The Big Book of Reel Murders

by Stories That Inspired Great Crime Films (epub)

  “Nonsense, woman!” the bareback rider said angrily, but nevertheless he rose. “There are other dogs in the world. On the second landing, there is a blind fellow who owns a dog. Perhaps that is what you hear.”

  “No, no—it is St. Eustache’s step! My God, if you had lived with him a year, you would know it, too! Close the door and lock it!”

  “That I will not,” Simon Lafleur said contemptuously. “Do you think I am frightened so easily? If it is the wolf-dog, so much the worse for him. He will not be the first cur I have choked to death with these two hands!”

  Pit-pat, pit-pat—it was on the second landing. Pit-pat, pit-pat—now it was in the corridor, and coming fast. Pit-pat—all at once it stopped.

  There was a moment’s breathless silence, and then into the room trotted St. Eustache. M. Jacques sat astride the dog’s broad back, as he had so often done in the circus ring. He held a tiny drawn sword; his shoe-button eyes seemed to reflect its steely glitter.

  The dwarf brought the dog to a halt in the middle of the room, and took in, at a single glance, the prostrate figure of Jeanne Marie. St. Eustache, too, seemed to take silent note of it. The stiff hair on his back rose up, he showed his long white fangs hungrily, and his eyes glowed like two live coals.

  “So I find you thus, madame!” M. Jacques Courbé said at last. “It is fortunate that I have a charger here who can scent out my enemies as well as hunt them down in the open. Without him, I might have had some difficulty in discovering you. Well, the little game is up. I find you with your lover!”

  “Simon Lafleur is not my lover!” she sobbed. “I have not seen him once since I married you until tonight! I swear it!”

  “Once is enough,” the dwarf said grimly. “The imprudent stable boy must be chastised!”

  “Oh, spare him!” Jeanne Marie implored. “Do not harm him, I beg of you! It is not his fault that I came! I—”

  But at this point Simon Lafleur drowned her out in a roar of laughter.

  “Ha, ha!” he roared, putting his hands on his hips. “You would chastise me, eh? Nom d’un chien! Don’t try your circus tricks on me! Why, hope-o’-my-thumb, you who ride on a dog’s back like a flea, out of this room before I squash you. Begone, melt, fade away!” He paused, expanded his barrel-like chest, puffed out his cheeks, and blew a great breath at the dwarf. “Blow away, insect,” he bellowed, “lest I put my heel on you!”

  M. Jacques Courbé was unmoved by this torrent of abuse. He sat very upright on St. Eustache’s back, his tiny sword resting on his tiny shoulder.

  “Are you done?” he said at last, when the bareback rider had run dry of invectives. “Very well, monsieur! Prepare to receive cavalry!” He paused for an instant, then added in a high, clear voice: “Get him, St. Eustache!”

  The dog crouched, and at almost the same moment, sprang at Simon Lafleur. The bareback rider had no time to avoid him and his tiny rider. Almost instantaneously the three of them had come to death grips. It was a gory business.

  Simon Lafleur, strong man as he was, was bowled over by the dog’s unexpected leap. St. Eustache’s clashing jaws closed on his right arm and crushed it to the bone. A moment later the dwarf, still clinging to his dog’s back, thrust the point of his tiny sword into the body of the prostrate bareback rider.

  Simon Lafleur struggled valiantly, but to no purpose. Now he felt the fetid breath of the dog fanning his neck, and the wasp-like sting of the dwarf’s blade, which this time found a mortal spot. A convulsive tremor shook him and he rolled over on his back. The circus Romeo was dead.

  M. Jacques Courbé cleansed his sword on a kerchief of lace, dismounted, and approached Jeanne Marie. She was still crouching on the floor, her eyes closed, her head held tightly between both hands. The dwarf touched her imperiously on the broad shoulder which had so often carried him.

  “Madame,” he said, “we now can return home. You must be more careful hereafter. Ma foi, it is an ungentlemanly business cutting the throats of stable boys!”

  She rose to her feet, like a large trained animal at the word of command.

  “Do you wish to be carried?” she said between livid lips.

  “Ah, that is true, madame,” he murmured. “I was forgetting our little wager. Ah, yes! Well, you are to be congratulated, madame—you have covered nearly half the distance.”

  “Nearly half the distance,” she repeated in a lifeless voice.

  “Yes, madame,” M. Jacques Courbé continued. “I fancy that you will be quite a docile wife by the time you have done.” He paused, and then added reflectively: “It is truly remarkable how speedily one can ride the devil out of a woman—with spurs!”

  * * *

  —

  Papa Copo had been spending a convivial evening at the Sign of the Wild Boar. As he stepped out into the street, he saw three familiar figures preceding him—a tall woman, a tiny man, and a large dog with upstanding ears. The woman carried the man on her shoulder; the dog trotted at her heels.

  The circus owner came to a halt and stared after them. His round eyes were full of childish astonishment.

  “Can it be?” he murmured. “Yes, it is! Three old friends! And so Jeanne carries him! Ah, but she should not poke fun at M. Jacques Courbé! He is so sensitive; but, alas, they are the kind that are always henpecked!”

  The Best of Everything

  STANLEY ELLIN

  THE STORY

  Original publication: Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, September 1952; first collected in Mystery Stories (New York, Simon and Schuster, 1956)

  ONE OF THE GREATEST ACHIEVEMENTS for a mystery writer is to be named a Grand Master for lifetime achievement by the Mystery Writers of America, and the Brooklyn-born Stanley Bernard Ellin (1916–1986) was given that honor in 1981. Although he is one of America’s most distinguished crime writers, a huge favorite of Jonathan Lethem, he has always been and remains underappreciated by the reading public, if not by his peers.

  Upon his return to civilian life after serving in the Army during World War II, his wife agreed to support him for a year (they had a small chicken farm) while he tried to make a career as a writer. Just before the deadline, Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine accepted his short story, “The Specialty of the House” (1948), which went on to become a relentlessly anthologized classic of crime fiction and was adapted for an episode of the television series Alfred Hitchcock Presents.

  Many more of his stories were adapted for TV by Hitchcock and for other series. Six of his stories were nominated for Edgars, two of which won: “The House Party” (1954) and “The Blessington Method” (1956); his superb novel, The Eighth Circle (1958), also won an Edgar. In addition to having work adapted for television, many have been produced as feature films.

  Dreadful Summit (1948), his first novel, was filmed by Joseph Losey as The Big Night (1951), starring John Drew Barrymore, Preston Foster, and Joan Lorring. Leda (1959), a French film directed by Claude Chabrol and starring Madeleine Robinson and Jean-Paul Belmondo, was based on his second novel, The Key to Nicholas Street (1952). House of Cards (1967) was filmed with the same title in 1968, directed by John Guillermin and starring George Peppard, Inger Stevens, and Orson Welles. The abysmal Sunburn (1979), starring Farrah Fawcett, Charles Grodin, and Art Carney, was based so loosely on The Bind (1970) that Ellin asked his name to be removed from the credits. And, of course, his short story, “The Best of Everything” (1952) became Nothing But the Best (1964) on the big screen.

  THE FILM

  Title: Nothing But the Best, 1964

  Studio: Anglo-Amalgamated Film Distributors (UK); Royal Films International (USA)

  Director: Clive Donner

  Screenwriter: Frederic Raphael

  Producer: David Deutsch

  THE CAST

  • Alan Bates (Jimmy Brewster)

  • Denhol
m Elliott (Charlie Prince)

  • Harry Andrews (Mr. Horton)

  • Millicent Martin (Ann Horton)

  This excellent adaptation of Ellin’s story, inevitably fleshed out for the screen but with all the elements in place, will remind readers and viewers of Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley series, especially The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955; released in France as Purple Noon, 1960), although the story preceded her novel by three years.

  Jimmy Brewster is an aggressively ambitious young man from the lower class who meets the profligate Charlie Prince, scion of a wealthy family but a black sheep who has been shunned by his father and is now an impoverished wastrel. Jimmy offers Charlie money and a place to live in exchange for teaching him the ways of the aristocracy: how to speak, how to dress, how to behave. Jimmy is an excellent student and finds success in the company he works for, as well as in his quest to marry the boss’s daughter—Charlie’s sister. Then Charlie wins a gigantic wager and, now flush, decides he doesn’t need Jimmy anymore. Afraid that all his dreams will come crashing down and that he’ll be exposed for the fraud he is, Jimmy kills Charlie.

  Nothing But the Best was nominated for several awards, winning the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain Award for Best British Comedy Screenplay.

  THE BEST OF EVERYTHING

  Stanley Ellin

  IN ARTHUR’S EYES, they were all seemingly cut from one pattern. They were uniformly tall and well built. They had regular features set into nicely tanned faces and capped by crewcuts. Their clothing was expensively staid; their manners were impeccable. They came from impressive Families and impressive Schools, and they regarded these things casually. Among the bees that swarmed through the midtown hive, through Gothic piles redolent with the pleasant scent of gilt-edged securities, through glass pinnacles like futuristic fish bowls, they were not the most obtrusive, yet they were not lost.

  To their jobs they brought the qualifications of Family and School and the capacity for looking politely eager when a superior addressed them. Actually, they were as casual about their jobs as they were about everything else, because they were cushioned with money. And for all this Arthur hated them, and would have sold his soul to be one of them.

  Physically, he might have passed muster. He was a tall, extremely good-looking young man—when he walked by, few women could resist giving him that quick little sidelong glance which means they are interested, even if unavailable—and he had a sober poise which was largely the product of shrewd observation and good self-control. But he came from no impressive Family, no impressive School—and he had no money outside of his moderate salary. His parents were dead (their legacy had barely paid their funeral expenses), he had left high school before graduation to go to work, and uneasily shifted jobs until he had recently come to port in Horton & Son, and he could, at any moment he was asked, have stated his net worth to the penny: the total of bank account, wallet, and change pocket. Obviously, he could not afford to be casual, as a fine young man should.

  That phrase, “fine young man,” crystallized his hatred of the type. He had been standing outside Mr. Horton’s door one morning when the two sons of a client had been ushered out. Their eyes flicked over Arthur in the fraction of a second, instantly marked that he was not one of them, and turned blankly indifferent. Nothing was said, nothing done, but he was put neatly in his place in that moment and left to stand there with the hate and anger boiling in him. And he couldn’t hit back, that was the worst of it; there was no way of touching them. Their homes, their clubs, their lives were inaccessible.

  When the elevator door closed behind them, Mr. Horton seemed to notice Arthur for the first time. “Fine young men,” he observed, almost wistfully, gesturing toward the elevator door, and the phrase had been planted. Not only planted, but fertilized on the spot by Mr. Horton’s tone, which, to Arthur’s inflamed mind, appeared to add: They belong to my world, but you do not.

  And to make it worse, of course, there was Ann. Ann Horton.

  It is the traditional right of every enterprising young man to apply himself as diligently to romance as to business, and to combine the highest degree of success in both by marrying the boss’s daughter. And if the daughter happened to be as beautiful and desirable and, to use the admiring expression of those who knew her, unspoiled as Ann Horton, so much the better.

  But what Arthur knew instinctively was that there are different degrees of being unspoiled. Thus, if a girl who desperately yearns for a forty-foot cabin cruiser and finally settles for a twenty-foot speedboat is unspoiled, Ann Horton was unspoiled. It is not quite sufficient to approach someone like this bringing only a burning passion and an eagerness to slay dragons. It is also necessary to come riding in golden armor, mounted on a blooded horse, and bearing orchestra seats to the best musical comedy in town. And, if the suitor is to make his point explicit, not on rare occasions, but frequently.

  All this and more Arthur brooded over as he lay on his bed in Mrs. Marsh’s rooming house night after night, and studied the ceiling. His thoughts were maddening, whirling around on themselves like the apocryphal snake seizing its own tail and then devouring itself. Ann Horton had looked at him more than once the way all women looked at him. If he could only meet her, offer her the image of himself that she required, was marriage out of the question? But to meet her on her terms took money, and, ironically, the only chance he ever had of getting money was to marry her! Good Lord, he thought, if he ever could do that he’d have enough money to throw into the face of every fine young man he’d ever hated.

  So the thoughts slowly reshaped themselves, and without his quite knowing it Ann Horton became the means, not the end. The end would be the glory that comes to those who, without counting their money, can afford the best of everything. The best of everything, Arthur would say dreamily to himself, and his eyes would see beautiful, expensive pictures like clouds moving across the ceiling.

  * * *

  —

  Charlie Prince was a young man who obviously had known the best of everything. He made his entrance into Arthur’s life one lunch hour as Arthur sat finishing his coffee, his eyes on a Horton & Son prospectus spread on the table before him, his thoughts on a twenty-foot speedboat with Ann Horton.

  “Hope you don’t mind my asking,” said Charlie Prince, “but do you work for old Horton?”

  The voice was the voice of someone from a Family and a School; even the use of the word “old” was a natural part of it, since the word was now in vogue among them, and could be applied to anything, no matter what its age might be.

  Arthur looked up from shoes, to suit, to shirt, to necktie, to hat, his mind mechanically tabbing them Oliver Moore, Brooks, Sulka, Bronzini, Cavanaugh, and then stopped short at the face. True, it was tanned, marked by regular features, and capped by the inevitable crew haircut, but there was something else about it. Some small lines about the eyes, some twist of the lips.

  “That’s right,” Arthur said warily, “I work for Horton’s.”

  “Is it all right if I sit down here? My name’s Charlie Prince.”

  It turned out that Charlie Prince had seen the prospectus on the table, had once worked for Horton’s himself, and couldn’t resist stopping to ask how the old place was coming along.

  “Well enough, I suppose,” said Arthur, and then remarked, “I don’t remember seeing you around.”

  “Oh, that was before your time, I suppose, and I’m sure the office is hardly encouraged to talk about me. You see, I’m sort of a blot on its escutcheon. I left under rather a cloud, if you get what I mean.”

  “Oh,” said Arthur, and felt a quick, bitter envy for anyone who could afford to be incompetent, insubordinate even, and could leave a firm like Horton’s so casually.

  Charlie Prince, it appeared, read his thoughts quite accurately. “No,” he said, “it doesn’t have anything to do with my not being able to hold down the job, if that’s what y
ou’re thinking. It was a bit of dishonesty, really. Some checks I forged—stuff like that.”

  Arthur’s jaw dropped.

  “I know,” observed Charlie Prince cheerfully. “You figure that when someone gets caught in a business like that he ought to be all tears and remorse, all sackcloth and ashes, and such. But I’m not. Oh, of course I was all remorse at getting caught by that idiot, meddling accountant, but you can hardly blame me for that.”

  “But why did you do it?”

  Charlie Prince frowned. “I don’t look like one of those silly psychopaths who just steals to get a thrill from it, do I? It was for money, of course. It’s always for money.”

  “Always?”

  “Oh, I worked in other places besides Horton’s, and I was always leaving under a cloud. Matter of fact, it wasn’t until I was in Horton’s that I learned the biggest lesson of my life.” He leaned forward and tapped his forefinger on the table significantly. “That business of tracing someone’s signature is the bunk. Absolute bunk. If you’re going to forge a name you just have to practice writing it free-hand, and keep on practicing until you can set it down slap dash, like that. It’s the only way.”

  “But you got caught there, too.”

  “That was carelessness. I was cashing the checks, but I didn’t bother to make entries about them in the books. And you know what an accountant can be if his books don’t balance.”

  Arthur found himself fascinated, but also found himself unable to frame the question he wanted to ask and yet remain within the bounds of politeness. “Then what happened? Did they—did you—?”

  “You mean, arrested, sent to jail, stuff like that?” Charlie Prince looked at Arthur pityingly. “Of course not. You know how those companies are about publicity like that, and when my father made the money good that’s all there was to it.”