A Bullet for Cinderella

John D. MacDonald (1916 – 1986) was a prolific American writer of crime and suspense novels as well as short stories, many of them set in his adopted home of Florida. His best-known works include the popular and critically acclaimed Travis McGee series, and his novel The Executioners, which was adapted into the film Cape Fear. In 1972, MacDonald was named a grandmaster of the Mystery Writers of America, and he won a 1980 U.S. National Book Award in the one-year category Mystery.
MacDonald's literary career began in 1945 when, while in military service, he wrote a short story and mailed it home to his wife who first submitted it to Esquire magazine, where it was rejected, and then submitted to Story magazine, where it was accepted for $25.00. After his discharge from service, he continued to write short stories that kept being rejected until a sale to Dime Detective set his career in motion. He ended up selling close to 500 stories to the detective, mystery, adventure, sports, western and science fiction pulps. With the boom of paperback novels, MacDonald successfully made the jump to longer fiction with his first novel, The Brass Cupcake. After a couple of years, and for almost a decade, MacDonald focused on writing crime thrillers, many of which are now considered masterpieces of the hardboiled genre.
A Bullet for Cinderella is a representative example of the 1950's hardboiled mystery paperbacks. It is pulpy, violent, sexy, and suspenseful with plenty of action and even a buried treasure. It is narrated in the first person by Tal Howard, the protagonist, a veteran of the Korean War searching for a stolen fortune in a small town where he will meet Toni Rassell the girl “I had risked my life to find… the girl who was going to lead me to a buried fortune in stolen loot.”