Hellflower

George Oliver Smith (1911-1981) was an American electronics engineer who parlayed his technical expertise into detailed, extrapolative science fiction with short stories he first contributed (and later collected as Venus Equilateral) to the sci-fi magazine Astounding Science Fiction during the Golden Age of Science Fiction in the 1940s. The 1953 novel, Hellflower, marked a notable shift in Smith's writing when he sidelined the technics and focused, instead, on character with framed and disgraced space pilot Charles Farradyne who is offered one shot at redemption by infiltrating an unknown interstellar organization trafficking the deadly ultra-aphrodisiac Hellflowers - and he might just discover who framed him in the process . . .