Bombshell: A Pulp Thriller
Max Allan Collins Barbara Collins
Also by Max Allan Collins
An Eliot Ness Mystery Omnibus
Mommy & Mommy's Day: A Suspense Duo
Murderlized: Stories
Too Many Tom Cats: And Other Feline Tales of Suspense
Murder—His & Hers: Stories
Regeneration: A Pulp Thriller
Reincarnal & Other Dark Tales
Shoot the Moon (and more)
Blue Christmas & Other Holiday Homicides
John Sand Thrillers
Come Spy With Me
Live Fast, Spy Hard
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
Text copyright © 2021 Max Allan Collins, Barbara Collins
All rights reserved.
Printed in the United States of America.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by Wolfpack Publishing
5130 S. Fort Apache Road, 215-380
Las Vegas, NV 89148
Kindle ISBN 978-1-64734-353-8
Paperback ISBN 978-1-64734-354-5
Contents
Get your FREE copy of Natural Death Inc.: A Short Story
Authors’ Note
Prologue
1. BLONDE AMBITION
2. Welcome To L.A
3. Poetic Justice
4. A Self-Made Man
5. The Wrong Room
6. Canned Can
7. Goodbye, Khrushchev
8. The Hungarian Ambassador
9. Rescue Mission
10. Nightmare In Red
11. Mad Tea Party
12. Apartment On Main Street
13. Rocket To The Moon
14. This Happy Place
15. Wild Frontier
Epilogue
A TIP OF THE COONSKIN CAP
Check out the Eliot Ness Mystery Omnibus
About The Authors
Also by Max Allan Collins
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Thank you for taking the time to read Suspense—His and Hers. If you enjoyed it, please consider telling your friends or posting a short review. Word of mouth is an author's best friend and much appreciated.
Thank you.
Max Allan Collins and Barbara Collins
Dedicated to
Stephen Borer …
… that most dedicated of fans
“I could tell Khrushchev liked me. He squeezed my hand so long and so hard that I thought he would break it.”
—Marilyn Monroe, 1959
“It is a question of war or peace between our countries, a question of life or death …”
—Nikita Khrushchev, 1959
“I have little respect for money… Ideas excite me.”
—Walt Disney, 1959
Authors’ Note
The events described in this book occurred on the weekend of September 19, 1959. Some of what you are about to read is in the public record; some of it derives from recently declassified material—from both Russian and American sources—made available to the authors from various quarters, in part due to the Freedom of Information Act. Other information was culled from unpublished memoirs of various participants, including a State Department official, herein called “Jack Harrigan.” Dialogue, whenever possible, is from these sources; other times the authors have taken the liberty of exercising their imaginations in what we are presenting as a novel.
Prologue
A BLINDING FLASH
The strobe of light—brighter than the simultaneous popping of one hundred million flash-camera bulbs— preceded the thunderous roar by seconds.
A young boy—clad in a plaid short-sleeved shirt and dark blue jeans with rolled-up cuffs, his blond hair sheared in a near-bald butch, his freckled face flushed from riding his bicycle in the hot sun—dove off the bike onto the green lake of a nearby lawn, where he belly-flopped, and frantically buried his face in the grass, covering the back of his head with his interlaced hands, protecting himself as best he could.
At the same time, across the street, a mother in a blue cotton housedress—she had been pushing a brown baby-buggy down the sidewalk past a row of neatly-kept clapboard houses with lawns cut as short as the bike-rider’s butch—threw herself across the front of the open buggy, making a human shield for her baby, wailing within.
The deafening roar turned down its own volume, becoming a low growling rumble …
… and a mushroom cloud rose in grotesque grandeur, blooming beneath an awaiting heaven, life-choking smoke and debris shooting outward with insidious speed in every direction, a storm of rubble and rubbish, a manmade tornado fragmenting other harmless manmade objects into deadly projectiles, a rain of death that filled the little movie screen.
“Remember,” a helpful if ominous male voice intoned, managing to be heard above the conflagration, as well as the rattle and hum of the movie projector, “in the event of atomic attack … duck and cover!”
Tiny eyes narrowed in young faces in the darkened classroom, heads nodding, filing away this priceless information.
“This action,” the stern yet friendly voice informed them, “can save your life.”
Light, ebullient music bounced along as if this were the end of the latest episode of “Ozzie and Harriet,” and then swelled absurdly to greet the letters spelling out THE END, which forebodingly filled the screen, only to fade. The monster movie many of these children had seen at a recent Saturday matinee had ended similarly … only with a question mark tagged onto those final chilling two words.
Now the end-of-the-world cacophony was over, the only sound in the classroom the whipcrack of the celluloid film— snap, snap, snap—whirling around as the reel ran out. There was something scolding about the sound…
Mrs. Violet Hahn—seventh-grade social studies teacher at Emerson Junior High in West Los Angeles—shut off the machine with a sharp click, making a few children jump, and the rotating film slowed, its snapping turning to soft, rather pathetic slaps, like a winded old man running out of energy. The teacher, looking matronly beyond her years in a drab tan cotton dress and brown oxford shoes, took a few steps over to a wall switch and turned on the lights with another spine-stiffening click.
Mrs. Hahn couldn’t remember a single time during her twelve years at Emerson when her pupils had been so pin-drop quiet after the showing of an educational film, the usual likes of which admittedly included risible do’s-and-don’ts—such classics as
