In Blonde Bait (Black Gat Book #47) by Stephen Marlowe, 29-year-old ski instructor, Chuck Odlum, feels like sex toy. Odlum’s rich and beautiful wife, Inez, owns a ski resort, where Odlum teaches classes in skiing and helps to maintain the ski trails. But Odlum’s relationship with his new wife remains on the physical level only. He wants Something More.
The Something More turns up as ski resort newbie, Bunny Kemp. Bunny is a young blonde and likes men. Bunny first seduces the dog-sled instructor, Jack McCall. Then, she turns her attention to Odlum.
Odlum and Bunny begin a passionate affair, but Bunny offers more than sex. She confides to Odlum that her husband Orin has $117,000 in non-sequential bills in his possession: one of the missing bags of money from a recent New York kidnapping.
Bunny and Odium come up with a plan to take the money, avoid a crooked cop, and escape from the broken marriages they both are trapped in. But a massive snowstorm hits the area, and that changes the plan by introducing new deadly factors and dangers.
Blonde Bait delivers a crime drama full of erotic obsession, greed, desperation, and murder in one of Stephen Marlowe’s most intense novels. Blonde Bait will lure you into a story full of danger! GRADE: B+
That’s my meat!
Dan, I’ve read plenty of Stephen Marlowe’s books–especially his excellent DRUM series–but BLONDE BAIT is a reprint of an AVON paperback from 1959 that somehow eluded me until I read this STARK HOUSE reprint. You will love it!
Marlowe really came alive after his yeoman work. Looking at what the FictionMags Index has captured of his work, he gets serious in 1950, and by 1954 he’s published slightly more sports fiction than crime fiction, and considerable amounts of sf…1955 is when he starts getting more than a story or two in crime-fiction magazines. A smattering of Drum stories as he leaves the fiction magazines, mostly, at the end of the ’50s, presumably in favor of novels primarily.
Todd, Gold Medal paperbacks paid well for those times and a lot of pulp writers transitioned to that market.
The ones who could! They paid wonderfully, at Fawcett…as was first brought home to me in Marijane Meaker’s memoir about her years with Patricia Highmith, the latter stubbornly refusing to write for Fawcett again (after having written filler/postage-qualification stories or something similar for Fawcett comics in the latest ’40s), and Highsmith getting petty advances from Knopf and all the prestige she could eat, while Meaker’s Vin Packer-signed novels were pulling down hefty sums for Meaker, as she supported both of them. Highsmith characteristically not fun about this.
Todd, Bill Crider was a huge fan of Gold Medal paperbacks! The Kelley Collection at SUNY at Buffalo includes dozens of them!
Sounds good to me. I don’t know this one at all. Thanks for reviewing i t.
Jeff, I would buy every Stephen Marlowe paperback I could find. I just never ran across BLONDE BAIT until STARK HOUSE reprinted it this month. You will enjoy it!
You’re right – it made me think of Bill too.
Jeff, Bill may have even owned a copy of BLONDE BAIT. I know he had plenty of Stephen Marlowe’s other paperbacks!