you only gave it a 7. It had very good characters, a solid plot, and it was well written. Why not a higher rating?

I found Hugh’s answer very revealing. It also gives insight into what it means to mature as a writer, even within the confines of a popular pulp genre:

Just look at the stories that followed in 1940. “Lost—and Found” was a
Black Mask
novelette published in April of that year. It was a fast-moving tale, with a swift action climax.And a great locale. The hero is a well-drawn and interesting character. War profiteering plays an important part in the plot, but there is much more going on. Then there is the top off with the hero spanking the young gal who tries to flatter him into making love to her on the ride back from the successful mission. This is good
Black Mask
stuff. I gave it a 9. I think the mood of the magazine was changing. The depression had faded, war was on the scene, and there was an interest in foreign places. And that story is representative of its time.

“The Missing Mr. Lee,”
Black Mask,
December, 1940, is narrated unlike anything I have ever written. A man named Paine is found stabbed to death, and each of five or six other characters comes forward to tell what he or she thinks happened. This is a one-of-a kind story—I don’t believe I ever wrote another like it—and it’s a good one, well written, with an unexpected ending. I gave it a 10. Then came “Front-Page Frame-Up,” a novelette for
Black Mask
in February 1941. Detective Jeff Cardin, investigating a blackmail racket on a wet, nasty night gives a lift to the Anderson girl and she starts screaming for help the minute they reach a populous crossroad. Jeff is forced to quit his job. He becomes a private dick. This complex story is told in the first person in a lively, sometimes humorous style, and could be one of my best stories for
Black Mask
. Everything works. I gave it a 9 or 10.

Finally there’s “Stranger in Town,” my last story for
Black Mask,
about 5000 words in the April 1941 issue. A clever story, very different. Corey, a cop, is back in town from a sanatorium. All the crooks are scared. In trying to cover themselves, they … but it is such a good story I won’t give any more of it away. A very well written, different, hard-boiled detective tale. 10.

I commented:

I like the way that story unfolds, Hugh. It reminds me of
High Noon
in reverse. It is a story that is difficult to analyze exactly how it achieves its effects.

I agree with you. In some ways you can’t take apart a great story like it was a mechanical device, Keith. When a story really works, it is like a living thing. If you cut it up to analyze it, you just won’t find the spark that makes it so good.

Supplied with annotations by the author

C. H. Barnett

Cary Barnett

Hugh Barnett

Allen Beck

Judy Case

Justin Case

(The jokey “Justin Case” was by far the most frequently used of my pen-names, with some seventy stories originally appearing under that name in the
Spicy
publications.

Some of my Justin Case stories were also reprinted by the editors of the
Spicy
magazines under the various house names Paul Hanna, R. T. Maynard, William Decatur, J. C. Cole, T. V. Faulkner, Max Neilson, and—gasp!—John Wayne.

I still use the name Justin Case occasionally.)

Carl Hughes

Geoffrey Vace

(My second most–frequently used pen-name. But the first three Geoffrey Vace stories, appearing in
Oriental Stories
and
Magic Carpet Magazine
, both edited by
Weird Tales’
Farnsworth Wright, were actually written by my brother, Geoffrey Cave.)

Ace Williams

(I believe this was an editorial house name for the Standard Publications
Thrilling
line of magazines. I had one story appear under this byline in the May, 1932 issue of
Thrilling Adventures
.)

Jack D’Arcy

(This was the name of an actual pulp writer but two of my stories somehow appeared under his name.)

Maxwell Smith

(This also was the name of an actual pulp writer whose stories appeared in many Street & Smith titles during the 1920s. For whatever reason it appeared as the byline for a story that my brother Geoffrey wrote for
Amazing Detective Stories
in 1931. Later it appeared as the byline on a few of my overseas reprints of pulp stories as well.)

This story about gumshoe Bill Evans and the dead lady appeared in
Black Mask
in May 1934 and was the first tale of mine to be published in that magazine. I was 23 years old at the time and had been writing for the pulps since I was 19.
Black Mask,
edited by the legendary Joseph T. (“Cap”) Shaw, had developed the hardboiled private eye story, and, during the early 1930s, among its regular contributors were Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Erle Stanley Gardner, Raoul Whitfield, Paul Cain, Horace McCoy, and Frederick Nebel. By the time
Black Mask
felt I was ready to mingle with these authors, I had been published in such pulps as
Ace High
,
All Detective
,
Argosy
,
Astounding, Dime Mystery
,
Ghost Stories
,
Short Stories
(23 times!),
Strange Tales
,
Top-Notch
and
Weird Tales
, to name just a few.

HBC

Gumshoe Bill Evans finds that the murdered girl was only one of many

W
ith rain slapping his face and more rain drooling from the turned-down brim of his gray hat, Bill Evans swung left off Atlantic Avenue and hiked methodically across the Eastern Star Wharf. Teetering along a wet plank to avoid slopping through a pool of goose-pimpled water, he stood staring at the weather-scarred words,
Ritoli’s Fish House
, painted across the front of the endmost wharf shanty. Scowling, he pushed in the door, and said impatiently to the shack’s occupant: “You Ritoli?”

The man said he was Ritoli. He stood behind an enormous counter packed with clams, fish, lobsters, ice. He wore a wet black apron and his hair was greasy and his bare arms were hairy. His face was round and fat and smeared with fish blood.

“Where’s the stiff?” Bill said.

“Huh?”

“The stiff you phoned in about. I’m a cop.”

Ritoli said: “You a gop? Huh? Yez, zir. Yez, zir, mizter.” He took off his apron and wiped his hands hard on his thighs. “She iz out back. I zhow you.” He put on a dirty brown hat and a blue sweater with leather elbows, and limped to the door. Bill trailed him.

“She wuz float, in ze water, mizter,” Ritoli explained, limping to the end of the wharf. “I find her wazhed up againzt my clam boat when I go out little while ago for zum clamz. I keep clamz in ze water after I dig zem. Zey keep frezher. Zey—”

“All right, all right.” Bill scowled. “Forget the clams.”

Ritoli turned and said: “Watch out here, mizter. Ze rain make ze stepz zlippery.” He limped carefully down a crude stairway to a long float where a half-dozen flat-bottomed boats were upended.

B
ill slipped on the bottom step, crunched one foot into a pile of clam shells, and slouched on again, muttering maledictions. Ritoli scuffed to the end of the float and bent over to drag back a sheet of canvas. He said: “Here zhe iz.”

The girl lay stark naked beside an upturned dory Her eyes were wide open and glazed. Her body was rigid. She was not more than twenty years old, Bill guessed.

“W’en I find her,” Ritoli shrugged, “I pull her up out of ze water and put her here. Zen I call ze police station.”

Bill put his hands in his pockets and stood staring. He forgot it was raining; he felt sick. Leaning forward slightly, he examined a whitish mark in the girl’s breast where the flesh had receded from a deep gash. He fingered the water-soaked rope around the girl’s ankle and studied the frayed end of it, frowning. Then he stood up and swallowed the thickness that came into his throat.

“All right,” he said. “Cover her up.”

Ritoli said anxiously: “You will not leave her here like zis, mizter, please? I don’ want—”

“Where’s your telephone?”

“Tel’phone? Yez, zir,” Ritoli said quickly. “Yez, zir, mizter.”

Bill used Ritoli’s phone back in the shanty behind the fish counter, to call headquarters. He said into it: “O’Brien? Evans talking. Listen, Jay—the stiff’s a girl. Young girl, stabbed, rope around her foot. Looks as if she was murdered and thrown in the drink with a weight to keep her under. Rope broke or frayed, and the body got loose. Case for some guy with imagination… . Yeah? Well, maybe I have, but not enough to see the joker behind this… . Okey. I’ll hang around until Macy gets here.”

Bill lit a cigarette and slouched to the door. To Ritoli he said: “Listen. If a big Mick with size seventeen feet and a mush-melon face asks where I’m at, send him to the one-arm lunch around the corner. I need coffee and beans—something simple and homelike—after looking at that thing you found.”

“Yez, zir,” Ritoli nodded. “Yez, zir, mizter.”

“And save that,” Bill said “for Macy. He’ll get a kick out of it. No one ever called him Mister before.”

Jay O’Brien said across the desk at headquarters, two hours later: “Well, where’s the tie-up? What’s back of it?”

Bill played an imaginary piano with the tips of his fingers and again read the penciled memo on O’Brien’s desk pad. He scowled, massaged his chin slowly, looked up into O’Brien’s scowl.

“That’s her all right, Jay. Twenty years old, five-foot-seven, dark hair and eyes, attractive, Italian-looking. That’s her.”

“Listen,” O’Brien scowled. “I been a flatfoot twenty years, and this fits too easy. See? It smells. You find an undressed stiff at four in the afternoon without a ghost’s chance of identifying it, and at five the phone rings and a guy gives you all the info it would take you two months to dig up. Ain’t that lovely now? Better check up.”

Bill nodded, tore off the memo sheet, stood up. The phone rang. O’Brien clamped the receiver between ear and shoulder, said “Hello” through his cigar, then listened. He forked the receiver slowly.

“Macy,” he said to Bill, “calling from DePisa’s office. The girl was stabbed. Been dead not more than twenty-four hours, probably less.”

“Yeah?”

“Go out and smell around. Find out who phoned me that identification.”

“Yeah.”

Bill went out and climbed into a taxi.

T
he name on the memo sheet was Rose Veda, the address 154 Vernon Street, South End. Bill climbed the high wooden steps, knuckled the doorbell, stood scowling at a frosted globe with
Board and Rooms
painted on it in black. The door opened and a smallish woman with thin dry lips and a checkered house dress said: “Yes?” “Does Miss Rose Veda live here?” “She rooms here, yes,” the woman said. “Home, is she?”

“I don’t believe so. I haven’t seen her today. Is there any message?”

“Mind showing me her room?” Bill suggested.

“Her room? Who are you?”

Bill put two fingers in his vest pocket and brought out a nickeled badge. The woman said: “Oh. You’re a—a policeman.”

“Yeah.”

The woman said “Oh” again, and then: “Yes, surely. The room is upstairs, Rose hasn’t—” as Bill stepped past her into the hall—“done anything wrong, has she?”

Bill shrugged, waited for her to close the door, then followed her down the carpeted hall. The room was on the second floor, midway down the corridor The woman produced a bunch of keys unlocked the door. Bill entered slowly.

The room was small, stuffy, with an old-fashioned chiffonier, wooden bed, one window, two rag rugs. Bill walked to the chiffonier and picked up a photograph in a cheap tin frame. The woman said: “That’s her. Those pictures on the wall are her too. She posed for them.”

Bill put the photo down and stood with his hands hipped, gazing at the pictures on the wall. They were magazine covers, all four of them, mostly carmine and yellow. The first was a nude girl holding a parrot; the second was a nude girl looking at canaries in a cage; the third was a nude girl stroking a Pekinese; the fourth was a nude girl fondling a large cat. The woman said: “She’s posing for a whole series of them for that magazine. It comes out every two weeks and she’s on the cover of every issue. The next one has her lying beside a bowl of goldfish. She’s working on it now.”

Bill squinted at the artist’s name and said, scowling: “I’ll take these, May need ’em.”

“But—”

“She won’t mind. Has she got any friends?”

“You mean boy friends?”

“Yeah. Either kind.”

“She has a boy friend,” the woman said. “Edwin, his name is. I don’t know his other name. He comes here often.”

“To her room?”

“Well, yes, sometimes. I don’t allow my girls to have boy friends in their rooms, but Rose and Edwin are such good friends.”

“On good terms?”

“Oh, yes. That is, all except her posing. He doesn’t like that, and I don’t know as I blame him. After all, it isn’t very nice for a girl to pose with no clothes on. They were having an argument about it only night before last. I didn’t try to listen, you understand, but he was talking loud. He said he wouldn’t stand for it any more and if she didn’t stop he’d—”