Dorothy B. Hughes - The Bamboo Blonde

THE BAMBOO BLONDE

By

Dorothy B. Hughes

The Bamboo Blonde

By Dorothy B. Hughes

First published in 1941.

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Gate Way Publishers

164 Robles Way, #188

Vallejo, California 94591

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ISBN: 978-1-936432-24-0

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

INTRODUCTION

A new revolution was underway at the start of the 1940s in Americaa paperback revolution that would change the way publishers would produce and distribute books and how people would purchase and read them.

In 1939 a new publishing companyPocket Booksstormed onto the scene with the publication of its first paperbound book. These books were cheaply produced and sold in numbers never before seen, in large part due to a bold and innovative distribution model that soon after made Pocket Books available in drugstores, newsstands, bus and train stations, and cigar shops. The American public could not get enough of them, and before long the publishing industry began to take notice of Pocket Books astonishing success.

Traditional publishers, salivating at the opportunity to cash in on the phenomenal success of the new paperback revolution, soon launched their own paperback ventures. Pocket Books was joined by Avon in 1941, Popular Library in 1942, and Dell in 1943. The popular genres reflected the tastes of Americans during World War IImysteries, thrillers, and hardboiled detective stories were all the rage.

World War II proved to be a boon to the emerging paperback industry. During the war, a landmark agreement was reached with the government in which paperbound books would be produced at a very low price for distribution to service men and women overseas. These books were often passed from one soldier or sailor to another, being read and re-read over and over again until they literally fell apart. Their stories of home helped ease the servicemens loneliness and homesickness, and they could be easily carried in uniform pockets and read anywherein fox holes, barracks, transport planes, etc. Of course, once the war was over millions of veterans returned home with an insatiable appetite for reading. They were hooked, and their passion for reading these books helped launch a period of unprecedented growth in the paperback industry.

In the early 1950s new subgenres emergedscience fiction, lesbian fiction, juvenile delinquent and sleaze, for instancethat would tantalize readers with gritty, realistic and lurid stories never seen before. Publishers had come to realize that sex sells. In a competitive frenzy for readers, they tossed away their staid and straightforward cover images for alluring covers that frequently featured a sexy woman in some form of undress, along with a suggestive tag line that promised stories of sex and violence within the covers. Before long, books with sensational covers had completely taken over the paperback racks and cash registers. To this day, the cover art of these vintage paperback books are just as sought after as the books themselves were sixty years ago.

We are excited to make these wonderful paperback stories available in ebook format to new generations of readers. We present them in their original form with very little editing so as to preserve the tone and atmosphere of the time period. In fact, much of the languagethe slang, the colloquialisms, the lingo, even the spellings of some wordsappear as they were written fifty or sixty years ago. We hope you will enjoy this nostalgic look back at a period in American history when dames were dangerous, tough-guys were deadly and dolls were downright delicious.

DEDICATION

To BOY
His Book

CAST OF CHARACTERS

In the order of their appearance

C ON S ATTERLEE , ex-newspaperman, who had some funny ideas about a honeymoon.

G RISELDA S ATTERLEE ., who had married him twice, and was still wondering why.

K ATHIE T RAVIS , a naval officer's wife, who was a little too beautiful to be true.

ALEXANDER ( C HANG ) S MITHERY , waiter and second-story man at the Bamboo Bar.

S HELLEY H UFFAKER , a Hollywood blonde, who picked up Con and argued with him about murder.

K EW B RENT , Washington columnist, who liked nothing better than a good story, unless it was another man's wife.

M AJOR A LBERT G EORGE P EMBROOKE , who described himself as a spy.

C APTAIN C HARLES T HUSBY , Long Beach chief of police, who maintained that you can't shoot yourself in the back.

V INNIE T HUSBY , his son, who loved peanuts and crime passionel.

L IEUTENANT W ALKER T RAVIS , U. S. N ., who knew too much about radio and too little about women.

S ERGEI V IRONOVA , movie director, who kept one assignation too many.

D ARE C RANDALL , one of the women in Con's life, whose many friends included a corpse or two.

CHAPTER 1

Con was bored. If he hadn't been he wouldn't have prowled around the living room of their beach cottage, making more noise than the incensed roar of the waves. Below the fogged windows they shattered with nerve-jumping regularity against the sea wall. She liked the pound of the water at high tide. But she didn't like it tonight. Not with Con bumping against chairs, shaking the floor with his tread, pretending to fix the rented radio. He was bored and she didn't like it. He had said this would be a second honeymoon. It wasn't. It was exactly like the first.

"We're going to Long Beach."

He had announced that before they were two days in Hollywood, with parties scheduled for every party hour, and Griselda wanting to show him off to all of her friends and perhaps-friends.

When she protested, "But, Con, nobody goes there!" he told her, "You're nuts. Thousands of people go there. I can prove it by the Chamber of Commerce. The Navy's there."

The Navy wasn't; a part of the fleet was in the Far East, a part on the Atlantic, fending danger from America. Yet, surprisingly, there was a scattering of gray-towered battleships on the horizon. The papers didn't tell you that but there was.

They had come to Long Beach. And he was bored.

He was acting as if she were to blame that they were boxed in this old-fashioned wooden beach cottage instead of in the beautiful Malibu home Oppy had urged upon them. Con had been exuberant when they arrived; Barjon Garth was also in Long Beach. She hadn't liked Garth being there. She knew that there was good reason for his presence; foreign agents had been concentrating on the West Coast. It was to be expected in these times that the head of the X division, highest governmental secret service, would be on hand a part of the time. It was absurd to be uneasy about Con when Garth was in the neighborhood simply because he had once helped out the X chief. That was in the to-be-forgotten past. He had returned to his job on the air waves months ago with no hankering to continue the precarious sideline. Nevertheless, she had been relieved when she heard that the X chief was leaving. She didn't know then how Con would react.

Garth had sailed this morning on someone's exquisite and expensive yacht for a fishing trip in southerly waters and Con was left behind. It was a man's trip and this was a second honeymoon. He had to stay with" her. But he was bored and Griselda was angry, sitting there trying to read, her nerves jumping with every crash of the waves and of Con. If she hadn't been angry she wouldn't have gone out with him and she wouldn't have seen Shelley Huffaker pick him up in the Bamboo Bar.