Tag Archives: Crime Fiction

Contents Vol. 4 No. 1

Welcome to Volume Four, Number One of Dime Pulp,
A Serial Pulp Fiction Magazine.

The new year at Dime Pulp begins with the return of Carriers by Mark DuCharme and it’s gothic air of shadowy creatures who might just be the living dead. Carriers is a vampire novella with touches of black comedy and satirical bite, and is told from the perspective of its unreliable narrator and protagonist, Johnny. It takes place during a “plague” that has been going on for two years in an unnamed city. Dead bodies litter the streets, hallways, and homes. A corpse disposal company hires people like Johnny to transport them to a facility at the edge of town with the very important stipulation that the bodies be delivered there before sundown. No one ever says why. Read more in the latest installment of Carriers, Episodes VIII-IX .

Also returning to the start Volume 4 off on the right foot are Dime Pulp regular authors Pierre Anton Taylor and Phyllis Huldarsdottir with Phyllis’s steampunk adventure, and Perre’s crimefighter fiction, Just Coincidence.

Phyllis Huldarsdottir returns with Cheése Stands Alone, the continuing adventures of Airship Commander Lydia Cheése (pronounced “Chase”) in the search for her anti-Clockwork Commonwealth renegade father, Commodore Jack, with the help Doctor Professor Jean-Pierre Serre-Pain, proprietor the Madame Ophelia’s Ophidiarium, a traveling snake show, and his associates, former circus strongman, Vlady, and Serpina, the snake girl. On the run from IOTA (the Investigative Office of The Admiralty), she has narrowly escapes capture by her nemesis, Chief Inspector Karla Kola, in Oldest Orleans, and now with the help of a young wannabe airship pilot, Pyare, must traverse the Central Massif to rendezvous with Serre-Pain and the dirigible that will take them on a mercy mission to HOAR (the Horn Of Africa Republics), base for the anti-Commonwealth ICERS. Read more of Cheése Stands Alone in Episode XII.

Pierre Anton Taylor’s dark crimefighting serial, Just Coincidence is about a privileged young man with the unremarkable name of Wayne Bruce who returns to the site where his father once had his business, a battery manufacturing plant, and where he often spent his childhood days hanging around the factory and the neighborhood. His return is haunted by the mysterious circumstances surrounding his father’s death and the vague feeling that his uncle is somehow involved. Appalled by the poverty and crime of the place he remembers fondly, he is moved to resolve the injustice of the socially marginalized and to wreak vengeance on those he believes are responsible for the death of his father. The backstory to his emergence as a crimefighter is revealed in Just Coincidence, Interlude I

Also returning for the 2024 inaugural issue is Dropping A Dime, the editor’s pithy commentary on pulp fiction, this time asking the vital question What Is It About Poets and Pulp?

FYI: Available for readers of Dime Pulp who may have missed a few issues or lost the thread of a serial, Dime Pulp Yearbook 21, featuring the novels (The Last Resort and Better Than Dead) and the short fiction (Hard Boiled Myth and Gone Missing) of Volume One’s 12 issues, is joined by Dime Pulp Yearbook 22, featuring the complete pulp Western, On The Road To Las Cruces, continuing episodes of a detective story, Better Than Dead, the opening chapters of new serial novels, Just Coincidence and Cheése Stands Alone, the short fiction of Hard Boiled Myth and Polka Dot Dress, as well as Dropping A Dime’s pithy pulp observations. Volume Two’s 10 issues are available for perusal in their entirety by simply clicking on the links in this paragraph or on the menu bar above. Dime Pulp Yearbook 23 will be available in early February ’24 as part of the annual archival review.

If you’ve made it this far, click on the links above to read the entertaining serial contents of Volume 4, Number 1!

—Perry O’Dickle, chief scribe
and word accountant

Just Coincidence: Interlude I

January 30, 2024Crime Fiction, Gothic, Pulp Fiction, Steampunk Fiction, Western FictionA Dark Knight, Crime Fiction, Crimefighter, Just Coincidence, Pierre Anton Taylor, Pulp FictionNuallain House, Publishers

by Pierre Anton Taylor

The faint smell of tear gas greeted them as they stepped out of their lodging at the old colonial hotel and into the heat of early day. There were two Land Rovers parked in the road. One of them was their transport, the other was for their armed escort. There had been demonstrations the previous day in the capitol of Bamako, the radio had announced. Government troops had fired on protesting students and there were reports of casualties. A smaller demonstration in Timbuktu had been dispersed in the twilight hours. The hotel manager assured them that it was just a minor disturbance. Disgruntled youths, he’d explained. They were headed north into the desert’s edge, the Sahel.

Wayne Bruce had accompanied the director of the BATS Lab, Doctor Alfred Fledermann, to the Republic of Mali and the ancient city of Timbuktu on a fact finding mission. Fledermann was retiring and had taken on the job of mentoring Wayne into the responsibilities of the position. It was no secret that the director would have preferred someone with a scientific background to oversee the Lab, not a tabloid fodder daredevil. Yet he was loyal to the old man, Wallace Bruce, who had believed in him as a callow young researcher and appointed him to head the Bruce Battery Works R&D division decades earlier. If it were any consolation, young Bruce was intelligent, and serious, if not a little too earnest. There was the shadow of a cape about him.

The previous evening, in the lounge of the hotel, they had met with the man who would be their guide, a Frenchman named Roland Brebeuf, a holdover from the old colonial days who knew the terrain and the sparse population that peopled it. There were was lithium to be mined in the south, but Fledermann wasn’t interested in lithium. He was after diatomite. Brebeuf had been incredulous. Sand?

There is sand, and there is silica. There are many types of sands and sources, from minerals to vertebrate excretion, Alfred had explained before they’d flown to Africa. Think of the ocean floor as one large litterbox as well as a graveyard. Most beach sand is a combination of rock, bone, and fish excrement. Diatomite is a peculiar type of sand made from microscopic fossilized algae millions of years old. The location of this silica deposit was once part of a vast shallow inland sea whose shore had been the grasslands that were now the Sahara. That’s where they were going.

Wayne was a little young to get excited about sand, but he accepted the scientist’s word that this particular silica had potential for producing a distinctive kind of glass that would be beneficial to Bruce Enterprise. Fledermann had developed a process that gave the compound unique properties advantageous in light harvesting. The future lay in solar energy he’d insisted, no matter what anyone said. “He who controls the production of batteries controls the world. After all, once you’ve harvested the energy of those photons, where are you going to store them? Batteries, of course.” Of course, that succinctly summed up the Bruce Enterprise mission.

Missing his accustomed foil, Brebeuf had hurled an invective at Fledermann. “You wanted sand! There’s your blasted sand!” pointing in the direction of the stranded vehicle.

They would have to be on their guard on this expedition. Brebeuf had warned that there were bandits to the north, antigovernment militias, Tuaregs. As the winding road rose up into the mottled sienna scrub lands sparsely wooded with windshaped acacia, they passed men and donkeys laden with spindly desiccated branches to be sold as fire wood in town. Wayne looked back at the mud and earth edifices receding in the distance. This whole world was made of sand. And discounting the modern accouterments, he marveled that this had been a way of life for centuries, millennia, a place whose environment had shifted from semi tropical to the brittle savannahs of shrubs and anemic grasses. It was a dry eviscerated soil that would not support much life. But at one time it had. And the people who inhabited the Sahel had learned to bend and survive, adapt to the geological shift.

Once they left the main track, passing through a village that was not much more than sticks and mud and stretches of blue canopied shelters, their progress was slowed by the rough going. The driver, a black man with the welts of scarification across his cheeks, argued with Brebeuf about which rise to take and which wadis to follow. Some of it was in French which Wayne could understand, but otherwise the heated exchange was a spitfire of patois that was much too fast for him. It was like having an old married couple in the front seat. And it could be amusing until it wasn’t. By then the heat of day had intensified. Although most of their effort was to try to stay seated, the exertion made then sweat profusely.

A wrong turn had landed them in a bowl, a dry depression that with an occasional rain became a watering hole. The sides were steep and repeated attempts to climb out had only dug the rear wheels deeper into the soft sand. The driver, whose name was Youssouf, and Brebeuf berated each other all the while the three of them, including elderly Fledermann, set their shoulders to the back of the Rover while their escorts watched from the side of the crater having stopped just in time to avoid the same mistake. They found the drama between the driver and the guide quite entertaining and added their own jibes and taunts. One must have struck a nerve and which caused Youssouf to climb up to the rim where they were standing and confront one of the armed men. Brebeuf had scrambled up the embankment after him, waving his arms to try to defuse the tension, all the while offering mollifying words. There ensued a frantic parlay that eventually resulted in a calming of the hostilities but with the escort telling them they could pack sand, and driving away.

The sun was almost directly overhead and to continue was to only invite heat stroke. Their vehicle offered little shelter and captured the heat like a tin roof. The contention between driver and guide continued but nervously subdued. They of course blamed each other for their predicament. Brebeuf led them to a spindly acacia some distance from the fissure that had swallowed the Rover. They would have to wait out the heat of the day before putting their backs to getting the Rover out of the ravine. In the meantime, Youssouf would head back to the encampment they had passed a dozen or so miles back and try to recruit some help. The heat had visible effect on Fledermann. Wayne had erected a canopy under the acacia from a tattered tarp in the boot of the Rover. It was an unrelentingly hot, the scorching air frying sinuses with every breath, searing the lungs, the shade from the acacia hardly worthy of its name. They had a reserve of water and some food which Brebeuf advised to ration. The supplies for their expedition were in the Rover the armed escort had driven off in. There was no telling how long they would stuck.

Missing his accustomed foil, Brebeuf had hurled an invective at Fledermann. “You wanted sand! There’s your blasted sand!” pointing in the direction of the stranded vehicle. Supine, Fledermann panted, licking his lips, eyes closed, head turned to one side. “Something is not right,” he breathed. Wayne had given him shallow sips from his canteen. “This is not the way it was supposed to happen,” the old man groaned. Wayne had tried to make Albert as comfortable as possible in the oppressive heat that seemed to be squeezing the life out of him. The horizon shimmered in silent exhaustion. Nothing stirred in the feral landscape. It sounded like an echo at first, the gunshot coming from a distance. Brebeuf had stood rigid as if he had been hit, his hand to his throat. He had given Wayne a quick furtive glance before he’d run off in the direction his driver had gone. “Youssouf!” he called out repeatedly, stumbling in the burning dust.

With Brebeuf gone, he’d been left to care for Dr. Fledermann. He’d only carried a small rucksack for his camera and extra film. The remainder of his gear was gone. Rummaging through the stranded vehicle had been like trying to recover an ice cube from an oven, the chassis and frame searing him several times, upholstery close to molten. He’d managed to retrieve his pack and Alfred’s aluminum field case with documents and maps. The grilling sapping his strength, he’d collapsed under the acacia. Alfred had moved or rolled from where he’d left him, almost as if he was trying to crawl off, but not managing more than a body width. He’d looked up at Wayne through pained half closed eyes. “Save yourself,” he’d said. “I’ve been such a fool.”

Next Time: The Ordeal Continues

Dropping A Dime: What Is It About Poets and Pulps?

January 30, 2024Crime Fiction, Gothic, Pulp Fiction, Steampunk Fiction, Western Fictionbook-review, book-reviews, books, crime, Crime Fiction, Dropping A Dime, Poets & Pulps, Pulp FictionNuallain House, Publishers

What is it about poets and pulps? The easy answer is imagination and vernacular. One might throw in a dash of ubi sunt just because it is truly about nostalgia, a nostalgia for a certain kind of storytelling that dispenses with the metaphysical and is driven by narrative inspiration and colloquial dialogue. The storyteller was not always defined by paragraphs and pagination. And poets are the ur-storytellers, singing of valorous and miraculous interludes in the myths of yore—it’s something poets, even contemporary poets, feel at their roots. Of course a lot has changed since, as Aram Saroyan once remarked, campfires were the first TV. In the post industrial world, the wood pulp paper used in the publication of disposable literature from newspapers to magazines to novels for most of the 20^th century became the designation of a genre.

Pulp can also be an acronym for Popular Undervalued Literature Publications. There is something common, déclassé about pulps. That’s why that kind of reading is called “guilty pleasures.” All popular literature delights in the sordid and the vulgar in which the reader can catch a glimpse of themselves in de facto complicity.

Noir is often conflated with pulp, but there is a distinction. Penzler suggests that noir began with Hammett in the American canon. Police procedurals depict an unromanticized look at our venial selves, and thus the abysmal pessimism of “noir.” Noir can be characterized by irony and cynicism, the modern malaise.

Pulp writing, on the other hand, represents a certain naivety, a suspension of belief that speaks to a kind of anti-existentialism, an escape to the realm of fantasy and fanciful storytelling. With a few notable exceptions, the popular men’s magazines in the 1920s and 30s featuring lurid stories of crime, the unusual, and the future, “true” or otherwise, can be considered “pulp.”

Postwar, the pulp heroes and villains grew capes and fled to the comic books, leaving the field open to an angst driven sardonic despairing self-righteousness of the survivors of a world cataclysm, winners and losers, but mostly losers, now defined as noir.

It is not unusual to find poets engaged in writing or reading pulp or noir, or for a novelist to pen a collection of poems. As writers write, one or the other becomes their maître and is recognized as such. Almost a hundred years ago, the poet Kenneth Fearing published acclaimed crime fiction in the pulps. James Sallis, author of the Lew Griffin PI series, is an accomplished poet, yet it is for his skillful novellas that he is known. Jim Harrison, author of Legends Of The Fall and the Detective Sunderson novels, was also known for his poetry. Poet Alice Notley, an admitted fan of the genre, published an epic “noir” poem titled Negativity’s Kiss in France (where the word originated), managing to synthesize the bleakness of crime fiction with the abstraction of the avantgarde. Kerouac and Burroughs (Williams S.) wrote Hippos Were Boiled In Their Tanks, as a paean to the hardboiled pulps. Roberto Bolaño, a poet whose novels are more well known than his poetry, cashes in on the cachet of pulp and noir with the title of his remarkably dark narrative, The Savage Detectives. James Ellroy might fancy himself a poet, pushing the stylistic envelope as poets do. And for countless other writers, known and unknown, poets or novelists, the genre of imagination and vernacular holds a peculiar fascination. It is, in a sense, a return to the source. Just sayin’: scratch a poet and find a storyteller, and vice versa.

Two recent books, Woody Haut’s On Dangerous Ground and Jim Nisbet’s Pandemic Ditties, offer a case in point.

Woody Haut’s On Dangerous Ground, Film Noir Poems takes its title from the Nicholas Ray movie of the same name. As the 50 “film noir poems” illustrate, the poet is well informed in the both genres. The author of numerous critical studies of the noir genre including Pulp Culture: Hard Boiled Fiction and The Cold War and Neon Noir: Contemporary American Crime Fiction as well as a couple of noir pot boilers, Cry For a Nickel, Die For a Dime and Days of Smoke, Haut’s poems take their titles from such classics as The Big Sleep, Nightmare Alley, and Touch Of Evil as well as the lesser known films like Where The Sidewalk Ends and I Wake Up Screaming. The poems themselves are prompted by dialogue, interesting camera work, the plot, a particular scene, the acting by the actor/actress, or their depiction of a time, place and social relevance which reveals the author’s knowledgeable immersion in a distinct American genre with a French name.

Woody Haut started out on poetry but soon hit the hardboiled stuff. And he even admits it! “Poetry had been my first port of call, though over the years my relationship had succumbed to disgruntlements and separations.” And yes, the poetry world is not an easy safe to crack, and even if you do, sometimes, although the safe may seem full, the rewards can be empty. Still carrying some of the baggage from that time, he confesses, “stretching back to the mid-1960s, in Los Angeles, then San Francisco, with various publications and a range of mentors, from the academic — Henri Coulette, Philip Levine, Jack Gilbert — to the peripatetic—Michael McClure, Charles Olson, Amiri Baraka and Ed Dorn. More recently, my interest veered towards the more linguistically-oriented, such as Clark Coolidge, Michael Gizzi, and Tom Raworth, and political screeds by the likes of Sean Bonney and Keston Sutherland.” And he is not above spilling the beans and implicating other writers in this amour fou: “Alice Notley, Robert Polito, Geoffrey O’Brien, Nicholas Christopher, and earlier, Weldon Keyes and Kenneth Fearing. Even Raymond Chandler began his writing career composing doggerel for the Westminster Gazette, while the great Dorothy B. Hughes garnered the Yale Younger Poets Prize long before she wrote such classics as In a Lonely Place or Ride the Pink Horse.” And of course the most damning testimony, besides his own words, are the poems themselves.

On Dangerous Ground
(Nicholas Ray, 1952)
Why do you punks make me do it?
growls the cop as he beats the shit
out of a pathetic street hood. As if
the same old same old, aggressor
blaming victim, perking watch and
wonder. Law and order cracking as
inevitable as the saturated light, an
apartment filled with testosteronised
artifacts: what once was, will never
be. Violence, as always, feeding the
conundrum. If only it wasn’t so addictive,
or family of last resort. A jones exiling
him to a sparsely populated snow-
ridden town, viewed-a movie within
a movie-through a windscreen, the
schtumed backseat viewer cachéd
in their own private critique, bleached
out by the death of a young girl at the
hands of a teenager barely knowing
better. With darkness bleeding into
domesticity, a match is lit for unblinking
eyes, and a wounded plea to locate her
brother before revenge can freeze his
tracks. Frightened, the kid invariably
slips from higher ground, recycling a
geology of clichés, footnotes in an
expurgated history of crime and
punishment. Fifty years on, the screen-
writer, blagging in his local coffee shop,
tells a redacted story: how he’d simply
wanted the cop to return to the city a
different person. But the studio’s arc was
non-negotiable. After all, the politics of
money dictates that only a miracle can
suffice. A capitulation, however generous,
not quite more than barely nothing at all

As Haut explains, “the poems in On Dangerous Ground could be thought as distortions, often humorous, of the films under consideration, like scrambled film reviews that exist at a particular moment, distilled through time, whose shelf life will last until the next viewing, by which time another set of linguistic prompts or images might attract my attention.”

Woody Haut’s On Dangerous Ground is available from Close To The Bone Publishing

A longtime member of the Bay Area lit scene who passed away in 2022, Jim Nisbet was an internationally recognized novelist and poet, and a seminal figure in the West Coast Noir Renaissance. His many novels which include Lethal Injection, Windward Passage, Snitch World, and The Syracuse Codex (to name only a few) have been described as “Jack Kerouac meets Tarantino meets David Forster Wallace” which is some kind of hyperbole but fitting of the genre and the author.

Nisbet returned to his poetry roots (not that he was ever very far from them) to put the pandemic in pentameters in a selections of poems titled Pandemic Ditties. Jim, in the late 70s was a young poet in San Francisco who wrote and declaimed his poetry in coffee houses and bookstores. He even read at the historic San Francisco Punk Poetry Festival at Terminal Concepts Gallery with such luminaries as Andrei Codrescu, Gloria Frym, Darrell Gray, and the ravishing redhead femme fatale, Victoria Rathbun, straight out of a noir drama. Obviously, as it turns out, poetry wasn’t the only thing he was writing.

The poems, fifty five in all, collected in this slim volume from Molotov Editions, were written over a two year period (March 2020 through June of ’22) and distributed to his email contacts. Informed both by classical tradition and the immediate circumstances of the pandemic, these poems deal in matters political, spiritual, and cultural — but ultimately take the shape of an increasingly personal encounter with the phantasms of the pandemic.
Nisbet has a fine discerning ear and the Oxfordian vocabulary to go with it. The raucous ditties romp and roam, the pace hyperactive, reminiscent of the high wire antics of Nisbet’s prose, walking the line between doggerel and limerick, all the while juggling a ham on wry sense of humor. And like those internationally acclaimed novels, the poems are nothing but lively and thought provoking. An excerpt from “No. 19” written in July of 2020 gives an idea of the gyroscopic wit of the novelist as poet

Safe at home in 1958
We had Doctor Zorba
Who, his eyes turned away at last
From the jitterbugging babe

In The Asphalt Jungle, weekly chalked
On a dusty slate
“Man. Woman. Birth.
Death. Infinity.”

Today, not safe anywhere,
We have Subdoctor Schnorba
Sketching in thin air
“Person. Woman. Man.

Camera. TV.” Repeat ad
nauseum. Never mind
The incredulity. Expect
Rezids, directly deposited.

The poems in Pandemic Ditties (pace Defoe) demonstrate Nisbet’s great range, from highbrow to lowbrow at the flick of the tongue, resulting in fascinating frenetic high octane linguistic kaleidoscopic versifying. A seat belt, nay, a harness is recommended if you’re going along for the ride: whiplash may occur as the result of sudden sharp turns, changes in direction and orientation, and abrupt stops, all of it like an amusement park ride, entertaining as well as exhilarating. Anyone who has enjoyed Nisbet’s novels will appreciate this selection.

Jim’s Pandemic Ditties is available from Molotov Editions

There is no doubt, as it is quite obvious to the most casual of observers, the genre is infested with poets. Should the reader of pulp be concerned, put in a call to the exterminators? Probably not. Poets and pulps are in a symbiotic relationship, like Louis and Rick in Casablanca, it is a “beautiful friendship.”

That’s my story and I’m sticking to it,
Perry O’Dickle
for Dime Pulp,

Carriers VIII-IX

January 30, 2024Crime Fiction, Gothic, Pulp Fiction, Steampunk Fiction, Western FictionCarriers, Crime Fiction, fiction, Gothic, Mark DuCharme, Plague, Pulp Fiction, thriller, Vampires, writingNuallain House, Publishers

by Mark DuCharme

-VIII-

“You’re late,” Waycross blurted, testily. He was the Interim Assistant Deputy Director of Transportation— that is, of transporters like me. I never met anyone higher up than Waycross. He felt it, too. He was like a petulant king.

I looked at my watch. I was about a quarter-hour late or so, I was surprised to learn.

“I’m sorry, sir, but I had a carrier incident while off-duty in the middle of the night, and I thought I should try to get the cargo to the facility directly, and thought I could do that and still make it back here on time, but I misjudged the time terribly. I’m so horribly sorry, sir.”

“Well,” he paused, “don’t let it happen again.” Then he huffed away, just as testily as before, but perhaps a bit incensed at his own uncharacteristic show of relative mercy.

I noticed the New Man several feet away, looking stealthily toward me and observing— observing the whole time, with a most curious and furtive glee.

The New Man was sinister. I felt uneasy in his presence, and so tried to avoid him. There was something odd about him, the way he’d so suddenly replaced Hank, and the silence about it, the whispers, as if nothing had happened at all, as if Hank had never been. And the New Man always seemed to be turning up suddenly at the wrong time, looking about stealthily, behind one’s back, over one’s shoulder, as if he were studying you, as if he wanted to learn your private business, as if he wanted to learn to be you. I half suspected him of being a spy for management. Maybe, it now occurred to me, he was a spy for this Thorne.

I didn’t intend to let myself be late again, but neither could I make much sense of all that had recently occurred. Then I remembered the packet Gruber had left me. I reached into my coat and felt that it was still in my breast pocket. I suddenly became more curious about it. I mean, here was I, who had been fearing that old man— or rather, his remains— and I’d been carrying his final testament, of sorts, the whole time. And why me? I was just a neighbor. Sure, I’d drunk his brandy and listened to his ravings on occasion, but we weren’t close, or so I judged. Why would he have made a point of leaving this for my eyes alone? Why would he have told Ana about it, and why did she feel it was important (if she felt anything at all) that I should get it— especially in that very strange moment when we’d just burst in upon her old daddy’s death scene? What strange jumble of thoughts rambled through her mind at that time, out of which she determined that this was the one thing she wanted to be sure not to forget? It’s not like she remembered it a week later and slipped it under my apartment door; no, she made a point of giving it to me then. Something was mysterious about it, alright. Yet I had no time to look into it now; a full day’s work lay ahead of me.

Must I confess how my curiosity began to grow and fester over the course of that day’s labors, and how my lack of a full night’s sleep only seemed to compound my general state of confusion?

Finally, after endless hours, the sun began its slow descent, and I, after having deposited my cargo, began to make my way home also. I knew as soon as I got there that I would want to read Gruber’s packet. And so I hurried.

When I finally entered my apartment, the night now having fully descended upon the city, I tossed Gruber’s envelope upon the table and removed my coat. I was hungry, but even more so was I curious, so I grabbed a beer out of the refrigerator, stuck a frozen dinner in the microwave, and sat down with the packet that had captivated my thoughts for the better part of that strange day.

I ripped open the yellowed envelope and removed the sheets of folded paper and another sealed packet that had been inside the first. When I read the contents, it became clear to me that Gruber had thought more highly of our “friendship” than I myself.

Dear Johnny,
By the time you read this, I may be dead. That’s how things go in times like these. I’ll try to explain more about that later. Forgive me if I can’t explain it all. There are some things I am about to tell you that defy reason or virtue.
On the last night you came to visit, Johnny, I could sense your skepticism, so I didn’t want to go on about all this. But nevertheless, I feel it’s important to tell you, because if I’m right, my life is in real danger, and yours is too.
I mentioned one Artemas Thorne that night. It didn’t seem like you’d heard of him. Nevertheless, he’s a very important man in this town. Some say, the most important. But I told you, or I tried to tell, that he is very, very dangerous. You must be on your guard!
Why he’s so dangerous will take some explaining. You probably already think me a little crazy, Johnny, but if you don’t, you surely will after you have finished reading what follows. I can assure you, though, that I am in full possession of my mental faculties, despite my age, even as I imagine that my assurance will not matter much to you, my dear friend. Nevertheless, because your own soul is at stake, as well as mine, I must try at least to convince you, however quixotic that labor may prove.
Johnny, strange things are going on in this city— strange and wicked things. Why do you think that all those bodies have to be brought to the abandoned warehouse before dusk? What is it your employers are afraid of? Have you ever thought about that?
Johnny— you’re smarter than you pretend to be, but if I can speak frankly, my friend, your problem is that you’re incurious.
Johnny, have you ever heard about the dead returning to life? I don’t mean to life exactly, but to some pale semblance of it. When this happens, some call those returned— those whom I believe you call “carriers”— the undead.
Johnny, please bear with me. I am not as feeble-minded as I think you think I am. I am not feeble-minded at all, in fact. But when I say this, I know you will not believe me.
Nevertheless, I persist, because you are my last hope. My daughter is lost to me. I know few people young enough, strong enough, to carry on this fight. You are both young and strong, Johnny, and if you will but believe, I know that you can see this through— and do what must be done.
You have received the calling card, by now, of Artemas Thorne, I trust. No, it’s not I who put it there! I understand your skeptical nature, Johnny— in many ways, I am a skeptic myself, as I’ve tried to stress to you, though it seems to have fallen on deaf ears. In any case, perhaps by the time you read this, you might be a bit more curious about him than when we last spoke.
I am a historian by training, if not by profession, as you well know. I have done a fair amount of historical research in my time. I have looked into this Artemas Thorne— for reasons that may become clear to you, but which for now it is difficult to fully explain. In any event, there is no record of a person of that name, man or woman (for in fact, it could be either) ever being born on this continent. And I’ve scoured all the data. I find that rather curious.
The other curious thing is that the only record— again, on this continent— of a person by that name, in any variant spelling, is of a colonist who arrived here on one of the early ships. A birth record has been found for that Artemas Thorne near London, but no death record for that person, born in 1596, has been located. Very strange.
Johnny, I am convinced that the Artemas Thorne who lives here and now and the Artemas Thorne born in 1596 are one and the same! He is one of the undead, Johnny— in fact, he is their leader, of sorts. If I am right about this— and I am almost certain that I am— then it is he who brought this plague upon our city. He is a very wicked man— or should I say, creature?
You’ll want proof. I can offer none, at least until catastrophe strikes. But if you ever wake up in the middle of the night, full of restless dreams, do not look out your south-facing window if you lack courage.
My hope and purpose in writing posthumously (should my guess prove correct, and my daughter, in that event, keep her word) is that you be awakened to this danger and act swiftly, as one should.

Most sincerely,
Augustus Aloysius Gustave “Jim” Gruber

PS: I am enclosing a second sealed letter in this first. I ask that you not read it unless and until you become convinced that I am right. This second letter will instruct you on what to do to rid this city of its plague and of the demon who brought it upon us.
PPS: One more thing, Johnny. My daughter Analeise may call upon you some evening, if she already hasn’t. Don’t let her see this letter or the enclosed one! If I’m right about all of these things, Johnny, she is dangerous too.

I was most perplexed by this strange missive. On the one hand, Gruber here sounds madder than ever before; on the other, he makes a strange sort of sense.

I grew upset. The events of the last few days had cast an unmistakable pall over things. It seemed as if I’d been drawn into some chain of circumstance that led I knew not where, and over which I had no control. I didn’t know what to do or think. I began to wish that I’d told Ana to go the hell away and gone back to sleep. I began to wish that I hadn’t knocked on Gruber’s door that night. O, what to believe?

I finished my meal, then drank another beer, then another. I went to bed at the usual time, but slept fitfully. I would have gladly settled for troubled dreams.

-IV-

I couldn’t very easily get to sleep, and when I did it was only a feeble approximation of rejuvenating repose. I did wake fully, though, around midnight. Old Gruber’s letter had haunted me, chasing back innocence’s rest. But when I glanced up at the clock and saw that it was only 11:58 P.M., I felt despair. And then, those words of Gruber’s came back to me: if you ever wake up in the middle of the night, full of restless dreams, do not look out your south-facing window if you lack courage. Gruber had been crazy, but he could be right about some things. My apartment does have a south-facing window, for example. But what could I see from there, and why would it require courage? The main thing visible from there is that old tower.

I have remarked earlier in my tale upon the unusual construction of the building in which my quarters are located— how the edifice is essentially an old Victorian house that has been added on to over the many decades hence. This is so, and the newer appendages are sometimes odd and ill-suited to the original components of the structure.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the tower. It is probably at least five or six stories in height— easily the tallest edifice for blocks around. It is constructed of mortared stones. It looks rather more like a European structure than one erected on this continent. In truth, it resembles a medieval tower more than anything post-Victorian, and so it fits right in with the odd hodgepodge of architectural styles that is the hallmark of the assemblage I call home. There are windows in that tower (fairly narrow), but there is no door at all outside its circular structure. It is said that an old door that no one ever uses— one that, coincidentally, is to be found just to the left as I exit my quarters and approach the main stairwell— actually leads to a hallway which, in turn, leads into that tower. But as I’ve said, that doorway is never used. It doesn’t seem that anyone has the key. And I have never seen lights in the tower’s somewhat narrow rectangular windows. In truth, I think that no one lives there, nor has anyone for at least as long as I have occupied my quarters.

The more I thought about it, the less sense Gruber’s statement made. You see, if I look out that window at night— or in day, for that matter— just about the only thing I can see is that tower. Now why should that be so frightening?

Here, I suddenly thought to myself, here was a chance to prove Old Gruber the benign lunatic I always took him to be. I got out of bed at once and went to that window. Surely, I would need no courage, because surely all that would be visible would be that old, abandoned tower, the darkness that engulfed it, and perhaps some faint lights down the street. This was brilliant, I thought. Surely all this vague, uneasy feeling would be resolved at once, and I would turn and go right back to bed, and sleep there like a babe in comfort.

I should not need to tell you with what chagrin I had to admit to myself that Old Gruber knew exactly what he had been talking about. For there it was, out my window facing south, that stone phallic structure. And out of one of its narrow, rectangular windows, I saw emerge to my growing horror the figure of a man. Yes, it was unmistakable. But this man did not leap to his doom, nor make some plea to the unheeding night; no. This man, instead, emerged from that window and crawled— yes, that is the right word— he crawled down the side of that building, quite like a spider. He had dark hair and was slender, but not slight, of build. He was clad all in black or dark gray— I could not tell the difference by cloudy moonlight— and his long overcoat paid no more respect to the law of gravity than his body did. When this downward-crawling human arachnid arrived at the narrow window directly below the one he had emerged from, he entered abruptly, and with an insect-like and most inhuman agility. Then— and this is the strangest part— I could see him stand up in the lower chamber he had so unnaturally entered, and turn and face me suddenly— yes, me! He was clearly aware that I had been watching him, and even in the dim moonlight, I could yet detect a malevolent smile curl his lips.

I rushed from my window in horror. Had this all been a dream? No, it couldn’t have been! I was nowhere near a state of sleep conducive to dreams, much less any state of sleep. I was wide awake, yet what I saw struck mortal terror in me in a way no nightmare ever had, even as a little boy. No, this was all too real! And this thing— this spider-creature— was now aware of me, if he hadn’t been before. My blood chilled as I reflected on this new and dreadful development.

Next Time: The Letter Inside The Letter

Contents Vol. 3 No. 8

December 29, 2023Crime Fiction, Gothic, Pulp Fiction, Steampunk Fiction, Western FictionA Detective Story, A Don Coyote & Saundra Pansy Mystery, A Serial Fiction Magazine, Better Than Dead, Carriers, Cheese Stands Alone, Colin Deerwood, Crime Fiction, Crimefighter, Dime Pulp, Gothic, Hard Boiled Fiction, Just Coincidence, Mark DuCharme, Mike Servente, Phyllis Huldarsdottir, Pierre Anton Taylor, Pulp Fiction, Steampunk, The Man From La Mirada PerdidaNuallain House, Publishers

Welcome to Volume Three, Number Eight of Dime Pulp,
A Serial Pulp Fiction Magazine.

Carriers by Mark DuCharme returns with it’s gothic air of shadowy creatures who might just be the living dead. Carriers is a vampire novella with touches of black comedy and satirical bite, and is told from the perspective of its unreliable narrator and protagonist, Johnny. It takes place during a “plague” that has been going on for two years in an unnamed city. Dead bodies litter the streets, hallways, and homes. A corpse disposal company hires people like Johnny to transport them to a facility at the edge of town with the very important stipulation that the bodies be delivered there before sundown. No one ever says why. Read more in the latest installment of Carriers, Episodes V-VII .

Issue 8 brings to a close Colin Deerwood’s long running serial, Better Than Dead, A Detective Story, featuring the unpredictable peregrinations of private investigator Lackland Ask, aka Stan Gardner, aka Sam Carter, and now Dr. Jerome Paulsen, O.D. leaving on a freighter for Cuba one step ahead of the law, the mob, and the draft board. All the loose ends (and there were many) are tied up or disposed of (are they?), and now the fugitive confidential agent can exit stage left. Find out how the story ends in Better Than Dead, Episode 30. (A note from the author reminds us that the cover of this issue is from an original Black Mask magazine, c. 1940, and as such was the catalyst and inspiration for the more than 150 pages of serial crime fiction that followed. )

This issue also introduces a new private eye, Don Coyote, brain child of Mike Servante, a newbie to the musty (and labyrinthine) halls of serial crime fiction although an aficionado of the genre, in a metatextual story that promises to be a lot of fun, titled The Man From La Mirada Perdida, A Don Coyote & Saundra Pansy Adventure. Read inaugural episodes i & ii in this latest offering of imaginative crime fiction from Dime Pulp.

Dime Pulp regular authors Pierre Anton Taylor and Phyllis Huldarsdottir were unfortunately caught up in the seasonal vortices that often cause time displacement, especially as the days get shorter, and the imprudent certainty that there is still plenty of time to get everything done. Phyllis’s steampunk adventure, Cheése Stands Alone, will return in Vol. 4, Number 1 in early 2024, as will Pierre’s crimefighter fiction, Just Coincidence.

FYI: Available for readers of Dime Pulp who may have missed a few issues or lost the thread of a serial, Dime Pulp Yearbook 21, featuring the novels (The Last Resort and Better Than Dead) and the short fiction (Hard Boiled Myth and Gone Missing) of Volume One’s 12 issues, is joined by Dime Pulp Yearbook 22, featuring the complete pulp Western, On The Road To Las Cruces, continuing episodes of a detective story, Better Than Dead, the opening chapters of new serial novels, Just Coincidence and Cheése Stands Alone, the short fiction of Hard Boiled Myth and Polka Dot Dress, as well as Dropping A Dime’s pithy pulp observations. Volume Two’s 10 issues are available for perusal in their entirety by simply clicking on the links in this paragraph or on the menu bar above. Dime Pulp Yearbook 23 will be available in late January ’24 as part of the annual archival review.

If you’ve made it this far, click on the links above to read the entertaining serial contents of Volume Three, Number 8

Special Note: Dime Pulp, A Serial Pulp Fiction Magazine has changed its posting schedule from monthly issues to once every forty-five days (more or less—mostly more). Thus Volume Three will (hopefully) consist of eight issues (much to the relief of the overworked writers and production staff). Thank you for your understanding.

—Perry O’Dickle, chief scribe
and word accountant

The Man From La Mirada Perdida—i & ii

December 29, 2023Crime Fiction, Gothic, Pulp Fiction, Steampunk FictionA Don Coyote & Saundra Pansy Mystery, books, crime, Crime Fiction, Hard Boiled Fiction, horror, Metatextual, Mike Servente, Pulp Fiction, The Man From La Mirada Perdida, writingNuallain House, Publishers

A Don Coyote & Saundra Pansy Mystery

by Mike Servante

i

—Ever work for a private investigator before?

—I can’t honestly say that I have.

—But you’ve had experience working in an office, answering phones, typing?

—It’s all there in the resume.

—Yes, of course. So why don’t you tell me in your own words.

—I was a receptionist for a law firm, Stag, Stagger,& Staggered. I answered phones, took messages, routed calls, sorted mail and put it in the appropriate mailboxes. And did some light typing. The legal secs did the important stuff.

—Just a minute, did you just say legal sex?

—No, no, legal secretaries, that’s what they were called, legal secs, legal secretaries.

—Alright, go on.

—The firm had an investigator on retainer, but I never saw him. Only his mail.

—Only his mail what?

“His mail, envelopes, packages, legal briefs, that sort of thing.”

—I see, mail, briefs, packages.

—But that was a while back. I haven’t been in an office environment since I got married.

—You’re married?

—Was. Widow.

—Oh, I’m sorry. My condol. . . .

—It was several years ago.

—Yes.

—And I’ve had to rejoin the workforce.

—Your husband, uh, Mr. Pansy?

—Corrigan, Jake Corrigan. Pansy is my maiden name.

—Ok. Mind if I call you Saundra? Or Sandy?

—If it comes with a pay check, I’m ok with that, though I’m not particularly fond of Sandy.

—Pay check, right, good you brought that up. If you were to accept this assignment I can only use you parttime, three days a week. Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, eight till noon, I will pay you for your time each week on Friday. I hope those are enough hours for you. Maybe once business picks up we can add more time.

—That’s fine. Like I said I’m rejoining the workforce after years of being a housewife. I’d like to take it slow. Plus I get Jake’s pension.

—Oh, yes, pension, that’s good. What did your husband do?

—He was a cop.

—Really? That’s very interesting, a cop?

—He never talked to me about the job. Said he didn’t want to depress me.

—I see. That was thoughtful.

—I have a question. Do I call you Don or Mr. Coyote?

—Boss is fine.

I’m a good judge of character. She was in her late forties, going gray pixie cut that went with the pixie face, dangling silver earrings, intense blue eyes, mascara thick eyelashes, not so subtle green shadowed and precisely drawn eyebrows. Her lipstick was a synthetic shade of orange and probably applied with a palette knife.

What choice did I have? The only other applicant was a high school girl who had arrived with her mother who wisely stayed in the car. She’d snapped her gum while looking around the small office, bewildered, pointed to the typewriter, and asked, “What’s that?”

This woman in the colorful summer dress and gold brocade shrug appeared evasive and reluctant when I asked about her experience. Anyone can write a resume, I wanted to get the depth of her understanding by how she used her words and if she was familiar with the nomenclature.

She brought up sex almost immediately. I don’t want to say that I have that effect on women, but I am not uninitiated in the ways of the world. When I questioned her bringing it up, she covered skillfully and made it out to be a misunderstanding on my part. I don’t make those kinds of mistakes. And as if to further tease, she brought up male briefs and packages. I wasn’t born yesterday. Packages, that was just blatant.

Next she tried the pity angle. Widow. What was I supposed to say? How did he die? And she coldly brushed off my expression of sympathy. I could tell she was desperate to get the job, her repeated emphasis on the need to return to the workforce, but maybe at her age it’s a challenge, and she’s desperate.

I guess that’s something I’ve never known, I come from money. My grandfather was a jeweler, from the Ukraine, one of three Koyoskozko brothers who were headed to Alaska during the gold rush to claim their fortune. Grandpa jumped ship in San Francisco, tired of puking his guts at every swell of a wave. He apprenticed to a jeweler, a fellow countryman, and learned the business. With the ’06 quake, the business was destroyed. Like many made homeless by the catastrophe, he headed north, following the circumference of San Pablo Bay until he reached the wet lands on the northwest side of the bay once owned by General Vallejo. There on a river that drained into the bay sat a relatively untouched settlement known as Petaluma. He took it to be an Indian name. He was successful, changed his own name to something easier to pronounce, Coyote, though at the time he didn’t realize its import as a mythical figure in the lore of his adopted country. Eventually he had jewelry outlets in every major burg in the valley. My father inherited the business and became even more prosperous by investing in real estate. When he died I inherited millions. He’d eased out of the jewelry business a while ago although I had worked for him as a courier when I was going to the University in San Francisco. I often carried satchels of very valuable jewels in the trunk of my Impala as if they were nothing more than a bag full of old tennis togs. I had a permit to carry, then, and still do.

That woman is wily, I’ll give her that. When I politely asked if I could address her by her first name she immediately turned it into an offer of a job.

I don’t know who he thought he was, thinning red hair, tall and gangly with quite a beak, too. He dressed conservatively for this neck of the woods, slacks, open collar shirt. I’ll admit I was desperate. After Jake’s passing, I had to keep up the house payments and that meant cutting corners on other necessities. Besides, being housebound as a homemaker for a couple dozen years, I was ready to re-experience life as a single woman.

My husband used to say I was a ditz, but what did he know, he was a lummox. Jake worked as a Napa PD patrol officer till he dropped dead at Swank’s Steakhouse in Santa Rosa. The red meat in his gut didn’t agree with the red meat of his heart. As someone from his family said at the wake, “He larded up.” Certainly no one on my side of the family would have said it, out loud, at any rate. And it was true that the slim handsome police cadet I married turned into a wide load, pot-bellied, booze swilling porker right before my eyes. The sorrier he felt for himself, the more pounds he put on, and the meaner he got. He was an accident that didn’t wait long to happen.

I’m from around here, born, bred, and schooled. My folks and their folks and their folks before them were pioneers in these parts, chicken ranching, sheep and cattle, apples and prunes, they did just about anything that had to do with growing or grazing. Of course Coyote Jewelers was known far and wide. My wedding ring came from their showroom in Sonoma, or as my dad used to call it, Sonombula because it was a sleepy little town back then, before it got overrun by grapevines and all the snobby money, snooty attitude, and high prices that followed. Growing grapes was suddenly an art when all it was really was just good farming. That’s my stock. I’m not afraid of honest work and I expect to be respected for doing it.

I knew enough to be on my guard, having worked as a waitress while I was taking secretarial courses at the local business school. Guys always bring sex up and then when you call them on it, they act all offended like and pretend that’s not what they meant. Happened at the office, too. And though I hadn’t expected it to come up in the job interview, there it was. Everyone knows a legal sec is short for legal secretary just as a para is short for paralegal. If I hadn’t got married I think I would have tried for paralegal, get the training and all.

In the meantime, I needed to get work and his acting like a jerk wasn’t making it easy. I wasn’t going to catch the drift? Mail, package, briefs. I come from a big family, brothers, cousins, uncles, all of them brain in the gutter. I’ve heard it all. And I wasn’t going to fall for it. If that’s what he thought, he had another think coming. Saundra Pansy was never a pushover whatever you thought of the name.

Guess he got the drift. Boss said I was to start Monday, eight sharp.

ii

—It’s not electric?

—Um no, but it’s authentic.

—It looks like it weighs a ton.

—It’s a 1939 Royal KMM with the patented Magic Margin system. See, if you hold down the right or left margin lever and slide the carriage to the desired location you ‘magically’ set the margin. It still has the original round glass-topped keys. I paid $5 for it at a flea market, and it still works as well as when it was new. I even ordered extra ribbons.

—Right. . . ribbons. That’s quite a museum piece.

—Oh, it is perfectly functional.

—And this lever?

—That’s the carriage return.”

—Ok, now I remember seeing a video of one being used when I was in business school. We practiced typing on electric typewriters.

—But you assured me you could type!

—Oh yeah, no problem, if it’s qwerty, I let my fingers do the walking, and I can do it blindfolded. I can also do Gregg but it’s been a while so I might be a little rusty.

—Greg?

—Yeah, you know, the shorthand guy.

—Shorthand?

—Transcription. Like I said, it’s been a while.

—Good, good, for now typing will be enough. And this is an elegant machine. You shouldn’t have any problem with it, freshly oiled and cleaned.

—You don’t have a computer?

—No I don’t believe in computers. But look, I even had some stationary printed.

—Stationary?

—I hired a graphics firm to design the letterhead and the logo. Don Coyote & Associates, Private Investigations. I think the howling coyote in the oval frame like that is quite well done.

—That looks like a wolf.

—No, no. I’ve been assured that it is, in fact, a coyote.

—Have you ever seen a coyote in the fur?

—I’ve seen pictures. Many pictures.

—Well, alrighty then, if that’s the case.

—Oh, no, no case yet, but I’m hoping in the near future to develop some leads, lure clients in need of investigative services.

—And in the meantime is there any correspondence you’d like me to write, calls you’d like me to make, appointments you want me to schedule, dictation? I’m ready to get down to business.

—Good, and I don’t know if I have to point this out, but that is what is called a rotary dial on the telephone. It’s a 1937 Stromberg Carlson, very rare.

—It works? I thought it was just part of the décor. Like the typewriter.

—It is in perfect working order, as functional as the day it rolled off the assembly line. It has the original bell. Wait till you hear it!

—I’ll assume it doesn’t take pictures.

—Of course not. The telephone is for the ear, not the eyes. This is not some Dick Tracy outfit with wrist radios and video phones. Don Coyote, Private Eye, is nothing if not authentic!

—Ok, you’re the boss. I’m ready to get to work. I just don’t want to waste your time and money sitting around not doing anything.

—Well, first of all you need to get familiar with the type of job you’ll be doing and probably the best way to do that is to begin by creating a catalog of the files and reference books in my office.

—Like a librarian?

—I have a collection of rare pulp fiction magazines and obscure post war crime fiction paperbacks. Oh, and my film noir library, private eye memorabilia, crime scene photos. I would recommend that you read a few of those novels to get a feel for the business. I’m thinking along the lines of Mike Hamm. . . .

—You’re going to pay me to read?

—Well, no, I see it as something you could take home and do. To bring you up to speed. A private eye’s secretary requires specialized knowledge.

—So I would be doing more than just typing and filing? That sound like I’d need specialized training. On company time.

—Are you going to answer that?

—Don Coyote & Associates, Private Investigations, how can I direct your call? One moment please. It’s for you.

I don’t know how to say this. My expectations might have been too unrealistic. She chews gum. Maybe she was nervous. I suspect that she is rather unqualified and I will eventually have to let her go. As my father used to quote my grandfather as saying, “The biggest problem in running a business is employees.” She is rather plain in a well-scrubbed sort of way. And maybe someone should have told her that colorful plastic jewelry was no longer as popular as it might have been, if ever, in the fifties, say. And even though she was made up to match the bangles and bracelets, she couldn’t hide her lack of refinement when I showed her to her desk.

That typewriter is a classic machine, indestructible, a workhorse. I couldn’t believe my luck. It was from an estate sale, everything had pretty much sold at auction except for a few odd items, like gooseneck lamps, and the old typewriter. One of the heirs was selling them at a flea market where, on occasion, I browse, looking for old magazines and paperbacks. A hand printed sign propped on the machine read BOAT ANCHOR? $5 or B/O. Finding a typewriter repair shop and restoring it was probably the hardest and most expensive part. Even the repairman had never encountered this old of a model, a 1939 Royal. His experience had been mainly on lightweight plastic chassis portables and dreadnaught electric office machines. He also repaired watches, something else experiencing technological displacement.

As soon as I questioned her competence she immediately brought the conversation around to sex. She said she was alright with quirky, and then something that she had done blindfolded with someone named Greg involving shorthand, whatever kinky fetish that was, but I could just imagine. I can only assume she was desperate. She kept saying that it had been a while. Then she brought up computers. And that’s a sore spot with me. I find them dehumanizing. Unfortunately I can become quite irrational when confronted with the issue. I deflected by showing the stationary I had printed but she wanted to make an argument about whether it was a wolf or a coyote depicted in the oval of the logo. I can see that she has a petty side.

I definitely got the feeling that she was in over her head. She was undoubtedly confused by the rotary dial on the telephone. She tried to laugh it off by making a joke. I have very little patience with mockery especially when it pertains to the degradation of values under assault from the techno sphere. I’ll admit it, I’m a technophobe.

And when I suggested that she educate herself for the role she would play as a secretary to a private investigation firm, she turned it into a labor negotiation. I was about to assert my prerogative as the employer when the phone rang. I’ll admit, she did answer the call quite professionally.

Hoo boy! I didn’t think I realized what I was getting into. That machine, a manual typewriter, was carpel tunnel syndrome waiting to happen. I thought he was kidding. Maybe a monitor would cleverly pop up from a hidden compartment on the mahogany desk. No such luck.

I had to remind him again that I was qualified as a secretary, I’d even included a copy of my diploma from Empire Business College with my resume. I found a clean copy that my crazy friend Lola Lamont hadn’t altered the heading of the certificate to Vampire Business College though in truth that’s what we all called it—they didn’t suck you blood, just your money. But from the look on his face, it might have been TMI, too much information.

Then he trots out this stationary with a heading like it was from a comic book. A picture of a coyote, he says, in a clunky oval frame. It was a wolf. I’ve seen coyotes numerous times. Even shot one on my uncle Brad’s sheep ranch over by Two Rock. I know what a coyote looks like. They’re vermin. But he’d seen pictures.

And speaking of pictures, he had to point out the antique telephone like I haven’t ever seen pictures on ones almost exactly like this one. My gran even had one on her bookshelf, used it as a bookend to hold up her collection of picture albums. He got a little touchy at my joke about taking pictures so I’m going to guess he had his funny bone surgically removed.

But I gotta hand it to the guy, his setup is right out of an old black and white movie which I can’t watch because without the color, there’s no meaning, and I lose interest real fast. The place is on Western just off the main drag in what used to be the original family jewelry store, a three story brick walk-up. The downstairs showroom is now an antique store so he doesn’t have to go far for his décor. His office is on the second floor, the door at the end of the hallway at the top of the stairs. It’s one of those old wooden doors with a frosted glass panel on the upper half and in gold lettering it says Don Coyote & Associates. I haven’t a clue who the associates are but I figure I’ll find out soon enough. Inside is a small reception area with a couple of old chairs up against the wall and across from the big mahogany desk where I’m supposed to work. There’s another door on which is written in the same gold lettering, Don Coyote, Private Investigator, and call me crazy, but I’m guessing that’s where the files and reference books are that he wants me to catalog. And read.

He has another think coming if he thought I was going to take work home. If I learned one thing from Jake Corrigan, it’s don’t take the job home. And the only thing I’m going to flip when I get there is the channels. Even McDonald’s pays you when they train you to flip burgers. I could see that that was going to be a bone of contention. If you want me to do a special job, train me. I’m a fast learner. I was about to let him know where I was coming from when the phone rang. It startled me at first. It was loud. And it was a real bell, not an electronic facsimile. I picked up the handset and immediately went into receptionist mode. It was a woman’s voice. She was sobbing, “Help me, oh please, Don Coyote.”

Next time: la bola desnuda or don’t go bowling naked

Better Than Dead—30

December 29, 2023Crime Fiction, Gothic, Pulp Fiction, Steampunk Fiction"Brother can you spare a dime?", 1940, A Detective Story, Better Than Dead, Colin Deerwood, Crime Fiction, Fedoras and Flatfoots, Pulp Fiction, weird-fictionNuallain House, Publishers

by Colin Deerwood

The cops finally caught up with me. Hogan, specifically. I had stopped at the newsstand around the corner from Hopper’s Diner, the daily blat’s headline blaring Bombers Blast Britain. It was another headline below the fold that caught my eye, Missing Ridley Constable Sought For Questioning. I was curious. Maybe Marie had stirred up a ruckus. I was on my way back to Alice’s old basement studio from the passport bureau with my new identity tucked in the breast pocket of my darker than tan suit coat. Almost two weeks had passed since I’d snuck back into the bad Apple. A lot had changed, and for me, for the better.

The five grand from the sale of the art piece had done wonders for my spirits, only the best mash, and my wardrobe, only the best haberdasher. It had also gone to the Uptown Downtown barber shop over on Seventh where I had had my mug given a going over. When I stepped out of the chair I was sporting a precise VanDyke. It went well with my sporty beige fedora with the fly fish feathers in the band and my new identity as Dr. Jerome Paulsen, O.D. Maybe the freedom of having a pile made me reckless. People were still looking for me. I’d let my guard down. But in my dark glasses and new duds, even the newsboy didn’t recognize me at first, and I’d been buying newspapers, girlies, pulps, and my Lucky Strikes from him for years.

I considered buying the latest issue of the crime fiction magazine, Black Mask. I’m not a big reader, especially of imaginary crime, but my old mug was on the cover of this one. I could see where Larry Jakes had got the color of the bruise under one eye just right.

I was about to take a closer look when I heard a familiar voice behind me. “You think you can fool me, wisenheimer? I’d know you anywhere, even in your dark glasses. You’re what every parent’s bad dreams are made of.”

I couldn’t help but grin. Jake Hogan and I went way back to the old neighborhood where I’d grown up, mostly on the street. He’d been the rookie beat cop back then. We were all wisenheimers to him, Ralphie Silver, Stevie Silverman, and me as well as a handful of other faces on the block. We thought we were the toughest guys on the East Side. He threatened to haul us down to the station just to get our attention, and when that didn’t work, and we got older, he did haul us in, and that meant that our parents had to come and get us, and sometimes that was worse than being taken in. “I guess I should say thanks for keeping an eye of me all these years.”

“Where’d you get the money to suit up like that? Last time I saw you, you looked like you were sharing a wardrobe with a moth.”

“Inheritance?” I coughed.

“Oh yeah, who from? I know it ain’t from your old man. And I don’t think it’s from your mother, either.”

“A rich uncle.”

“He got a name?”

“Ned. Ned Ask.”

“Ned? That the best you can come up with?”

“Honest. His full name is Nedan T. Ask.”

“What’s the T stand for?”

“I dunno, Ted, Tom?” All of a sudden I felt like I was ten years old again, caught doing something I wasn’t supposed to do.

“That’s a nice story, wisenheimer, but I still got to take you downtown.”

“Come on, Hogan, you don’t think I had anything to do with Ralphie’s murder, do ya?”

He shook his head slowly, giving me the patented intense cop stare. “No, I don’t think you did Ralphie, wisenheimer. You ain’t got the guts or the brains.”

“Then whadya want with me?”

“Oh, I got questions about that crew that ended up full of holes at Kovic’s warehouse. But it ain’t only me, the government boys wanna have a word.”

“Listen, Hogan, this is all Ralphie’s fault.”

“There you go, blaming a dead man. I can’t say I’m surprised.” He jerked his thumb over his shoulder. “Let’s go.”

“Wait, wait. Let’s talk about this. There’s something you should know.” My chances at a clean getaway were fading fast. If Hogan took me in, I’d be a sitting duck for Kovic’s stoolies and anyone else who would want to get their hands on me. And I wanted to avoid the feds at all costs. “How about I buy you a cup of coffee over at Hopper’s diner?” I was gonna throw in the offer of a donut but I know how sensitive cops can be about that. “You know Ralphie,” I pleaded, “it was always his schemes that got the rest of us in trouble. And this whole chain of events started because Ralphie said he had a job for me. Hear me out. Ok?”

Hogan cocked his head to one side, surprised. He’d never heard any of us beg, no matter how deep a mess we were in.

“It all started with Kovic’s daughter.”

“Don’t tell me.” Hogan smirked over his cup of steaming java.

“Naw, nothing like that.” And I went on to tell him about how Ralphie Silver had set it up. I was going to be paid to find the mob boss’s daughter. Ralphie thought he could maybe get some of his gambling debt forgotten if I could bring her back to daddy. She had a history of running away and the old man usually sent one of his goons to retrieve her. But this time, it was way out of State, and South. His dapper boys would have been made out to be city slickers and the local law would be onto them like white on rice. As I could pose as a traveling salesman on my way through town without any problem.

Hogan grunted and shook his head when I told him how Kovic had stiffed me and left me for dead in a ditch on the island. And how I was determined to get what was owed me, with interest. But in the meantime, my pal, Al, the pearl diver at Madame Cho’s chop-suey joint, hooked me up with his sister, Della, who wanted me to find her boyfriend who had stolen something from her. “That’s how I got pulled in on suspicion of murdering him.”

“Yeah, I remember that. I knew that wasn’t you. It was a professional hit. I can’t figure why. He was a no account pimp. And his girlfriend wanted something he stole from her? I wonder what that was.”

I shrugged. “I never got the chance to find out.” I left out the fact that I had filched the postal slip from Della’s mailbox. “Of course that was before I knew that she and her brother were part of a robbery gang who called themselves the Thieves of Bombay.” And before I knew that waiting to be picked up at the post office was the exotic erotic jade, the Empress’s Cucumber.

I thought about the empty bank deposit envelope in the cigar box back at the basement studio where I was lying low, and the postal package notice it had once held. Della with her dying breath had told me she had mailed the jewelry box containing the rare jade to herself. Why was the postal slip missing? I was certain Rebecca had it on her that day. But she was dead. No one survives a fall four stories up.

“So not long after that, I’m in a phone booth where I find an address book somebody forgot. I woulda returned it but I couldn’t read it.” I didn’t want to say I lifted the wallet from a man drowning in the East River.

“I told ya, you shoulda stayed in school.”

“Naw, nothing like that. I can read alright. This wasn’t in regular writing. Something called Serial writing.”

“Serial writing? You mean like in the pulps?”

“I don’t think so. Whatever it was, it was Greek to me.”

“Waitaminute. Do you mean Cyrilic?”

“Yeah, probably. That sounds right. No way I can return it if I can’t read it so I stick it in my pocket. I go to buy a cheap suit from a tailor, see, and as he is taking my measurements, I’m trying on the suit coat, the address book drops out of my old one. He picks it up and gives it back to me and when he does, he sees the writing. He’s kinda shocked, probably because I don’t look the type to be reading that cockamamie scrawl. And he’s right. I do ok with the ABC’s and I don’t see why I gotta know anything else. Anyway, he says he can’t read it well but he knows someone who might, a rabbi, at some uptown address, and that I should see if he can’t help me.”

“Are you going somewhere with this, wisenheimer? If you keep droning on, I’m gonna need another cup of coffee.”

“Well, as it turns out the tailor has a daughter. . . .”

“Ok, I shoulda seen that coming.”

I had to watch my step with the story. Hogan didn’t need to know about the diamonds. It was best that I stuck with the beef I had with Kovic. I had tipped him to the crates of machine guns at the Serbian Social Club where I had gone, foolishly, to enact some kind of revenge because my old man taught me, somebody hits you, hit them back twice as hard. He didn’t say anything about a brick wall and hitting it twice as hard hurts twice as much. And I’d told Hogan about the heist at the Customs Warehouse and the threat to the grand jury investigating Kovic’s control of the waterfront. But how to explain Rebecca.

“Is she the one that jumped off the roof of that social club?”

“She didn’t jump. There was an explosion, remember? She was knocked off the terrace.” I didn’t have to tell him that it was Rebecca’s father who had built the bomb and planted it there on orders from Herr Doktor Soloman and his clandestine diamond syndicate.

“We never found a body so unless she walked, you’re imagining things.”

I had to think on that for a bit. “So Kovic grabs me, he thinks I set the bomb. They scram before the keystones can get there, and take me with them to the warehouse. Which is where you found me in the aftermath of the shootout.”

Hogan shook his head. “I can’t figure that one out. Once we started making identification of the bodies at Kovic’s warehouse, we realized we were on to an international gang that target the wealthy for their jewelry and their art. We’d been after them for a while as the ones who had been taking down high society penthouses and their art collections. I don’t see how Kovic fits in there. And the feds are still looking for him.”

“I don’t either but I heard he wanted me dead. And which is why I took it on the lam and laid low up in the Lakes country waiting for it to blow over. That’s where I learned my uncle had died and he had left me a little something in his will. I’m just in town wrapping up some business. I like it up in the country and I’m thinking of going back there to live. Start a new life, stay out of trouble.”

Hogan snorted. “Not a chance. Besides there’s the little matter of the victim’s statement.”

“Victim?”

“Yeah, a certain Alice Neal. About a month ago she was attacked in her studio by two men who were looking for you and the dame. Only thing that stopped them from murdering her was a crazy Czarist and his rapier. You’re an acquaintance of Miss Neal? You were seen leaving her dwelling recently. ”

“I’ll bet Kovic was behind it.”

Hogan shook his head. “Kovic’s goons don’t wear goggles. That one’s still a mystery. The same crew shot up a diamond dealer a while back. So far all the leads point to Chinatown.”

“Forget it, Jake, it’s Chinatown.”

He laughed and it was a rare occasion when he did that. “I’m gonna thank you for the cup and I’m still gonna extend my hospitality and invite you downtown to sample some of the swill they call java.”

“Wait, what if I told you something that would get you in good with the G-men and get you a load of commendations and maybe even a handshake with the mayor.”

Hogan didn’t get where he was by ignoring situations that would put him in a good light. “I’m listening.”

“I know where Kovic is hiding out. You think that information could buy me a pass?”

“I could take you down to the precinct and beat it out of you.”

“Listen, Hogan, I just want to move to the country and get out of this rat race, make an honest living.”

“You should have quit while you were ahead, wisenheimer. Honest ain’t in your blood, and why would a rat leave the race when that’s the only thing he knows.” He sat back in the booth, a spiteful grin creasing his mug. “But ok, spill.”

“Chinatown.” That’s when it all fell into place. Hogan saying that all the leads pointed to Chinatown was the piece I was missing. The goggle bandits, of course. They resembled owls. And that’s what Max Feathers was called by the Chinese denizens in the neighborhood of his pawn shop, māo tóu yīng, the cat headed eagle. The Owl.

I stood in a doorway across the street from the pawn shop. I’d left Hogan holding up his end of the bargain. “For once you done something right, wisenheimer,” he’d said, “Just don’t leave town.” I had every intention of leaving town. My bags were packed and I’d made arrangements with Annie Bassinger, the tugboat captain. There was a freighter due to sail in the wee hours of the next morning and I was going to be on it. But first I had to take care of some unfinished business.

The front of the shop was dark, but a light shone against the ceiling at the far back where Max sat in his cage. I’d gone back to the basement studio and looked in the cigar box again. The empty deposit envelope, the cloth sachet that had held the uncut rocks, and slipped Rebecca’s peashooter into my pocket. The street was the usual hustle and bustle for the time of day, wagons and trucks and a smattering of foot traffic but mostly further up the block where the street stalls were set up. I waited for an old woman, bent forward on a cane, a scarf close around her face, to wobble past the entrance to the shop before I made my move.

The bell over the door tinkled. I quickly made my way through the racks of clothing and stacks of boxes to the cage. Max, his back to me, seated in his chair didn’t turn around until I was right up to the counter. He blinked at first and then nodded in recognition. “Lackland Ask, to what do I owe this pleasure?”

“I got a bone to pick with you, Max.”

An evil smile creased his unshaven cheeks and he rolled his chair up to the teller caged counter. “Should I put you on a waiting list?”

“I’m taking cuts, Max. I brought that diamond here for you to appraise. And I told you I was gonna cut you in on the deal when the rabbi’s people paid me off for the address book. But you had to get greedy, you wanted it all.”

This time he laughed, exposing the ruins in his mouth. “Is that not the purpose of this madness? To want it all, to get it all?”

“You offered Rebecca the red brocade dress as an engagement present delivered to the address she gave you. You figured that’s where the diamonds were and you sent your boys to get them.”

“Do nothing in half measures, I learned long ago. Not only were the diamonds an opportunity but you, yourself, as well. With Mr. K’s price on your head, it was one I could not pass up.”

“Keep your hands where I can see them, Max. I know you’ve got a gat squirreled away on the shelf below.” I pulled the pistol from my pocket and pointed it at him.

He grinned and shrugged. “If you must know, I would have the diamonds and the finder’s fee from Mister K. My owls swooped in on their prey only to meet with fierce resistance and find the diamonds gone and you missing. I assumed that you and the diamonds had left together. I had your so-called office watched. The super was very cooperative. The sister act failed to fool him. He alerted my man who followed them to the woman’s studio. My owls swooped in only to find you not there and themselves dead. Unfortunate, but often the fate of soldiers for the cause.”

The bell over the door tinkled as someone entered the pawn shop. “Closed!” Max called out not taking his eyes off me or the gun. And then “Guānbì” in case it was one of the locals. The bell above the door sounded again. “The diamonds have entered the market so I hear. Whomever had them has made a tidy profit, and judging by your accouterments, you have come into some money. Only one thing puzzles me. According to my sources, the person who sold the uncut gems was a woman. Do I have to ask? Someone you know?”

That confused me, someone, a woman, had sold the uncut diamonds, and it must have shown. I hesitated as he brought the automatic to bear on me. “But I have you, Ask, and Mr. K’s offer is still standing. His current troubles with the authorities will be short lived and has not slackened his thirst for revenge.”

I pulled the trigger and nothing happened. I pulled it again with the same results.

Max was enjoying my panic. “You will kill me with your comedy, Lackland Ask. You in your fancy clothes, ridiculous beard, dark glasses, and toy pistol. I will die laughing. But before that happens, you will suffer a horrible death at the hands of Yan Kovic.”

Out of the corner of my eye I caught a movement followed by the shadow of a shape. Max didn’t realize until too late that we were not alone. It was the old woman in the head scarf I’d seen creeping along the sidewalk before I entered the pawn shop. Only it wasn’t an old woman after all. It was Rebecca. And she had a gun in her hand, a big gun. “Try this on for laughs, Max.” Her revolver barked. Max held his chest with a look on his face like something he ate didn’t agree with him, a lead pill, as he slowly spilled out of his chair and onto the floor behind the counter.

“Becky! I thought. . .the explosion. . .you fell. . . .”

“I didn’t fall, Lack. I jumped.” She pointed the gun at me. “I jumped from the ledge to the fire escape just as the bomb went off. I was certain that you were dead. In the commotion I was able to get out of the building unseen.”

“You’re alive!” I wanted to hold her in my arms but the gun wouldn’t let me.

“I don’t want to see you again, Lack. Don’t come looking for me, otherwise I will be forced to kill you. Forget me, you don’t even know my real name.”

How could I have been so blind? I kicked myself with the thought of how I had been fooled all the way back to the studio where I grabbed my satchel and left without leaving a note. I needed to make my exit before more bodies started piling up, one of which, to believe Rebecca, could very well be mine. All the same my mind was feverishly trying to make sense of how Rebecca was alive when I’d been certain she was dead, shocked and relieved because I’d been blaming myself all this time. What didn’t square was how she had the diamonds all along and had no intention of giving me my cut. How could I have missed that? I’m nothing if not skeptical, I can spot a con a long way coming. But not this, dazzled by a pretty face and womanly wiles.

She brushed off the double cross, saying that she needed the money to finance her goal of fighting fascism and the oppression of the working class wherever it arose. And the way she saw it, there was a lot of that in the States.

This was not the naïve kid I thought I was protecting from the mean cruel world. The tables were turned and I was the dupe being led around by a sharp cookie.

She didn’t want to go into detail about what she’d been up to since the night of the explosion, the night we’d made love in the shabby hotel, but I assumed fencing the diamonds had been some of it. She had some unfinished business she said, and it had to do with the jade, the Empress’s Cucumber, which explained the empty bank deposit envelope. But why be so careless to leave those things behind in the cigar box?

With a shrug of cruel indifference, she explained that she had redeemed the package with the postal call slip, and it contained the Empress’s Cucumber that Della had mailed to herself. The only problem was that the jade was a fake, a soapstone replica. Someone had switched the authentic jade with an imitation jade cucumber.

I had to think about that for a bit. The only time that the swap could have been made was when it was in the possession of Della’s pimp boyfriend, the one who was murdered. The Thieves had got it in a heist of a collector’s penthouse. Then someone stole it from them and left the fake behind. It was a wily move and I knew exactly just who could have pulled it off. He was gargling blood and thrashing on the floor behind the counter, The Owl.

Rebecca had come to the same conclusion when she discovered that it was a replica. She had stumbled upon the authentic jade after Max had offered her an engagement present. It had been a ruse to get her address where he would have the red brocade dress delivered, assuming, correctly, that the diamonds would be found where she lived. Max was hiding the Empress’s Cucumber in plain sight. She’d never received the red dress either, it was still hanging on the rack, so she was taking it and the jade as well.

That’s the way I’ll always remember her, revolver pointed at me, dress over one arm, imperial green brocade box in the other, backing out the door to the hubbub of the street outside. Rebecca was not who I thought she was. That accent, the innocent act, had me fooled good. I figured I wasn’t the first and I wouldn’t be the last. She wanted the power to change the world because she was a formidable woman, the money from the sale of the rocks and the authority of the Empress’s Cucumber would make her what the Chinese call qing guo qing cheng, a terrifyingly powerful woman. A flash of red and she was gone. I had to wonder, is she working for Uncle Joe or just a rebel with a just cause, the Joan of Arc in all women? That’s why when I think of her I think of her as the Red Empress.

I stood atop the accommodation ladder looking out over the smear of lighted early morning skyline behind the scrim of a thick fog. In the churning waters below, the stern of the tug Narcissus was pulling away from the freighter’s towering hull. I’d said my goodbyes to Annie, telling her that she was one of the reasons I wished I could stay. “Then stay,” she pleaded, “Get your seaman papers. Ship out to the West Coast, Hawaii, I hear it’s pretty safe out there.” But, nah, my old man was one, and that wasn’t me. Robal, one of Annie’s crew, had given me the name of someone to look up when I got to Havana who would connect me with someone else to get me the rest of the way. Valparaiso, no one would ever think of looking for you there, an old mobster told me once. I was travelling light, a change of clothes and my new name as a visually impaired optometrist, like it said on my passport. Some people might appreciate the irony and refer to me as “the blind man”, a really private eye. Maybe I could get into the art collection con south of the Equator. Open an art gallery, call it The Blind Man.

The first mate interrupted my reverie and indicated the direction with an outstretched arm. “This way to your cabin, Dr. Paulsen. The Captain looks forward to meeting you at breakfast.” I stepped through the hatch and into the passageway where fastened to the bulkhead was a life ring displaying the ship’s name, the S.S. Van Dyne.

END

Is there a sequel in the making? Featuring The Red Empress, The Blindman, The Owl, and Mr. K? Stay tuned to Dime Pulp, The Serial Pulp Fiction Magazine!

Carriers V-VII

December 29, 2023Crime Fiction, Gothic, Pulp Fiction, Steampunk Fictionbooks, Carriers, Crime Fiction, fiction, horror, Mark DuCharme, Pandemic, poetry, Pulp Fiction, Vampires, writingNuallain House, Publishers

by Mark DuCharme

-v-

In truth it wasn’t the door I finally broke through, but the plastered drywall frame it had been latched to. When I managed to accomplish that feat— and not without some terrible cost to my bones— I remember her laughing. This struck me as odd, for the sight we found within those L-shaped quarters was hardly amusing. Her own father— for that is what she called him— Gruber, that crazy old goat— lay there with a great red stream trickling from his neck. He was obviously, incontestably dead— had died by most horrid means— yet it was quite unimaginable what beast, either human or animal, might have entered his chamber and delivered the wound. (Still more unimaginable, I had heard nothing of what must have been a terrible struggle, given the condition of the scene, with books and papers strewn about, though our adjoining apartments were only separated by a thin layer of drywall, through which I used to routinely hear even Gruber’s faintest mumblings.)

I remembered what Dr. Greenway had said. I looked closer at the departed— and yes, there were two wounds indeed, two small wounds, somewhat close, and exactly at the site of the jugular, just as the good doctor had described. In addition, I now noticed, from that closer vantage, the somewhat gray complexion of the skin and the increasingly jaundiced look in the eyes. No, this was no work of a beast as we know it, nor an intruder; Gruber, that strange, crazy old man, had clearly fallen victim to the plague. Well, that, at least, explained why I had heard no struggle: presumably, there had been none. And then it hit me: he had to be taken to the facility, and sooner than later! Gruber was now what my bosses would call a carrier. And even if I were off-duty, you see, I simply couldn’t let a carrier sleep— to go on sleeping. I had to get him to the facility as fast as I could.

His daughter— or the creature claiming to be such— seemed to feel less urgently or sadly about all of this than me. It’s not that she exulted; rather, a blankness overtook her affect, out of which she seemed lost to herself, benumbed. Perhaps the shock of loss had overwhelmed her; I suspected as much, but could not judge with certainty, having only just met her— yet she suddenly seemed not in this world at all, but in another.

“Can you help me get him down to my truck?” My question seemed to jar her. She stared into space a moment, then regained herself.

“Sure,” she nodded, half smiling. I had him by the armpits. She was about to grab his feet, but then blinked in awareness, veered, and made her way to the great, old, wooden desk where Gruber kept his ravings— the ones in written form, at least.

“Here, this is for you,” she said, handing me an envelope on which “Johnny” had been scrawled in idiotic hand. “He told me he wanted you to have it.”

I attempted to stuff it in my back pocket, but suddenly realized I was still attired in plaid, woolen pajamas. “Excuse me,” I said, looking down in embarrassment, then set the body back down and went straight back to my quarters. Once there, I hastily threw on yesterday’s pants, shirt and socks, in addition to my winter coat, a trench resembling military wear of several bygone eras ago. I tossed the envelope upon the small table that serves all my nutritional, social (when I have visitors) and business needs, but then thought better of it: this Mr. Thorne, or one of his agents, might well intrude again while I’m away, and though I doubted the envelope contained more than ravings, if only out of respect for the dead, I thought it best to keep it out of that Thorne’s reach. I stuffed it hastily into the inside pocket of my overcoat.

“What’s your name,” I inquired, on returning. I thought it best to have a way to contact her— just in case.

“Analeise. Analeise Gruber. You can call me Ana.” A smile broke upon her pallid face, and her brown eyes suddenly, briefly, regained their luster.

“That doesn’t matter now,” I retorted, striving to keep this all on strictly business terms. “Give me your card.”

I had no reason to expect that she would have one, but she produced a rectangular, off-white piece of stiff cardstock from her small, decorative, gold lamé handbag. It wasn’t until the next day that I noticed it was the same thick, off-white stock with the same dark, almost blood-red font as the card that Thorne, or someone in his employment, had deposited on my pillow.

We carried the body down the dilapidated, crooked flights of stairs. She was surprisingly much stronger than she looked.

-vi-

Although I did briefly consider taking Old Gruber straight to the arena, I judged that there would be enough time to take him directly to the facility before going to pick up my cargo. And besides, what else was there to do now? I wasn’t going to be able to get back to sleep, and even if I could, I wouldn’t be able to sleep for long. Besides, it was still dark. Sunup wouldn’t happen for a good hour. I considered waiting till the sun’s first rays, but the problem with that idea was twofold: if I did that, I’d never be able to get to the arena in time, and I was afraid of what might happen if I left Gruber alone before dawn. Oh, I’ve heard stories! You see, it seems that carriers sometimes can wake up. I don’t know much about it (or I didn’t then), but I knew enough to know that I didn’t want him left unattended in the event that did happen. Uneasy as I felt about the idea of driving him in the dark to the facility, I was more afraid of the alternative. So I went back upstairs, grabbed some food to eat in my cab, and I was off, down crooked streets.

Yet all that time, I felt that strange old fool’s dead, yellow eyes staring at me, hauntingly, in the rearview, neither quite alive nor entirely dead. Must I tell you how I feared him?

His eyes were cold, dead, now fully yellow— most devoid of expression. That blank, almost idiotic twist of his mouth— one achieved only through his death throes— threatened to break suddenly into a smile, a most wicked and evil grin. I watched for it, almost as carefully as I watched the twisted roads ahead of my careening vehicle— but I swear it never occurred.

I was racing down Pico Avenue— I mean really racing! Dawn was fast approaching. I could see better now, in the new, bluish half-light. I put my boot to the pedal and zoomed past trouble— for what had I, exactly, to fear? Wasn’t I a Transporter, an official agent of the Company? Who was anyone to interrupt my racing? Even the police didn’t care!

I was delirious with excitement and relief. The slowly awakening sun seemed to mark the end of my fears about Old Gruber, at least for the time being. I was getting close to the facility, when suddenly I turned a corner and caught a flash of rosy, post-dawn light in the rearview as I passed the towering hulk of an abandoned, formerly auspicious office structure. For all I knew, carriers were having their way in there at that very moment.

I turned another corner and at last could see the facility looming ahead in the distance.

-vii-

When I arrived, there was no one there, no dockworkers, no flatbeds on which to dump the remains. Now that the sun was almost fully up, I felt a little safer— and that was good, for it suddenly occurred to me that I would have to carry the old man in— and I had no idea whether the building would be open or not! Suddenly, the colossal mistake of my hasty decision fully dawned on me. For all I knew, I wouldn’t be able to leave him there at all— would have to transport him, in fact, back to the arena, to pick up my other cargo, only to race back here again before the pink sun sank.

I looked back through the tiny window separating the driver’s cab from the carriage proper. I could see no change in Gruber: same yellow eyes, same gray complexion (perhaps just a shade grayer now), same twisted half-smile. Perhaps my fears had been unfounded after all, I exulted to myself, in the eerie, bright light of new-day.

I steeled myself and exited the cab, swerved round, and unlocked the rear door of the transport. He didn’t move at all. Whatever had I been thinking?

I entered, situated my arms about his (I could tell) stiffening corpse, and lifted him up, as one would lift a new bride, and carried him out of the carriage, making my way toward the narrow flight of stairs leading up to the platform. I reached the top and headed to the door next to the warehouse gates. If anyone was there— if I had any hope of dropping off Old Gruber at this hour— that was where I might find him. I set down the stiff assortment of limbs and knocked hard— knocked and knocked with all my might, upon the heavy, unrelenting steel door. I knocked for what felt like nearly a quarter hour, and I was just about ready to give up, when I heard faint, approaching footsteps, some rustling keys, and a sharp metallic click. The door swung slowly open, and I could see Carlos behind it. He looked like he was still half asleep. I had no idea he would be here this early.

“Sorry, Carlos, but I got one for ya. I’ll be back at the usual.” He nodded mutely, then I turned and scooped up the cadaver— for what else was he now?— and brought it through the doorframe. I had never been through that door, but there was a pallet on the other side, and I decided that would be as good a place to leave Old Gruber as any. I laid him there, and Carlos kind of nodded, while making vacant eye contact. I veered back and walked out without saying goodbye. He hadn’t said a word the whole time.

Contents Vol. 3 No. 7

November 8, 2023Crime Fiction, Gothic, Pulp Fiction, Steampunk Fiction, Western FictionA Detective Story, A Serial Fiction Magazine, Better Than Dead, Carriers, Cheese Stands Alone, Colin Deerwood, Crime Fiction, Crimefighter, Dime Pulp, Gothic, Hard Boiled Fiction, Just Coincidence, Mark DuCharme, Phyllis Huldarsdottir, Pierre Anton Taylor, Pulp Fiction, SteampunkNuallain House, Publishers

Welcome to Volume Three, Number Seven of Dime Pulp,
A Serial Pulp Fiction Magazine.

Phyllis Huldarsdottir returns with the continuing adventures of Airship Commander Lydia Cheése (pronounced “Chase”) searching for her anti-Commonwealth renegade father, Commodore Jack, with the help Doctor Professor Jean-Pierre Serre-Pain, proprietor the Madame Ophelia’s Ophidiarium, a traveling snake show, and his associates, former circus strongman, Vlady, and Serpina, the snake girl. On the run from IOTA (the Investigative Office of The Admiralty), she has narrowly escapes capture by her nemesis, Chief Inspector Karla Kola, in Oldest Orleans, and now with the help of a young wannabe airship pilot, Pyare, must traverse the Central Massif to rendezvous with Serre-Pain and the dirigible that will take them on a mercy mission to HOAR (the Horn Of Africa Republics), base for the anti-Commonwealth ICERS. Read more in Episode XI of Cheése Stands Alone!

Pierre Anton Taylor’s dark crimefighting serial, Just Coincidence is about a privileged young man with the unremarkable name of Wayne Bruce who returns to the site where his father once had his business, a battery manufacturing plant, and where he often spent his childhood days hanging around the factory and the neighborhood. His return is haunted by the mysterious circumstances surrounding his father’s death and the vague feeling that his uncle is somehow involved. Appalled by the poverty and crime of the place he remembers fondly, he is moved to resolve the injustice of the socially marginalized and to wreak vengeance on those he believes are responsible for the death of his father. In this new episode, the young crimefighter continues to investigate the unexplained death of his father, and the robbery murder of old Rick, the candy store owner, as well as the strange new street drug, Wacky Waxx. Read more in Act 2, Scene 2, Part 3

Last but certainly not least, Colin Deerwood’s long running serial, Better Than Dead, A Detective Story, continues its unpredictable peregrinations featuring private detective Lackland Ask, aka Stan Gardner, aka Sam Carter, on the run again when he learns that his bucolic hideaway in the Three Lakes area is also where his nemesis, mob boss Yan Kovic, aka Mr. K, is ducking the feds. Now it is even more imperative that he make himself scarce, especially after a crooked local constable in league with Mr. K’s hoods try to finish him off. In the meantime, thanks to the moonshiner’s daughter and a lusty cousin, he learns a surprising revelation about his paternity. On his return to the big city from the country, still on the lam, Lackland Ask has to scare up some cash and make plans to flee the country under an assumed name with one minor hitch: he has to be blind. Read more in Better Than Dead, Episode 29.

If you’ve made it this far, click on the links above to read the entertaining serial contents of Volume Three, Number 6

—Perry O’Dickle, chief scribe
and word accountant

Cheése Stands Alone XI

November 8, 2023Crime Fiction, Gothic, Pulp Fiction, Steampunk Fiction, Western FictionAirship Commander, Cheese Stands Alone, Clockwork Commenwealth, Crime Fiction, IOTA, Jean-Pierre Serre Pain, Lydia Cheése, Pax Victoriana, Pulp Fiction, Pyare, Serpina, SteampunkNuallain House, Publishers

by Phylis Huldarsdottir

Cast of Characters (Partial):

Captain Lydia Cheése (pronounced “Chase”), Airship Commander for Aerosud, a luxury liner airship company based out of São Paulo in the Empire of Brazil, who is searching for her father, Commodore Jack Cheése, an outlaw and antigovernmental rabble rouser.

Professor Doctor Jean-Pierre Serre-Pain, proprietor of Madame Ophelia’s Ophidiarium, a traveling snake show, who has abducted Lydia to get her to pilot an illegal unregistered airship to HOAR (the Horn Of Africa Republic) on a mission of mercy in exchange for helping her find her father.

Serpina, a young girl who serves as Serre-Pain’s assistant and snake handler and who is also a psychic Vessel.

Vlady, an older bearlike man also in the employ of Madame Ophelia’s Ophidiarium and a traveling circus strongman Lydia recognizes from her past.

Pyare, a young man with dreams of being an airship pilot, and member of LBFDS (the League Bousculier Francaise Du Sud) helping Lydia and Serpina rendezvous with Serre-Pain and Vlady at an illegal airship.

Pax Victoriana, a period of peace imposed by the Clockwork Commonwealth and its enforcement arm, The Admiralty, dating from the beginning of Queen Victoria’s reign to the present for a total of 180 years which includes the TSR (Temporal Shift Realignment) of 56 PV (1893 AD) after which Commonwealth calendars where recalibrated to reflect Her Royal Majesty’s peaceful rule (following the devastation of the first Pandem and its resurgence 30 years later as Pandem II).

Chief Inspector Karla Kola, head of the IOTA squad charged with capturing Commodore Jack Cheése and Lydia’s nemesis and pursuer.

Chapter XXV

Lydia felt dirty. She hadn’t washed in days, really washed bio clean in weeks. Her pores were caked. And a hard rain was falling, chilling the air and blocking the light. They had made it to the chapel just as the rain began. The primary reason the chapel was abandoned was that it did not have a roof. A stone archway and overgrown trellis provided a refuge of sorts out of the rain from the downpour. Pyare had removed the slot velo’s bioweave tarpaulin from the boot and they clustered under it as large drops splashed in the pooling rain at their feet.

Serpina had withdrawn into herself, huddled, arms folded acrost her chest. Pyare was agitated, scowling and fidgeting. They had hidden their vehicles in the underbrush overtaking the crumbling stone walls at the edge of a deep darker wood. Now they awaited a let up in the weather. They could travel cross country following the occasional stream or animal track and the contours of the landscape keeping to a southwest direction. They would undoubtedly run into clansmen. Everything depended on which of the clans they encountered. If they were Fourierists or Communards, there could be a problem. Briefly that was Pyare’s plan and he assured Lydia that he had an acutely sensitive sense of direction.

Lydia had not been impressed. With the best of luck it would take them at least two days to reach Autre Lyons. The biobars were not enough to sustain them over that time.

“We’ll have to go raw,” he’d offered cavalierly, “We’ll forage, berries, wild fruit, gardens, maybe even fish.”

The thought still alarmed her. Organic material. Lydia shuddered.

Why am I here? She stared at her hands clasped before her around her knees. It was simple enough, or started out that way. She remembered her father as the most reasonable of men, except. There was a flash point. She’d heard stories, and witnessed once while her grandmother, Brie, was dying, the incredible energy of his anger. The last time she saw him was when he wished her good luck as she left to train at the Admiralty Air Academy. Brie had passed the year before and left her son a small fortune, large even by Commonwealth standards. He was never around much, traveling. She never really knew him as an adult. And now ten years later she was a hunted fugitive because she was looking for him.

Jack Cheése had retired as a ranking officer in the Admiralty Medical Corps, a top bio research clinician with the rank of Commodore, as had been his father, Harvey T., and the aged patriarch, great grandfather Bart who had been in the forefront in the fight against the global black mold infestation and variant spoors which some had claimed was an invasion from a hostile planet, disproved by great grandfather and his formulated bacterial strain that neutralized the spread of the invasive rapidly reproducing mold. Bart was one of the heroes of Pandem One, as they called it, a team of men in white lab coats conducting tests, analyzing, experimenting, failing, succeeding, and finally producing a strain that would stop the replication. From that work a number of novel bacterial strains were developed and later refined to serve industry and society. A second outbreak, long after the great Bart had retired, of a mutating fractal variant that further devastated large regions of the globe, especially in the Northern Hemisphere, wiping out vast tracts of forests and grass lands down to mineral soil. Grandfather, Harvey T, was involved in what was dubbed Pandem Two, but primarily in research on the campus of the Mendel Institute for Biological Research which had developed the reproductive drive, the technology that revolutionized modern airship transportation. She had never learned what her father’s work involved only that it was top secret. His retirement from the Corps was unexpected, hardly anyone retired from the Admiralty, but was attributed to his mother’s death.

When she returned at holiday break after her first semester she found him gone, He had disappeared, leaving not a word. His friends in Rio Paulo were mystified. Everyone feared the worst, an accident. Polite inquiries were made with the police, hospitals, a missing person’s report filed. IOTA was notified as he was a retired Admiralty officer. The men in the black hats had interviewed her, asking their probing insinuating questions. She was put off by their arrogant demeanor.

And then it was time to return to the Academy overlooking the dunes of Gdansk. She’d considered dropping out when she received a message in the most unlikely place. She had wandered into a bookstore in a plaza near the family home in Rio Rio which everyone pronounced Rio-io. She was browsing for something to keep her mind off the worry for her missing father and resigning her dream of becoming an airship captain.

She’d picked up a book titled Don’t Tell Anyone, the story of an illicit affair late in the reign of the Queen, around the time of her rapprochement with her nephew, Wilhelm. It was by the bestselling Commonwealth author Anthony Blair, also available on voice box. It was on a table display of a new memoir of a Panam War veteran titled, I Am Alive. She was also attracted by a rather bold spine that read Have Faith in large gilt letters.

Lydia had returned to the Triple A, as the cadets called it, and resumed her studies and training under the sponsorship of the Brazilian airship behemoth, Aerosud Luxury Air Ships. Friends in Rio Rio kept her apprised of any news of which there was none. Jack Cheése had disappeared without a trace. The Emperor’s secret service had closed its investigation. She had friends and in-laws at the Court in Nova Brasilia because of her Guzman connection, her husband being one of that royal clan. No one knew anything or was saying anything if they knew. He was missing and presumed dead.

She had graduated at the top of her class with distinction as well as a gold medal in combat arts in her final year, defeating the reigning champion, her Russair rival, Karla Kola. Her compulsory two year service in the Admiralty Air Corps was spent in an intelligence brigade stationed at the Clockwork Commonwealth’s embassy compound in Greater Houllas in the Slave State Republic of Texas in charge of the lighter than air transport pens, an assignment certainly well below her abilities. She did distinguish herself during the Bushwhacker Rebellion, ferrying hostages to safety after the ceasefire. She should have been stationed at the Admiralty Headquarters in Greater London, but that post went to Karla Kola, her raven haired nemesis. The feeling that she had been singled out, sidelined, isolated from the real intelligence action stayed with her through her service. Upon discharge she began her career as an airship pilot, rising in rank to Captain with the honorific of Commander when she was put in charge of the large luxury dirigibles.

It was while she was stationed in Greater Houllas that she’d first heard the rumors of an anti-government agitator known as Commodore Jack. She had gone to the favelas that had grown up around Greater Houllas and found herself in an early American artifact shop. The shopkeeper, obviously a native with long white hair and a scar on his forehead, had eyed her suspiciously. She browsed among the artifacts of the old West, native bead work and antique weapons, arrowheads and real skin moccasins. On the door to the shop was an announcement for a boxcast titled The Queen Is Light, The Victorian Mirage, one whose subject would be banned in the CC, by an underground boxcaster who went by the name of Commodore Jack. She noted that the broadcast was on a prohibited band, one most certainly monitored by IOTA as not only was it illegal to tune in to the frequency but it required some illegal modifications to the box receiver filter. In the lawless USSR, those prohibitions were regularly ignored, despite the treaty with the Crown.

The modifications were easy enough to make on an unsanctioned box she bought on the black market. She recognized the voice of the boxcast immediately and it shock her so that she had to power down the device. Once the spinning of her thoughts subsided and the realization that it was her father’s voice, she tuned back in to the banned frequency. Yes, it was her father spewing toxic chemtrails, a soup of gibberish antigovernment conspiracy theories and ICER propaganda, and invective against the royal family, especially the crown prince, Victor, whom Commodore Jack claimed was a hologram. It was trash and she was mortified that it was in her father’s voice. She soon learned, after discrete inquiries, that Commodore Jack’s boxcasts were immensely popular in the unaffiliated states of North America and on the African and Indian subcontinents. She couldn’t comprehend that her father would subscribe to such sloppy thinking and base idiocy. It disgusted her.

Nonetheless, she was determined to find him. Perhaps he had been kidnapped by anti-monarchists and rebel environmentalists who were predicting a climate change that would cover the earth in glaciers. She felt that she had to talk to him, convince him of his error, and if all else failed, commit him to a care facility in Rio Rio. Her first inquiries resulted in visits from the men in the black hats with more of their insinuations. She realized then that she was under surveillance by IOTA.

She had hit upon a solution. She remembered that her father read the London Tines, a micro-macro manufactured food gastro culture magazine, religiously. He read every word even the classified ads at the back of the magazine. She had placed her notice asking for information to his whereabouts using her father’s childhood nickname of “Pepper” along with a tidy reward to be paid in Victorines.

The answer had come in the person of Jean-Pierre Sere Pain and his itinerant medicine snake show at which point she was effectively kidnapped to pilot an unregistered airship from the vicinity of Autre Lyons to Djibouti in the Horn Of Africa Republic, a rat’s nest of air pirates, Icers, and anti-Commonwealth discontents, on a mission of mercy. In return for her assistance, she would be reunited with her father or at least receive assurances of his proof of life.

Which was how she found herself listening to the rain beat on the tarp covering her and her two companions and watching pearls of light form along its frayed edge.

Chapter XXVI

A house stood attended by large oaks and surrounded by a gaggle of geese, picking and rooting and disputing loudly suddenly alert to their presence. The house was quiet in itself and a lazy canopy of smoke hovered about the chimney and indicated that it was inhabited. The road leading up to it appeared well traveled and as Lydia and her companions drew closer they could make out a faded signboard hanging over the entrance. It depicted a lion and a bear in an embrace, either dancing or fighting. The geese raised a ruckus and reared back with their wings flapping in challenge to the intruders.

The trio had spent the previous day slogging through the underbrush. Once the rain had let up, they had left the soggy shelter of the abandoned chapel, their destination, the vague misty shape of the steep sided razorback ridge of the upper Massif. They made their way slowly, laboriously, climbing higher, scurrying across the barren fields from copse to copse of trees and in the shadows of large boulders. They’d watched the air activity taking place below, close to where they had just left, from their vantage point on the steep hillside. The gendarmes had deployed observation blimps and light gliders that circled over the tree tops like birds of prey.

Once the sun went down, they had had to take shelter under a rock outcropping on the upside of the slope. The bio energy bars had long been devoured and their trek having itself devoured the consumed energy, they ended up hungrier than ever. Fortunately Pyare had had the presence of mind to roll up the tarp, slinging it over his shoulder, and they huddled under it, keeping close to each other and sharing their exhaustion and sweaty body heat.

The earthy scents assailed Lydia’s nostrils. It reminded her of bivouacking with the other cadets in her squad at the Air Academy. It had been pleasant because of the camaraderie of her peers. And she didn’t dream that years later she’d ever be called to experience exposure to the elements again. She didn’t feel like making small talk, numb as she was from the encroaching cold. And Pyare’s enthused optimism had retreated to dour brooding. Yet Serpina’s physical closeness to the young man had turned her cheeks rosy, eyes half closed as if she were seeing something at a distance.

The discomfort of the makeshift shelter had caused them to continuously shift position and displace previously advantageous perches in trying to seek some comfort on the rough rocky ground. Finally, Pyare rolled himself up into a ball and Serpina spooned him, Lydia having no other choice but to wrap her arms and the trap around both of them.

First light found them cresting a ridge and staring down into a rough rock strewn valley coursed with ravines and fissures. Conifers and oak groves dotted the rolling expanse as clumps of bright greenery.

Serpina had pointed down to a layer of smoke hovering above a row of oaks. There was a small settlement in the crook of a paved road. They knew that they could get food in the village but also ran the risk of being detained by the local militia. They’d agreed to keep to the fields and the hillside, avoiding the inhabitants if at all possible. They could easily be mistaken for refugees and turned over to the authorities.

Pyare had gone ahead of them to reconnoiter, looking for a farm or an orchard where food might be found. He’d returned shortly grinning, a smear of purple around his mouth. He had found an abandoned vineyard and had retrieved a few clusters of grapes the birds and animals had missed.

Serpina had plucked the fruit eagerly. Lydia was a little more cautious. Ingesting unprocessed organic matter was something she was not wild about. She had brought the deep purple pearl to her nose to gauge its scent, but that told her nothing. She put it in her mouth and rolled it around her taste buds. Earthy, but then she was covered in dirt so why should it matter. She bit down. The liquid that filled her mouth shocked her and she’d almost spit it out. A sweet sourish taste that wasn’t entirely unpleasant led her to sample a few more until she was no longer concerned that the fruit was not factory grown.

Somewhat refreshed they’d followed a stream from which Lydia had wet a handkerchief to wipe some of the dirt from her face but according to Serpina’s comments, now her face was streaked with mud and she looked like a wild savage.

It was about then that they crossed a little stone bridge to find themselves before the public house at the sign of the bear and the lion guarded by a flock of geese. Accompanying the honking fowl was the aroma of cooking food which hasten their advance at the behest of their stomachs.

Lydia in the lead paid no heed to Pyare’s comment that they were about to encounter one of the clans, the most dreaded of them all, the Ancient Order of the Phalange, if the sign board said what he thought it meant.

Welcome to Volume Four, Number One of Dime Pulp,A Serial Pulp Fiction Magazine.

Next Time: The Ordeal Continues

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Next Time: The Letter Inside The Letter

Welcome to Volume Three, Number Eight of Dime Pulp,A Serial Pulp Fiction Magazine.

A Don Coyote & Saundra Pansy Mystery

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Next time: la bola desnuda or don’t go bowling naked

Is there a sequel in the making? Featuring The Red Empress, The Blindman, The Owl, and Mr. K? Stay tuned to Dime Pulp, The Serial Pulp Fiction Magazine!

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Welcome to Volume Three, Number Seven of Dime Pulp,A Serial Pulp Fiction Magazine.

Chapter XXV

Chapter XXVI

Next Time: The Ancient Order Has An Odor

Welcome to Volume Four, Number One of Dime Pulp,
A Serial Pulp Fiction Magazine.

Welcome to Volume Three, Number Eight of Dime Pulp,
A Serial Pulp Fiction Magazine.

Welcome to Volume Three, Number Seven of Dime Pulp,
A Serial Pulp Fiction Magazine.