"Pronzini, Bill - Nameless Detective 007 - Hoodwink" - читать интересную книгу автора (Pronzini Bill)

Bill Pronzini.

Nameless Detective.

Nameless is excited when he gets an invitation to the first annual pulpwriters' convention, a gathering of old mystery and detective hacks, and thinks he's in for a weekend of fun and reminiscing with some of his favorite authors. But when ex-editor Frank Colodny is found murdered in a hotel room, Nameless suddenly has a real-life whodunnit on his hands!

It seems a lot of people wanted Colodny dead, his former writers, illustrators, and even a jealous husband. And when the plot thickens with blackmail, extortion, and another hideous murder, Nameless has to collar the culprit quickly before he himself is written out of this deadly mystery, for good!

I was sitting tilted back in my office chair, reading one of Russell Dancer's private eye stories in a 1948 Midnight Detective, when the door opened and Russell Dancer walked in.

Coincidences happen now and then; I knew that as well as anybody after the Carding/Nichols case I had been involved in a few months ago. But they still jar you a little every time. I opened my mouth, closed it again, blinked a couple of times, and then got on my feet as he shut the door.

"Hey there, shamus," he said. He came through the rail divider, gave the scattered cardboard packing boxes a curious glance, and plopped the briefcase he was carrying down on the visitor's chair. "Remember me?Ф

"Remember you? Hell, I was just reading one of your old pulp stories.Ф

"You kidding?Ф

"Not a bit." I held the magazine out for him to look at. "One of the Rex Hannigan novelettes.Ф

Dancer glanced at the title above the interior illustration, and his sardonic mouth got even more sardonic. " 'There'll be a Hot Crime in the Old Tomb Tonight!' Frigging editors loved pun titles in those days, the worse the better.Ф

I said, "Bad title, maybe, but a good story," as we shook hands.

"If you say so. I wouldn't recognize a word of it after all these years.Ф

"Don't you ever reread your early work?Ф

"I don't reread what I wrote six days ago," he said. "Besides, all my pulps went up in the fire, remember?Ф

I remembered. It had been almost seven years ago, down the coast a hundred miles or so at a village called Cypress Bay. A woman named Judith Paige had hired me to follow her husband because he kept disappearing on weekends and she suspected he was seeing another woman. Paige led me to Cypress Bay, and straight into a nasty triple murder that revolved around tangled relationships out of the past and a twenty-year-old paperback mystery written by Dancer. The novel, through no fault of his own, had almost cost him his life, no doubt would have if he'd been home at his beach shack, instead of celebrating the completion of his latest Western with a bottle and a woman, the night it was deliberately set ablaze.

"You didn't replace any of the books and magazines you lost?" I asked him.

"No.Ф

"How come?Ф

"Too much trouble," he said. "I used to keep file copies of most of my published shit, but I kind of lost interest after the fire." He shrugged. "Guy who wrote all that early stuff is dead and gone anyway.Ф

Still the same old Dancer, I thought. Bitter, cynical, full of self-mockery and something that approached self-loathing. He had cared once; you could tell that, and how much talent and promise he'd had by reading the pre, 1950 Hannigan stories. But that had been a long time ago, a lifetime ago, before a combination of things only he could understand had soured and blighted him.

If he cared for anything now, it was probably money and liquor. He was sober enough at the moment, but there was the faint smell of bourbon on his breath that said he had drunk his lunch and maybe his late-afternoon snack as well. And he had all the physical signs: ruptured blood vessels in his nose and cheeks; the grayish dissipated appearance of his skin; the washed-out blue-gray pupils and bloodshot whites of his eyes. He was at least fifteen pounds thinner than I recalled, and starting to lose some of his dust-colored hair. He had to be about sixty now, and he looked every year of it, every hard, unhappy year.

Some of what I was thinking must have shown in my face. Dancer grinned at me in a lopsided way, without humor. "Pretty sorry specimen, right?" he said.

"Did I say that?Ф

"You didn't have to." He shrugged again. "All writers are drunks, you know.