Smoke Screen

Smoke Screen is a detective story without a genius detective-only a keen-witted society girl who walks into a maelstrom of murder. Sally Lomax, down in Houston, Texas, daughter of a wealthy family, sister of a District Attorney, anxious to do something more interesting than going to dances and teas, manages to get herself onto the staff of a daily newspaper. She leads a dull life until she blunders into a fire, coming back from a midnight tour of bootlegging roadhouses with Johnny Rorke, star of the staff.

In the partly burned house they find the bodies of an old man and a handsome young woman. Sally stumbles onto evidence that proves the fire was set-then the tale begins to unfold. Was the house set afire to burn the two alive, or to cover up a double murder? Who were the victims? Why should these apparently blameless folk have been done to death? The story moves along rapidly as the married journalist authors behind 'Lawrence Saunders' (John Burton Davis and Clare Ogden Davis) invest the threads of their murder mystery with an authentic atmosphere of local politics and newspaper reporting.

Smoke Screen was published in 1930. This edition includes a bibliographic introduction by detective fiction historian Curtis Evans.