Crime Fiction Alphabet 2013: The Letter F

We are rolling along in the Crime Fiction Alphabet for 2013. Currently we are up to the Letter F. Kerry's Blog is kind enough to sponsor this community meme. The rules are very simple:  The posts must be related to either the first letter of a book's title, the first letter of an author's first name, or the first letter of the author's surname, or even maybe a crime fiction "topic". But above all, it has to be crime fiction. This time around I will be featuring a Carter Brown title.

Carter Brown: F is for The Flagellator

She was Hollywood's hottest sex goddess,

until a killer cast her as the world's most glamorous corpse.

Robert McGinnis Cover

   One nice thing about being a sadist is that you can give more often than receive. Trouble is, your recipients are not always grateful. For Theo Altman, film director and torture master, the number of dissatisfied customers was legion. Prime, among them, a curvacious, copper-haired secretary whose private secrets were as well kept as she was, a screen goddess whose sudden flight from sanity was as mysterious as her fall from the cliff, and a very photogenic corpse.

Horwitz Edition

  Rick Holman's job was to sift out the crimes from the punishments and tie up the whole package for a well heeled producer. But when someone rewrote the scenario, adding blackmail, double-cross, and a Hollywood ending that could very well be Rick's own. She was a nymphet from the Oklahoma backwoods who had bed-hopped her way into stardom, Fluer Falaise, the Hollywood wonder chick who did not believe the sky was the limit, until the day it started falling. Fluer's decline started on her honeymoon, with her husband's drowning, continued through her second marriage, which put her in a sanitarium. It forced her into low grade pictures and even lower grade love affairs. It ultimately drover her right over the edge of the cliff. Her life so perfectly followed a movieland scenario that Holman could not understand why anyone would question her suicide attempt. But someone did, then someone else, and pretty soon the plot began to thicken as the script of Fluer's life.

Signet Photo Cover

Various Other Covers

Finland 1970

France 1969

Italy 1972

Printing History
Written by Alan G Yates (1923-1985)

Horwitz Publications

Numbered Series #145 1969

Printed in Hong Kong

New American Library

Signet Books

D3776 February 1969

Y7403 1977

Note
This title was posted in a slightly different form in July 2011.