Jeremy,
Re your question below:
> I have never seen any reference to Chet
Drum
> anywhere
> at all. Are they in the same vein as Gall, Helm
and
> Durrrell? Are they widely available? Are they
any
> good?
Chet Drum was a popular PI character in the '50s and
'60s who appeared in a long series of Gold Medal novels
written by Stephen Marlowe (a pseudonym of Milton Lesser, who
later went to court and made it his legal name).
Drum followed the Chandler paradigm in virtually all respects
(30-ish, unmarried ex-cop, operating a one man agency in a
large US city, telling his own stories in the first person).
To this familiar recipe was added a new ingredient, world
travel. Thous Drum was based in Washington, DC, almost all of
his cases take him to a different foreign country. He's made
the pilgrimage to Mecca, solved a murder in Moscow's Gorky
Park years before Martin Cruz Smith ever ehard of the place,
made it to Rome in time for the 1960 Olympics, and had two
cases in Berlin, one before the Wall, one after. Like many
PIs in the 50s and 60s, a lot of his cases involved
espionage. In fact, this was the case with Drum more often
than not, given the international nature of his cases. Kevin
Smith has a page on Drum at his THRILLING DETECTIVE website.
You can find it at:
http://www.thrillingdetective.com/drum.html
You can find his books in used stores if you're willing to
dig.
JIM DOHERTY
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