The Princess Stakes Murder

Max Roper is compelled to use all of his resources to stay alive long enough to last through the mystery of The Kissing Gourami. What starts out a fairly simple and even downgrading assignment, quickly becomes an obsessive search for a brutal killer, leading Roper a skill-numbing chase from Los Angeles to the glittering gambling casinos of Las Vegas, and finally to the chilling temple of marine biology. Max has to deal with the murder of a beautiful blonds by some ingenious unfriendly fish, and thus meets a handsome young golf pro with one eye out for a brunette heiress with hundred million dollars and the other for a shapely redhead who plays with sharks for kicks; an unforgiving acid-mouthed sports reporter; a designing matador; an erudite marine biologist who lost a leg and gained a lifelong enmity; a college cutie who moonlights at a tropical-fish aquarium when she isn’t out with a spear-gun killing things; a giant, hulking mad sculptor who used logs for playthings; and over all, the creeping menace of the vengeful animal-like first string executioner of the Las Vegas underworld, Big Vince Geneva. The Kissing Gourami starts when Max Roper’s boss, head of the EPT security organization, assigns him to find a ten-thousand-dollar missing dress. In this instance, Max is motivated not merely by duty, but by the gnawing thought that he might find a girl inside it, one whose specifications are mind-blowing enough to warrant his putting his life on the line for it. Max finds out what he knew before, that things are seldom what they seem, and a person can get himself severely beat up and even killed trying to dispute the point.

Max Roper, durable investigator, is sapped, doped and imprisoned on a boat apparently used by a mysterious Oriental for business purposes. The point of this caper is to have Max carry a warning to basketball superstar Jo-Jo Gonzaga that he must throw the championship play-off. When Gonzaga is shot and killed in his own fabulous and eccentrically designed home after his team wins the second game of the series, Roper decides to find the hoods who had abducted him.

Max discovers that a lot of people wanted Gonzaga dead and that there is more to this murder than the gangland routine of forcing a team win at any cost.

• Jules Belmont, miserly millionaire who likes to bet and bet big. He also hates to lose—a bet or a dame.
• Sandy Shaw, a bright and sexy whiz kid who can beat the computer in her specialty of voice prints.
• Larry LaSalle, her boss, resident expert at UCLA, the man who had designed the computer which can identify any person from his speech patterns.
• Barbara Belmont, niece of Jules.
• A hippie girl who lives at sea and tries to keep Roper the same.
• Frankie Wu, a shadowy Oriental who may be part of an international heroin-smuggling ring.

Then there are the other characters Roper knows only as The Rube, Gorilla and Wolfman. He trails this trio to Mexico, where more violence erupts. Then the trail leads back to a beautiful blonde singer in the Gaslight Club in Los Angeles, where there is more violence. There is Tom Power, the ex-basketballer, a man who remembers the favors Gonzaga had done for him.

Not to be forgotten among this provocatively mixed cast, are the Great Danes who owned by Gonzaga. Roper has a feeling they will be in a the final kill and only hopes he can beat them to it when he brings down Gonzaga’s murderer.

Max Roper is one of the new-fangled breed who includes murder in his arsenal of security activities. In The Pushbutton Butterfly, he has to track a missing girl through a myriad of fascinating, violent, and potentially evil people, including an idealistic student rebel at Berkeley; the most fashionable of gurus; young coeds who augment their income by pushing heroin; a motorcycle gang leader who is flying high all the time; and a staid, liberal pillar of the Establishment who secretly collects pornographic pictures.

Roper is a compelling man who carries his own standards of behavior into every society he encounters. He fits best with the local police who are his friends, with an aspiring Mr. America, whom he can throw with karate, indeed with all types of evildoers and guardians against evildoers. He’s an adaptable fellow, though, and manages to get on well—when he has to—with millionaires and murderers of all classes.

The Pushbutton Butterfly begins when Max Roper’s boss, head of an organization called EPT, sends him out to investigate the report of a missing girl, a security project. EPT, an offshoot of a wartime operation, occasionally does top, top secret jobs for the CIA and other legal espionage groups. In this case, the girl’s father is manufacturing some highly important electronic gadgets, and there’s some danger that pressure could be exerted o him through his daughter to release secret formulas. The father, who is understandably inimical to Roper’s presence in the case, gives grudging cooperation. The girl is a student at Berkeley, and there Max goes to learn what he can from her friends. He finds one of them almost immediately, an attractive girl whose charms are not improved the condition in which Max finds her, which is very dead.

From this opening, there is no letdown to the pace and excitement of The Pushbutton Butterfly, Max Roper’s first case, a provocative introduction.

Felix Witter is the reigning Mr. Universe. He is in training for the current international body-building competition—just another dedicated weight lifter with extraordinary muscular development.

He is murdered during his last workout on the day preceding the annual competition, and it just so happens that the murder takes place in the gym where Max Roper does his exercising. Lucky for the innocent gym attendant who is accused of dropping a quarter-ton of iron on the Superbody, because Roper is on hand to clear up the murder and prove who really did it.

Roper has to sift through the co-ed part of the gym, including a few of the exercising ladies and their reasons for wanting Witter deader than alive. Also in line for lively suspicion are jealous competitors, last year’s losers and this year’s aspirants.

Felix Witter, the victim, has a broken marriage behind him, a disgruntled business agent, an irascible trainer, a jealous girlfriend, a jealous boyfriend, and a tie-in with a nutrition product and a company unable to meet his demands for more money before he goes over to a rival health-kick group.

What with karate experts, weight lifters, body builders and college athletes using the gym for work-outs, obviously Roper has a lot of strong men to deal with this time, and he is forced to fight for his own life before he can come up with the killer.

The games are tennis and murder … and private eye Max Roper has a bevy of beautiful tennis competitors to turn his head when he goes after the murderer of lovely Aussie tennis star Wendy Cliff. It was set up to look as if it was one of her opponents in the Los Angeles ladies pro tournament who did it—Wendy was garroted by a piece of tennis stringing. These include all the lovely women athletes who are taking part in the international competition. In addition to the local aspirants, the usual collection of current and ex- champions, there is the Italian start who boasts the most devastating-looking legs Roper has ever seen, the cuddly young Russian doubles pair, the beautiful French star, and their various friends and countrymen who hate to see them lose.

Just to complicate Max’s problem, there is a fighting liberal senator from California threatened by a fanatic guerilla group of international assassins with whom Roper is waging a long-time personal vendetta. In the course of his investigation (as usual, filled with risk and violence), other murders follow. And Roper, pursuing the blood trail, quickly has his own life to worry about. Max has to go to the limit with his special brand of endurance and fighting character before he can come up with the winner and bring the murderer along.

Colton Graham is furious when his partner double-crosses him by agreeing to sell the company they founded together. He is so enraged by his partner?s behavior that he does something he used to do whenever he was frustrated or upset, something he?d been warned never to do again?drink alcohol. He ignores the warning, finds a saloon, and gets stinking drunk. Of course getting drunk solves nothing. That becomes clear the following morning when he awakens lying in bed in a strange bedroom. He has no idea where he is and his memory of the preceding night has been wiped out by too much whiskey. He discovers his partner?s been murdered and that he?s been framed to look like the killer. He is innocent but instead of turning himself in and attempting to prove his innocence he decides to go on the run. When he does the police become convinced that he?s guilty of the slaying.

He goes into hiding, changes his appearance, and assumes a new identity. But that doesn?t work and he soon finds himself in even more trouble with seemingly no way to avoid the threat of capture and being tried for the murder he didn?t commit.