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Semi-naked femme fatale branded with a TOP SECRET stamp

Pulp Fiction

The Lady's a Decoy

Audrey Armitage and Muriel Watkins writing as KT McCall

1957


The Johnny Buchanan pulp series starred a New York investigator for the Silver Star insurance company.

Published by Sydney-based Horwitz Publications in the heyday of Australian pulp fiction, the writer, KT McCall is billed on the cover as 'crime fiction's best selling woman author'. McCall was a pseudonym for Audrey Armitage (who taught at the New South Wales Institute of Technology) and Muriel Watkins, who together wrote about 20 pulp novels between 1957-8.

As this excerpt from the back cover blurb reads:

'Like always they were asking for something - but this time it was one hundred thousand dollars. Anna Karpis had insured her beautiful legs with the Silver Star Insurance Company, and now she was missing.

'I knew she was dead - I had a leg to prove it. Things get kind of complicated when you have spies chasing after a top secret - they even thought I had it - but they didn't have to go to those lengths to prove they were wrong!

'What with everybody double-crossing everybody else, I didn't quite know where I was. I even thought my brunette loved me - but if she did she wouldn't be pointing a gun at my chest . . .'