Sally Baxter in Hong Kong, 1960

I must admit I wasn’t really aware of the Sally Baxter (Teenage Girl Reporter) series of books, though they are British. I don’t know much about their author Sylvia Edwards (which may be a pseudonym) but Sally was pure 1950s/early 1960s and does end up in quite a few colonial destinations and commonwealth boltholes (Oz, Canada etc). There were 16 books in the seris of which Hong Kong Deadline was the tenth published in 1960. How good are the descriptions of 1960 Hong Kong? I don’t know I haven’t read it! Perhaps someone out there has?

When an airline offers the Evening Cry a free trip to Hong Kong, Sally Baxter, the girl reporter, is chosen to make the glamorous trip. Her trip is supposed to be a holiday in the sun, but Sally’s nose for news scents a story when she meets Jean McFinlay, the only girl skipper of a junk in the South China Sea.  Sally discovers that Jean smuggles people into Hong Kong for money and writes about Jean’s work as well as the squalid living conditions in the city tenements.  Not only does Sally raise Jean’s ire, she makes a deadly enemy out of Mr. Yut, the wealthy tenement owner.

Several attempts are made on Sally’s life, making her feel that she must leave Hong Kong, but she is given a new assignment to discover the truth behind daily pilgrimages the people make to a certain island.  Sally nervously begins work on her new assignment.

Will Sally finish her new assignment before another attempt is made on her life?  Jean agrees to help Sally, and the two girls travel to the mysterious island to seek out answers to their many questions.