I heard the fire siren before I reached the village. I shunned the task of telling Thirza and sneaked past her cottage like a criminal, hoping she was in the kitchen at the back. Once in my own place, I poured myself a stiff whisky to try to subdue the rage I felt against fire-raisers — or was it just one? I remembered Darren’s threat to Thirza: “I know where you live.” I wondered if she could be persuaded to move house.
The police came to me that evening. Someone had seen me return from the direction of the cliffs. The body of a child had been found in the ruins of the cabin. There was a bike outside in the heather. His father identified it as Darren’s. Darren himself couldn’t be identified until they had his dental records.
The little I could tell them only confirmed their theory. Darren had set two fires, had taken a petrol can inside the cabin, and the door had blown shut and the bar dropped. Thirza had told the police about the old kitchen knife but Darren wouldn’t have known about that. They did find the partially melted remains of a Swiss Army knife, so he could have had the right idea, but the blades were closed; he hadn’t had time to use it to open the door. And the viewing slots were too narrow for even a small boy to escape that way.
The police were surprised that I hadn’t heard anything. “I could have,” I said, “but the gulls were making such a racket, screaming—” And then I realised it wasn’t the gulls that had been screaming.
Hughie Jones said his son didn’t own a Swiss Army knife. “He would say that,” Thirza said. “Mine disappeared the day he broke my nose.”
She didn’t rebuild the cabin. She sold her cottage to an English family for some inflated sum and moved into a luxury apartment in town. I visited her when she was settled and found her much improved. She was a different woman, far more outgoing in this light and airy flat above the harbour: neatly dressed, and she’d even had her hair styled. A red marmalade cat dozed on the window sill.
“Why, you’ve found a cat just like Cooper,” I exclaimed.
“That is Cooper, dear.”
“I thought — didn’t you think—”
“I put him in a cattery when Darren told me what could happen to a cat that strayed.”
“But you could never have him back while Darren — while he lived in the same village.”
“While he lived,” she amended. “He was a good boy,” she added, raising an eyebrow as a gull screamed close by, startling Cooper. Her tone mimicked the local accent.
“He was evil,” I said firmly. “A kind of justice was done out there on the cliffs. No way do I go along with the coroner and his verdict of accidental death — although I agree with his rider about the dangers of children playing with fire.”
“Justice?” she repeated.
“The door would slam shut only in an offshore wind,” I said. “And it was the cabin shaking in a gust that made the bar drop. There was only a light breeze that day, and it was onshore.”
After a while she said, “He wouldn’t have burned to death. He’d have been unconscious before the flames reached him.”
“Smoke inhalation?”
“Something like that.” She smiled. “I’ll put the kettle on and we’ll have a nice cup of tea.”
She could have been speaking the truth to the best of her knowledge. She may have left him unconscious, and she’d been too far away to hear his screams when he recovered. How had she done it? Lured him out there by dropping well-placed hints that the cabin wasn’t insured, known he was following her, waited inside with a raised weapon (something wooden, something that would burn), spilled the petrol, struck the match? She’d made a mistake, dropping the Swiss Army knife through a ragged pocket. She’d remedied the mistake superbly. Darren had stolen it.
She came in with the tea tray.
“How did Darren carry a petrol can in broad daylight without being seen?” I asked.
“He didn’t. It was already there. He must have taken it there in the dark.”
“So why wouldn’t he set fire to the cabin then?”
“He wanted me inside, dear. He thought he had his chance. Stupid boy. But then all criminals are stupid, aren’t they?”
“No. Just the ones who get caught.”
Our eyes locked. That we had the same thought was obvious from her next words. “There’s no proof, and you won’t talk. Suppose you did? A senile old woman suggested a fantasy about turning the tables on a naughty boy. That’s all.”
She was right. She had changed out of all recognition — but of course it was Darren who had changed her: uttering his threats, looking at her cat with his cold goat’s eyes, never realising that he was being measured for size by a tigress.
The Jury Box
by Jon L. Breen
© 1997 by Jon L. Breen
The pulps, fragile and disposable fiction magazines printed on cheap paper, peaked between 1920 and 1950. Writers like Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler gave them the patina of legend, and Quentin Tarrantino’s remarkable film Pulp Fiction generated a fresh spurt of interest. But were the pulps as terrific as reputed?
Editors Ed Gorman, Bill Pronzini, and Martin H. Greenberg, introducing the 550-page trade paperback anthology American Pulp (Carroll & Graf, $12.95), note that “most pulp fiction was cliche-filled and Godawful.” Thus, they have included few stories actually from pulps — far more appeared in the vastly superior digests, including EQMM, AHMM, and the great ’50s magazine Manhunt. The selections — from authors as various as Evan Hunter, Marcia Muller, Yin Packer, John Lutz, Jack Ritchie, Leigh Brackett, Richard S. Prather, William Campbell Gault, Craig Rice, and Clark Howard — are excellent, as are the notes that precede them. Also worth seeking (and also drawing more from the digests than the pulps) is a hardcover instant-remainder bargain from British anthologist Peter Haining, Pulp Fictions: Hardboiled Stories (Barnes & Noble, $7.98).
Even if the pulps were mostly junk, there are still worthy stories to be rescued from their disintegrating pages. Sixteen tales by Howard Browne, most from ’40s issues of Mammoth Detective, are gathered in Incredible Ink (Dennis McMillan, 1581 N. Debra Sue Place, Tucson, AZ 85715; $80), which begins with a fascinating oral history distilled from interviews with Browne, who turned 90 this year. The account of his life as novelist, pulp writer-editor, and screenwriter includes the story of how he came to write the 1952 novelette “The Veiled Woman,” signed by Mickey Spillane. A bibliography and list of screen credits are also included. (You read the price correctly. The book is only available in a boxed edition limited to 350 signed copies.)
I’ve read just enough fiction by the legendary pulp Weird Tales’ most famous contributor, H.P. Lovecraft, to know he’s not my cup of tea, but he was a strong influence on two writers I admire, Robert Bloch and August Derleth. Two new volumes, one hardcover and one paperback, present the most famous works of the supernatural horror icon: Tales of H.P. Lovecraft (Ecco Press, $23), with a substantial introduction by Joyce Carol Oates; and The Annotated H.P. Lovecraft (Dell, $12.95), with introduction and extensive notes by Lovecraft biographer S.T. Joshi, whose four selections are all included among Oates’s ten. But given Joshi’s illustrations and extra editorial matter, collectors may want both.
Pulp writing was either an occupation or an influence on the dark suspense writers represented in two handsome volumes from The Library of America, an ambitious project that until now has included only Raymond Chandler among crime fiction writers. Crime Novels: American Noir of the 1930s and ’40s ($35) includes James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934), Horace McCoy’s They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? (1935), Edward Anderson’s Thieves Like Us (1937), Kenneth Fearing’s The Big Clock (1946), William Lindsay Gresham’s Nightmare Alley (1946), and Cornell Wool-rich’s I Married a Dead Man (1948). All the entries in Crime Novels: American Noir of the 1950s ($35) save Patricia High-smith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955) originally appeared as paperback originals: Jim Thompson’s The Killer Inside Me (1952), Charles Willeford’s Pick-up (1967), David Goodis’s Down There (1956), and Chester Himes’s The Real Cool Killers (1959). Editor Robert Polito provides outstanding biographical and textual notes.