"It's been a long time now, nearly two years since we met at that party."
"Yeah," Tessie said bitterly, "and nearly five years since I was a clever little girl who thought she'd found a way to make a hundred dollars. There was only going to be one time. I needed the dough. Two months later I didn't have an excuse any more and I was still doing it. Still am."

A blindingly blonde woman walks into private detective Mike Garfin's downtown Montreal office, complaining that she's being followed by a man. That evening, at a luxurious Lakeshore home, he witnesses another woman being forced into a car. Garfin gives chase, only to find her dead and disfigured beneath the wheels of a large truck on Highway 20. At first he sees no connection between the two - why should he? - but Garfin's pursuit of the truth shows they are inextricably linked by base vice on the highest floors of the swankiest Sherbrooke Street apartments.

This Douglas Sanderson thriller follows Hot Freeze as the second Mike Garfin adventure. First published in 1954 under the title The Darker Traffic, a Dodd, Mead Red Detective Mystery, it was reissued the following year as Blondes are My Trouble by Popular Library. A French translation, Salmigonzeeses (1956), followed as part of Gallimard's Série noir. This Ricochet Books edition is the first in sixty years.

Douglas Sanderson (1920-2002) was a native of Kent, England. A veteran of the RAF, after the Second World War he emigrated to Montreal, where he studied briefly at McGill. Sanderson turned to writing mystery thrillers when his first novel met with disappointing sales. Hot Freeze, his second foray into the genre, was followed by twenty others; many written under the noms de plume "Martin Brett" and "Malcolm Douglas".

Brian Busby is Ricochet Books' series editor. He is the author of A Gentleman of Pleasure: One Life of John Glassco, Poet, Translator, Memoirist and Pornographer (McGill-Queens UP, 2011) and editor of The Heart Accepts It All: Selected Letters of John Glassco (Véhicule, 2013).

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