Scenarios - A Collection of Nameless Detective Stories

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STORY COLLECTIONS:

Case File

Graveyard Plots

Night Freight

Oddments

Sleuths

NON-FICTION
:

Gun in Cheek: An Affectionate Guide to the Worst in Mystery Fiction

AUDIOBOOKS:

Case File

Graveyard Plots

Gun in Cheek: An Affectionate Guide to the Worst in Mystery Fiction

Night Freight

Oddments

Sleuths

Son of Gun in Cheek

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Preface

It's a Lousy World

The Pulp Connection

Dead Man's Slough

The Ghosts of Ragged-Ass Gulch

Cat's-Paw

Skeleton Rattle Your
Mouldy
Leg

Incident in a Neighborhood Tavern

Stakeout

La
Bellezza
delle
Bellezze

Souls Burning

Bomb Scare

The Big Bite

Season of Sharing (with Marcia Muller)

Wrong Place, Wrong Time

I
n terms of life on the printed page, the "Nameless Detective" celebrates his thirty-fifth birthday in 2003. During his three and a half decades, he has appeared in twenty-eight novels and more than forty shorter works, and has undergone professional and personal highs and lows too numerous to mention here. Those various changes, for the most part chronicled in his novel-length adventures, are the reason for the seeming lack of connective tissue among some of the stories which appear in the following pages. New readers are invited—I might even say encouraged—to seek out such novels
as
Hoodwink, Shackles, Illusions,
Crazybone
,
and
Bleeders
in order to fill in the gaps.

The fourteen selections here span the entire thirty-five years of "
Nameless's
" existence. The opening story, "It's a Lousy World," is his first recorded case, having been published originally in
Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine
in 1968. The final entry, "Wrong Place, Wrong Time," is his most recent outing in the short form.

A few of the dozen tales sandwiched between invite comment. "The Ghosts of Ragged-Ass Gulch" was written late in 1981, one of four longish novelettes commissioned by a Japanese publisher for a "Nameless" volume published only in that country. Its publication here is the first English language appearance in its original form. (I confess to having expanded and substantially revised the story into the novel Nightshades. One of the other novelettes was likewise cannibalized, into
Quicksilver;
the remaining two, "Who's Calling?" and "
Booktaker
," appear in the first collection of "Nameless"
shorts
,
Casefile
.)

"La
Bellezza
delle
Bellezze
" and "The Big Bite" are also cannibalized stories, the former incorporated into
Epitaphs
, the latter expanded into the opening three chapters of
Bleeders
. As is the case with "The Ghosts of Ragged-Ass Gulch," these two stories are self-contained and substantially different in form and content from their novelized versions. For that reason it seems fair and reasonable to offer them here in the form in which they were initially written.

"Season of Sharing" was written on commission for
Crippen
&
Landru
, for publication as their 2001 Christmas gift pamphlet. It is the third collaboration between my wife Marcia Muller's San Francisco-based sleuth, Sharon McCone, and "Nameless" on a common case; the previous two were a novel,
Double
, and a short story, "Cache and Carry."

As the body of work about "Nameless" attests, he has been a major player in my life and career. In many ways he is my alter ego; he is also a friend, and has sometimes even been (I hope he won't take offense) a much-needed cash cow. He's far from perfect, God knows, but he is hardworking, caring, honest, and pretty good at his job. I like to believe he's also a relatively nice guy, the sort others would enjoy having a beer with or inviting over for dinner. If he comes across that way to you, then I've been pretty good at my job, too.

Bill
Pronzini

Petaluma, California

C
olly Babcock was shot to death on the night of September 9, in an alley between Twenty-ninth and Valley streets in the Glen Park District of San Francisco. Two police officers, cruising, spotted him coming out the rear door of Budget Liquors there, carrying a metal box. Colly ran when he saw them. The officers gave chase, calling out for him to halt, but he just kept running; one of the cops fired a warning shot, and when Colly didn't heed it the officer pulled up and fired again. He was aiming low, trying for the legs, but in the half-light of the alley it was a blind shot. The bullet hit Colly in the small of the back and killed him instantly.

I read about it the following morning over coffee and undercooked eggs in a cafeteria on Taylor Street, a block and a half from my office. The story was on an inside page, concise and dispassionate; they teach that kind of objective writing in the journalism classes. Just the cold facts. A man dies, but he's nothing more than a statistic, a name in black type, a faceless nonentity to be considered and then forgotten along with your breakfast coffee.

Unless you knew him.

Unless he was your friend.

Very carefully I folded the newspaper and put it into my coat
pocket. Then I stood from the table, went out to the street. The
wind was up, blowing in off the Bay; rubble swirled and eddied
in the Tenderloin gutters. The air smelled of salt and dark rain
and human pollution.

I walked into the face of the wind, toward my office.

"How's the job, Colly?"

"Oh, fine, just fine."

"No problems?"

"No, none at all."

"Stick with it, Colly."

"Sure. I'm a new man."

"Straight all the way?"

"Straight all the way."

Inside the lobby of my building, I found an out-of-order sign
taped to the closed elevator doors. Yeah, that figured. I went around to the stairs, up to the second floor and along the hallway to my office.

The door was unlocked, standing open a few inches. I tensed when I saw it like that, and reached out with the tips of my
fingers and pushed it all the way open. But there was no trouble.

The woman sitting in the chair in front of my desk had never been trouble for anyone.

Colly Babcock's widow.

I moved inside, shut the door and crossed toward her.

"Hello, Lucille."

Her hands were clasped tightly in the lap of a plain black dress. She said, "The man down the hall, the CPA - he let me
in. He said you wouldn't mind."

"I don't mind."

"You heard, I guess? About Colly?"

"Yes," I said. "What can I say, Lucille?"

"You were his friend. You helped him."

"Maybe I didn't help him enough."

"He didn't do it," Lucille said. "He didn't steal that money. He didn't do all those robberies like they're saying."

"Lucille. . ."

"Colly and I were married thirty-one years," she said. "Don't you think I would have known?"

I did not say anything.

"I always knew," she said.

I sat down, looking at her. She was a big woman, handsome —a strong woman. There was strength in the line of her mouth, and in her eyes, round and gray, tinged with red now from the crying. She had stuck by Colly through two prison terms and twenty-odd years of running, and hiding, and looking over her shoulder. Yes, I thought, she would always have known.

But I said, "The papers said Colly was coming out the back door of the liquor store carrying a metal box. The police found a hundred and six dollars in the box, and the door jimmied open."

"I know what the papers said, and I know what the police are saying. But they're wrong. Wrong."