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It was a screwball case the Commissioner said, so it obviously needed a screwball assigned to it! That’s right – me! Take a bunch of science-fiction fans, take a lecturer – take a tungsten dart from Outer Space and bury it in the lecturer’s heart. For me you can take all of it and lose it. Excepting the dames, of course. There’s a redhead with practically no practical experience in this boy-girl stuff – she says. So I introduce her to my hi-fi set-up in the hope she will play. There’s a blonde with a boyfriend but the boyfriend bores her and she prefers drinking with me. There’s another blonde on the switch who can throw a switch so fast I’m still going thisaway instead of thataway. But I like my women to be the way I am – unorthodox. Oh, yes – the murders. People keep on dying all over the place and the Commissioner kept on making threats. ‘Solve this case, Wheeler,’ he said. ‘Or take back a blue uniform and get your flat feet out again.’ Now, this redhead I was telling you about... Uploader's Note: I can take no credit for this one. It was converted to ebook by the Carter Brown Preservation Society, and to my knowledge, it wasn't published in the US, as it predates the earliest US-released Al Wheeler book I know of (The Blonde, 1958)! For this reason, I haven't added it to the Al Wheeler series. We're seeing a number of US-unreleased Carter Brown titles bubbling up lately! Exciting times! Enjoy! This is a seedy pulp detective novel from the American Midcentury. It was considered "racy" in its day, but I suspect modern readers will find it quite tame and even quaint by current standards. Still, I'm flagging it for sex and violence, on principle. You may find the authorial or character voices and deeds less than enlightened by modern standards; this is simply how this era of pulp detective novels worked, and part of the trope.