The Seducer

by Fletcher Flora

Two Women Too Many

To otherwise conservative Professor Bradley Cannon, women were a definite problem.

Take Cornelia - and he did - one twitch of her lush, ripe body and he was lost.

Take his favorite student, Maggie - and he did - one provocative leer and the chase was on.

Take his wife, Madelaine - and he wished someone would - she left him cold, but the million dollars she owned generated a certain heat of their own.

It was obvious that Peermont College would not tolerate Prof. Bradley’s attempt to corner the woman market, so two of them had to go.

That posed the How could he keep Maggie - she was the only one who could really satisfy his passions - and get rid of Cornelia and Madelaine, without losing the million dollars and without creating a scandal that would rock the college to its foundations?

154 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1961

About the author

Fletcher Flora was born in Parsons, Kansas in 1914. Flora began writing soon after returning from World War II. His crime and mystery short stories and novels were published in magazines like Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Mr., Cosmopolitan, and in Alfred Hitchcock’s mystery anthologies. He received the Cock Robin Mystery Award for his first hard cover novel, Killing Cousins in 1960. Flora wrote over 150 short stories and 13 novels during his writing career. Three of his works are published under the house name, Ellery Queen. Timothy Harrison was also a pseudonym for his work, Hot Summer.

Reviews

[Steven · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm lukewarm on this one. Flora is a decent prose stylist, probably one of the best of the late 1950s-early 1960s writing in this erotica-noir genre, certainly way more accomplished than Orrie Hitt, and on par with the Donald Westlake's and Lawrence Block's pseudonymous novels published at the same time. The first half of the book plays through the professor's series of affairs. The second half spins out the murders and there is some clever pot twists but it is really all a bit tame.

[Victor Whitman · Rating 3 out of 5]

Normally I would hate Flora's literary tone but in this case - a story about an empty and shallow academic - I loved it. The story worked for me up to the last 30 pages when it fell down a bit, but I liked how Flora didn't try to resolve everything at the end, a mistake that so many make and ruin it.