Web of the City
Authors: Harlan Ellison
Rusty felt the sweat that had come to live on his spine trickle down like a small bug. He had made his peace with them, and he was free of the gang. That was it. He had it knocked now. He'd built a big sin, but it was a broken bit now. The gang was there, and he was here.
The streets were silent. How strange for this early in the evening. As though the being that was the neighborhood
—
and it was a thing with life and sentience
—
knew something was about to happen. The silence made the sweat return. It was too quiet.
He came around the corner, and they were waiting.
“Nobody bugs out on the Cougars,” was all one of them said. It was so dark, the streetlight broken, that he could not see the kid's face, but it was light enough to see the reflection of moonlight on the tire chain in the kid's hand. Then they jumped him…
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by Lawrence Block
THE DEAD MAN’S BROTHER
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THE CUTIE
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by E. Howard Hunt
CASINO MOON
by Peter Blauner
FAKE I.D.
by Jason Starr
PASSPORT TO PERIL
by Robert B. Parker
STOP THIS MAN!
by Peter Rabe
LOSERS LIVE LONGER
by Russell Atwood
HONEY IN HIS MOUTH
by Lester Dent
QUARRY IN THE MIDDLE
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by Jonny Porkpie
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by A.C. Doyle
MEMORY
by Donald E. Westlake
NOBODY’S ANGEL
by Jack Clark
MURDER IS MY BUSINESS
by Brett Halliday
GETTING OFF
by Lawrence Block
QUARRY’S EX
by Max Allan Collins
THE CONSUMMATA
by Mickey Spillane and Max Allan Collins
CHOKE HOLD
by Christa Faust
THE COMEDY IS FINISHED
by Donald E. Westlake
FALSE NEGATIVE
by Joseph Koenig
THE TWENTY-YEAR DEATH
by Ariel S. Winter
THE COCKTAIL WAITRESS
by James M. Cain
SEDUCTION OF THE INNOCENT
by Max Allan Collins
of the
CITY
by
Harlan Ellison®
IN ASSOCIATION WITH
A HARD CASE CRIME BOOK
(HCC-111)
First Hard Case Crime edition: April 2013
Published by
Titan Books
A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd
144 Southwark Street
London
SE1 OUP
in collaboration with Winterfall LLC
Web of the City,
copyright © 1958, 1975 by Harlan Ellison.
Copyright © 1983 by The Kilimanjaro Corporation.
Renewed © 1986 by The Kilimanjaro Corporation.
“No Way Out” (under the title “Gutter Gang”), copyright © 1957 by Harlan Ellison.
Renewed © 1985 by The Kilimanjaro Corporation.
“No Game for Children,” copyright © 1959 by Harlan Ellison.
Renewed © 1987 by The Kilimanjaro Corporation.
“Stand Still and Die!” copyright © 1956 by Harlan Ellison.
Renewed © 1984 by The Kilimanjaro Corporation.
This edition of
Web of the City,
© 2013 by The Kilimanjaro Corporation.
All rights reserved.
Cover painting copyright © 2013 by Glen Orbik
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic or mechanical—including photocopy, recording, Internet posting, electronic bulletin board—or any other information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Author or the Author’s agent, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a critical article or review to be printed in a magazine or newspaper, or electronically transmitted on radio, television or in a recognized on-line journal. For information address Author’s agent: Richard Curtis Associates, Inc., 171 East 74th Street, New York, New York 10021 USA.
All persons, places and organizations in this book—except those clearly in the public domain—are fictitious, and any resemblance that may seem to exist to actual persons, places or organizations living, dead or defunct is purely coincidental. These are works of fiction.
Print edition ISBN 978-1-78116-420-4
E-book ISBN 978-1-78116-421-1
Design direction by Max Phillips
Typeset by Swordsmith Productions
Harlan Ellison and Edgeworks Abbey are registered trademarks of The Kilimanjaro Corporation.
The name “Hard Case Crime” and the Hard Case Crime logo are trademarks of Winterfall LLC. Hard Case Crime books are selected and edited by Charles Ardai.
Printed in the United States of America
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Introduction: Unnecessary Words
Three: Friday Night, Saturday Morning
Eight: Monday Morning, Monday Night
Also Available from Hard Case Crime
The original edition of
this, my first book, bore the
following dedication:
“Whoso neglects learning in his youth,
loses the past and is dead for the future.”
—
Euripedes
To my teachers:
Charby,
Mother,
AJ
But time passes, debts are
canceled, and sometimes the
student surpasses the teacher.
In which case one curses the
lesson and blesses the knowledge.
And so, years later,
I need only rededicate this
fledgling effort to
MY MOTHER,
with love and deep respect.
INTRODUCTION: UNNECESSARY WORDS
There’s really no point to writing an introduction to a novel. A book of short stories, sure, okay. A collection of essays, definitely. A scholarly tome, naturally. But what the hell should one have to say about an entertainment, a fiction, a novel? Nothing. It should speak for itself.
And I intend to let it.
Even so, I’d like to make one brief statement about the book. Bear with me; I won’t be long.
There’s a story told about Hemingway—I don’t know if it’s true or not, but if it isn’t, it ought to be. The story goes that he was either on his way to France or on his way back from France, one or the other, I don’t recall the specifics of the anecdote that well. He was on shipboard, and he had with him his first novel. Not
The Sun Also Rises;
the one he wrote
before
that “first novel” that made him a literary catchword almost overnight.
Yes, the story goes, Hemingway had written a book
before The Sun Also Rises
, and there he was aboard ship, steaming either here or there; and he was at the rail, leaning over, thinking, and then he took the boxed manuscript of the book… and threw it into the ocean.
Apparently on the theory that no one should
ever
read a writer’s first novel.
Which would mean—were all writers to subscribe to that theory—we’d never have had
One Hundred Dollar Misunderstanding
or
The Catcher in the Rye
or
From Here to Eternity
or
The Seven Who Fled
or
The Painted Bird
or
Gone With the Wind
or...
Well, you get the idea.
I don’t know whether to argue with the theory or not, but I suppose I’m lobbying against it by permitting (nay,
encouraging)
this reprint of my first novel,
Web of the City.
It was my first book, written under mostly awful personal circumstances, and I’m rather fond of it. I’ve re-read it this last week, just to find out
how
amateurish and inept it is, and I find it still holds the interest. I even gave it to a couple of nasty types who profess to being my friends when they aren’t sticking it in my back, and even
they
say it’s worth preserving.
So the book is alive once more.
The time about which it speaks is gone—the early fifties; and the place it talks about has changed somewhat—Brooklyn, the slums. But it has a kind of innocent verve about it that commends it to your attention. I hope, of course, that you’ll agree with me.
In case you might wonder, I began writing it around the tail end of 1956 and the first three months of 1957. I was drafted in March of 1957 and wrote the bulk of the book while undergoing the horrors of Ranger basic training at Fort Benning, Georgia. After a full day, from damned near dawn till well after dusk, marching, drilling, crawling on my belly across infiltration courses, jumping off static-line towers, learning to carve people up with bayonets and break their bodies with judo and other unpleasant martial arts, our company would be fed and then hustled into a barracks, where the crazed killers who were my fellow troopers would clean their weapons, spit-shine their boots, and then collapse across their bunks to sleep the sleep of the tormented. I, on the other hand, would take a wooden plank, my Olympia typewriter, and my box of manuscript and blank paper, and would go into the head (that’s the toilet to you civilized folks), place the board across my lap as I sat on one of the potties, and I would write this book.
After the first couple of fist fights, they stopped complaining about the noise and let me alone. But Sgt. Jacobowski called me, in his dragon’s voice, “The Author.” The way he pronounced it, it always came out sounding like The Aw-ter.
The editor who bought the book originally, who took the first chance on me as a novelist, was a wonderful guy named Walter Fultz. He was the editor at Lion Books, a minor paperback house that gave a lot of newcomers a break. Walter is dead now, tragically, before his time, but I think he would have liked to’ve seen how long-lived this book has become, and how the kid he gave a break has come along.
Lion Books went out of business before they could release
Web of the City,
and the backlog of titles was sold here and there. Pyramid Books then bought the manuscript.
It was almost a year later, in 1958, while I was serving out my sentence as the most-often-demoted PFC in the history of the United States Army, at Fort Knox, Kentucky, when this book finally hit print. I was writing for the Fort Knox newspaper, and getting boxes of review paperbacks for a column I was doing, when the August shipment of Pyramid titles came in. I opened the box, flipped through the various products therein, and almost had a coronary when I held in my hands, for the first time in my life, a book with my name on the cover.