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- Herausgeber: Wildside Press
- Kategorie: Krimi
- Sprache: Englisch
Soldier-of-fortune Poko Kelly runs -- literally -- into a girl in an alley, only to find her persued by villains. After killing two of them, he takes the girl home to her uncle...only to become embroiled in the most dangerous job of his career. A classic crime story.
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Seitenzahl: 53
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
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Table of Contents
DEAD MAN’S CHEST, by Norbert Davis
COPYRIGHT INFORMATION
INTRODUCTION, by John Betancourt
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
DEAD MAN’S CHEST,by Norbert Davis
COPYRIGHT INFORMATION
Originally published in Thrilling Adventures, November 1936.
Published by Wildside Press LLC.
wildsidepress.com | bcmystery.com | blackcatweekly.com
INTRODUCTION,by John Betancourt
American crime fiction writer Norbert Harrison Davis—Bert to his friends—was born in Morrison, Illinois in 1909. In the late 1920s, his family relocated to Southern California. There, he enrolled in Stanford University to study law—surely the perfect choice for a man destined to be one of the best mystery writers for the pulps. Although he graduated, he decided not to take the bar exam. He was already publishing mystery fiction at this time for many of the leading pulp magazines in the genre, including Black Mask, Dime Detective, Double Detective, Detective Fiction Weekly, Argosy, as well as “slick” magazines like The Saturday Evening Post. As a writer, he was making more money than he would have been as an entry-level lawyer.
He married Frances Kirkwood Crane (1890–1981), who was also an American mystery author, She published a mysery series featuring private investigator Pat Abbott and his (eventual) wife Jean in a series of 26 novels, beginning with The Turquoise Shop (1941). Each book featured a color in the title—a memorable gimmick.
In early 1940s, Norbert Davis began transitioning to novels, publishing books like The Mouse in the Mountain (1943, the first of his “Doan and Carstairs” series) and its sequels Sally’s in the Alley (1943) and Oh, Murderer Mine (1946). This series featured Doan, a short, overweight private investigator, and Carstairs, his Great Dane—who is quite a character himself! For completists, in addition to the 3 Doan and Carstairs novels, there are also two short stories to track down. Davis also published His Murder Picks the Jury (1947, written in collaboration with W. T. Ballard under the pseudonym “Harrison Hunt”).
Norbert Davis died on July 28, 1949, an apparent suicide following a cancer diagnosis.
In recent years, there has been a revival of interest in Davis and his work. Wildside Press will begin releasing the novels in hardcover, paperback, and ebook formats this year, and Altus Press has already released a complete collection of the Max Latin stories from Dime Detective, entitled—appropriately enough—The Complete Cases of Max Latin (2014), which I highly recommend. If you want to read more of Norbert Davis’s work, these are the books with which you should start. (Frances Crane’s myseries are good, too.)
CHAPTER 2
BELOW THE BORDER
THE tequila smelled like rotten eggs and tasted like carbolic acid slightly diluted with ground glass, but “Poco” Kelly drank it down without the slightest change in the expression on his face.
“How much?” he asked.
The greasy mestizo behind the bar was an excellent judge of character. He had to be in this place. One mistake, and they buried him. He took a calculating look at Poco Kelly. He saw an immensely tall man with a long, gaunt face and rust-colored hair and huge hands and feet. Poco Kelly looked thin, in fact, skinny, until examined closely, then it was discovered he just wasn’t carrying any spare flesh.
His face was a bony caricature that looked as though he had been thoroughly worked over with a war club when he was very young. His nose was bent crookedly, his jaw bone was lumpy. A saber scar stretched from the corner of his mouth straight across his cheek to his ear. The bottom of the ear was gone.
Poco Kelly looked clumsy and harmless and a little dumb, until you saw his eyes. They were a clear blue, steely, glittering a little. It was like seeing a clumsily wrapped package of dynamite, and then noticing suddenly that it had a lighted fuse on it.
The bartender bowed gracefully. “Nada,” he said. “Nothing to you, señor. It is my pleasure.”
“It’s your luck, you mean,” Poco Kelly said amiably. “I was going to make you eat whatever you charged me for that poison. Adios, amigo.”
“Malo hombre,” the bartender muttered as the door slapped shut behind Poco Kelly’s wide shoulders.
Poco walked away from the lighted grease-smeared windows of the cantina stumbling on the rough cobblestone pavement of the darkly crooked street. He was disgusted. There was nothing to see, nothing to do in this Tepeyac place.
Tepeyac was far south of the border in Old Mexico. A sleepy village hidden among the mountains thrown up around it like a tumbled blanket. Dusty and dirty and full of strange smells.
Hotter than fire in the daytime with the sun blazing down. Beautiful maybe, if you liked clashing colors and the picturesque. Poco Kelly didn’t.
He was in Tepeyac because, traveling up from the south, he had run out of funds here. He had sold his horse and what personal effects he could spare to the town’s one innkeeper and so had a place to eat and sleep for the moment and some small change to jingle in his pocket. He wasn’t worried.
Something would turn up.
* * * *
He had almost reached the corner when a small dark figure spun around it running hard and slammed headlong into him. Kelly had just enough warning to have time to brace his legs against the shock. The figure bounced off him as though he had been a cement post, tripped, and fell down against an adobe wall in a huddled heap, panting in gasping sobs.
“Here—” Kelly leaned over.
He had time to say no more. Three other figures pounded around the corner, skidded to a stop when they saw him and the dark figure on the ground. They were only vague outlines in the darkness, thick shadows with an air of menace about them and with rasping breaths coming harshly from their throats.
“Well?” said Poco Kelly, straightening.
They didn’t utter a sound. They spread a little apart in a moving semicircle, then suddenly they came for him in a silent rush. A fugitive ray of light caught and glittered on a knife blade.
“Ho!” said Poco Kelly, grimly amused. “So that’s it!”
