The Big Book of Reel Murders

by Stories That Inspired Great Crime Films (epub)

  Dr. Millard rose, and long-suppressed anger had its way with him. He stood tall, erect, and formidable, and his eyes blazed with forgotten fire. At that instant all compassion was gone out of him; he wanted to hurt and to frighten the impious man opposite him. He stretched out his long arm and pointed an accusing finger at the prisoner; his voice took on sonorous depths, quieting the noisy courtroom; and he spoke old, prophetic words which sounded like the clanging of great bells: “ ‘Behold, the whirlwind of the Lord goeth forth with fury, a continuing whirlwind: it shall fall with pain upon the head of the wicked.’ ”

  He stood there for an instant, full of wrath. Then, with an effort, he mastered himself and stepped down from the witness stand. As he did so, excited voices rose in the neighborhood of the prisoner’s box.

  “What’s the matter with him?” someone cried.

  A guard answered, “Looks like he’s passed out.”

  A woman cried, “He’s dead!” And another: “John Nobody is dead!”

  Above the torrent of sound, defying the judge’s gavel, a voice screamed “—died when he pointed his finger!” Someone else shouted, “It’s a real miracle, this time!” “He put the curse of God on him!”

  “No!” answered Dr. Millard, suddenly and loudly. “No! The man had a bad heart!”

  No one listened to his words. Men were staring at him with awe. Several women openly began to pray. One of them burst through the guards, fell on her knees before him, and had to be bodily lifted and dragged away.

  Dr. Millard stood completely still before the witness stand. Some who observed him thought he was filled with sublime exaltation. It was not so. Within him was a sense of terror, of painful humility, and of ignorance. He felt unsure, and weary. He did not raise his eyes, but presently his lips moved a little, as out of his remembered store of prayer there came to him a saying that struck him as appropriate to his need:

  “Give therefore Thy servant an understanding heart,” he murmured earnestly, “to judge Thy people, that I may distinguish between good and evil.”

  Gun Crazy

  MACKINLAY KANTOR

  THE STORY

  Original publication: The Saturday Evening Post, February 13, 1940; first collected in Author’s Choice by MacKinlay Kantor (New York, Coward-McCann, 1944)

  MACKINLAY KANTOR (1904–1977) was born in Webster City, Iowa, became a journalist at seventeen, and soon after began selling hard-boiled mystery stories to various pulp magazines. He also wrote several novels in the genre, such as Diversey (1928), about Chicago gangsters, and Signal Thirty-Two (1950), an excellent police procedural, given verisimilitude by virtue of Kantor having received permission from the acting police commissioner of New York to accompany the police on their activities to gather background information. His most famous crime novel is Midnight Lace (1948), the suspenseful take on a young woman terrorized by an anonymous telephone caller; it was filmed two years later, starring Doris Day and Rex Harrison.

  Kantor is better known for his mainstream novels, such as the sentimental dog story, The Voice of Bugle Ann (1935), film release the following year; the long narrative poem Glory for Me (1945), which was filmed as The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), winner of the Academy Award for Best Picture; and the outstanding Civil War novel about the notorious Confederate prisoner of war camp, Andersonville (1955), for which he won the Pulitzer Prize.

  Curiously, “Gun Crazy” has seldom been reprinted, even though it served as the basis for the famous noir cult film of the same title, for which Kantor wrote the screenplay.

  THE FILM

  Title: Gun Crazy, 1950

  Studio: United Artists, 1950

  Director: Joseph H. Lewis

  Screenwriters: MacKinlay Kantor, Millard Kaufman (front for Dalton Trumbo)

  Producers: Frank King, Maurice King

  THE CAST

  • Peggy Cummins (Annie Laurie Starr)

  • John Dall (Barton Tare)

  • Berry Kroeger (Packett)

  Directed by Joseph H. Lewis, the film was an excellent though more violent expansion of the short story. It features a clean-cut young man, Bart (Nelly in the story), who has always been obsessed with guns and is a crack shot, though he has never been violent. At a carnival he meets a beautiful sharpshooter, Annie Laurie Starr (Antoinette McReady in the story) and they rush off in a near sexual frenzy to get married. She convinces him to rob a store and he reluctantly follows her on a spree of bank robberies and shootings as she depravedly shoots people without conscience.

  Gun Crazy was originally titled Deadly Is the Female but was never released with that title. The 1992 movie titled Guncrazy is unconnected to the Kantor short story or the film inspired by it.

  GUN CRAZY

  MacKinlay Kantor

  I FIRST MET NELSON TARE when he was around five or six years old, and I was around the same. I had watched his family moving into the creek house on a cold, snowless morning in early winter.

  Two lumber wagons went by, with iron beds and old kitchen chairs and mattresses tied all over them. They rumbled down the hill past Mr. Boston’s barn and stopped in front of the creek house. I could see men and girls working, carrying the stuff inside.

  In midafternoon I was outdoors again, and I coasted to the corner in my little wagon to see whether the moving-in activities were still going on.

  Then Nelson Tare appeared. He had climbed the hill by himself; probably he was looking for guns, although I couldn’t know that at the time. He was a gaunt little child with bright blue beads for eyes, and a sharp-pointed nose.

  He said, “Hello, kid. Want to pway?”

  Nelson was only about a month younger than I, it turned out, but he still talked a lot of baby talk. I think kids are apt to do that more when their parents don’t talk to them much.

  I told him that I did want to play, and asked him what he wanted to do.

  He asked, “Have you got any guns?” What he actually said was, “Dot any duns?” and for a while I didn’t know what he was talking about. Then, when I understood, I coasted back to the house in my wagon, with Nelson walking beside me. We went into the living room.

  I had three guns: a popgun with the pop gone, and a glass pistol that used to have candy inside—but now the candy was all eaten up—and a cap gun and holster.

  The cap gun was the best. It was nickel-plated, and the holster was made of black patent leather. It was the shape and possibly half the size of an ordinary .32-caliber revolver.

  Nelson Tare’s eyes pushed out a little when he saw it. He made a grab, and belted it on before I had time to protest and tell him that I wanted to play with the cap gun and he could play with the glass pistol or the broken pop rifle. He went swaggering around with the gun on, and it kind of scared me the way he did it—all of a sudden he’d snatch the revolver out of its holster and aim it at me.

  I took the glass pistol and tried to imitate him. But the glass pistol couldn’t click, and at least the hammer of the cap gun would come down with a resounding click. Nelson, or Nelly, as I came to know him, fairly shot the daylights out of me. I began to protest, and he kept on advancing and kind of wrangling and threatening me, until he had me backed up in a corner.

  He hadn’t taken off his little red coat with its yellow horn buttons, and he was perspiring inside it. I still recollect how he smelled when he got close enough to wool me around; I had never smelled a smell like that before. I remember his face, too, when he came close—the tiny, expressionless turquoise eyes, the receding chin and baby mouth still marked with the tag ends of his dinner; and in between them, that inhuman nose whittled out to a point.

  I tried to push him away as he kept battling me and shooting me, and I guess I began to cry.

  Nelson said that it wasn’t a real gun.

  “It might go off!”

  He said that it could
n’t go off; that it wasn’t “weal.”

  “ ’Course it isn’t real!” I cried. “I guess there isn’t any boy in the world got a real gun!”

  Well, he said that he had one, and when I was still disbelieving he said that he would go home and fetch it. His coat had come unbuttoned in our scufflings, and I remember how he looked as I watched through the window and saw him flapping down the last length of concrete sidewalk past the big maple tree.

  My mother came from upstairs while I waited at the window. She said that she had heard voices. “Did you have company?” she asked.

  “It was a new boy.”

  “What new boy?”

  “He moved into the creek house down there.”

  My mother said doubtfully, “Oh, yes. I heard there was a ditcher’s family moving in down there.”

  Well, I wanted to know what a ditcher was, and while mother was explaining to me about drainage ditches out on the prairie and how the tile was laid in them, here came Nelly hustling up the road as fast as he could leg it. He had something big and heavy that he had to carry in both hands. When he got into the yard we could see that he did have a revolver, and it looked like a real one.

  Mother exclaimed, and went to open the door for him. He ducked inside, bareheaded and cold, with his dirty, thin, straw-colored hair sticking every which way, and the old red coat still dangling loose.

  “I dot my dun,” he said.

  It was a large revolver—probably about a .44. It had a yellow handle, but the metal parts were a mass of rust. The cylinder and hammer were rusted tight and couldn’t be moved.

  “Why, little boy,” mother exclaimed in horror, “where on earth did you get this?”

  He said that he got it at home.

  Mother lured it out of his hands, but only after she had praised it extravagantly. She got him to put the revolver on the library table, and then she took us both out to the kitchen, where we had milk and molasses cookies.

  My father came home from his newspaper office before Nelly had gone. We showed father the gun, and he lighted the lamp on the library table and examined the revolver thoroughly.

  “My goodness, Ethel,” he said to my mother, “it’s got cartridges in it!”

  “Cartridges?”

  “Yes, it sure has. They’re here in the cylinder, all rusted in tight. Good thing the rest of it is just as rusty.”

  He put on his coat again and said that he’d take Nelson home. It was growing dark and was almost suppertime, and he was afraid the boy might be lost there in the new surroundings of Elm City. Nelson wanted his gun, but my father said no and put it in his own overcoat pocket. I was allowed to go along with them.

  When we got to the creek house, father rapped on the door and Nelly’s mother opened it. She was a scrawny, pale-faced woman, very round-shouldered, in a calico dress. Nelly’s father wasn’t there; he had gone to take one of the teams back. There were several girls—Nelly’s sisters—strung out all the way from little kids to a big, bony creature as tall as her mother.

  Father brought out the gun and said that it wasn’t wise to let little kids go carrying things like that around.

  “You little devil!” said Nelly’s mother to Nelly, and she laughed when she said it. “What on earth were you doing with that?”

  The girls crowded close and looked. “Why, it’s Jay’s gun!” said the eldest one.

  Father wanted to know who Jay was. They laughed a lot while they were telling him, although they were remarkably close-lipped about it at the same time. All that Father could get out of them was the fact that they used to live in Oklahoma, and Jay was somebody who used to stay at their house. He had left that gun there once, and they still kept it—as a kind of memorial for Jay, it would seem.

  “I swear Nelly must have taken it out of the bureau drawer,” said Mrs. Tare, still smiling. “You little devil, you got to behave yourself, you got to!” And she gave him a kind of spat with her hand, but not as if she were mad. They all seemed to think it was cute, for him to sneak off with that gun.

  Father said goodbye and we went home. It was dark now, and all the way up the hill and past Mr. Boston’s farmyard, I kept wondering about this new little boy and the rusty revolver. I kept breathing hard, trying to breathe that strange oily smell out of my nose. It was the odor of their house and of themselves—the same odor I had noticed when Nelly tussled with me.

  My father said quite calmly that he supposed Jay was an Oklahoma outlaw. Unintentionally, he thus gave Nelson Tare a fantastic importance in my eyes. I did not dream then that Jay, instead of old Barton Tare with his sloppy mustache, might have been Nelly’s own father. Perhaps it is a dream, even as I write the words now. But I think not.

  * * *

  —

  When Nelly grew older, he possessed a great many physical virtues. He was remarkably agile in the use of his hands and arms. He had no fear of height; he would climb any windmill within reach and he could stump any boy in that end of town when it came to Stump-the-Leader. But Nelly Tare liked guns better than he did games.

  At the air-rifle stage of our development, Nelly could shoot rings around any of us. He and I used to go up in our barn and lie on the moldy, abandoned hay of the old mow. There were rats that sometimes came into the chicken run next door, to eat the chickens’ food. I never did shoot a rat with my BB gun, and for some reason Nelly never did either. That was funny, because he was such a good shot. We used to amuse ourselves, while waiting for rats, by trying to peck away at the chickens’ water pan. It was a good healthy distance, and I’d usually miss. But the side of the pan which faced our way had the enamel all spotted off by Nelly’s accurate fire.

  He owned an air-pump gun of his own, but not for long. He traded it to somebody for an old .22, and after that there was little peace in the neighborhood. He was always shooting at tin cans or bottles on the roadside dump. He was always hitting too.

  In the winter of 1914, Nelly and I went hunting with Clyde Boston. Clyde was a huge, ruddy-faced young man at least ten years older than Nelly and I. He lived with his parents across from our corner.

  One day there was deep snow, and Nelly and I were out exploring. He had his .22, and every now and then he’d bang away at a knot on a fence post. At last we wandered into Boston’s barnyard, and found Clyde in the barn, filling his pockets with shotgun shells.

  He had a shotgun too—a fine repeater, gleaming blue steel—and Nelly wanted to know what Clyde was doing. “Going hunting?”

  “Come on, Clyde,” I said, “let us go! Nelly’s got his gun.”

  Clyde took the little rifle and examined it critically. “This won’t do for hunting around here,” he said. “I’m going out after rabbits, and you got to have a shotgun for that. Rifle bullets are apt to carry too far and hit somebody, or maybe hit a pig or something. Anyway, you couldn’t hit a cottontail on the run with that.”

  “Hell I couldn’t,” said Nelly.

  I said, “Clyde, you let us go with you and we’ll beat up the game. We’ll scare the rabbits out of the weeds, because you haven’t got any dog. Then you can shoot them when they run out. Maybe you’ll let us have one shot each, huh, Clyde—maybe?”

  Clyde said that he would see, and he made Nelly leave his rifle at the barn. We went quartering off through the truck garden on the hillside.

  The snow had fallen freshly, but already there was a mass of rabbit tracks everywhere. You could see where the cottontails had run into the thickest, weediest coverts to feed upon dry seeds.

  Clyde walked in the middle, with his face apple-colored with the cold and his breath blowing out. Nelly and I spread wide, to scare up the game. We used sticks and snowballs to alarm the thickets, and we worked hard at it. The big twelve-gauge gun began to bang every once in a while. Clyde had three cottontails hanging furry from his belt before we got to the bend in the creek opposite the Catholi
c cemetery. Then finally he passed the gun over to me and told me I could have the next chance.

  It came pretty soon. We saw a cottontail in his set—a gray little mound among the vervain stalks. I lifted the muzzle, but Clyde said that it wasn’t fair to shoot rabbits in the set, and made Nelly throw a snowball. The cottontail romped out of there in a hurry, and I whaled away with the shotgun and managed to wound the rabbit and slow him down. I fired again and missed, and Clyde caught up with the rabbit after a few strides. He put the poor peeping thing out of its misery by rapping it on the head.

  I tied the rabbit to the belt of my mackinaw, and Clyde passed the shotgun over to Nelly.

  Nelly’s face was pale.

  “Watch your step,” said Clyde. “Remember to keep the safety on until you see something to shoot.”

  “Sure,” said Nelly Tare.

  We crossed the creek without starting any more rabbits, and came down the opposite side of the stream. Then a long-legged jack jumped up out of a deep furrow where there had been some fall plowing, and ran like a mule ahead of us.

  “Look at those black ears!” Clyde sang out. “It’s a jack! Get him, Nelly—get him!”

  Well, Nelson had the gun at his shoulder; at first I thought he had neglected to touch the safety—I thought he couldn’t pull the trigger because the safety was on. He kept swinging the muzzle of the gun, following the jackrabbit in its erratic course, until the rabbit slowed up a little.

  The jack bobbed around behind a tree stump, and then came out on the other side. It squatted down on top of the snow and sat looking at us. It hopped a few feet farther and then sat up again to watch.

  “For gosh sakes,” said Clyde Boston, “what’s the matter with you, kid? There he is, looking at you.”