Just read in the latest PWA newsletter that Stephen Marlowe,
author of one of the best of the '50's-era private eye
series, recently passed away.
Born Milton Lesser, Marlowe published science fiction under
that name for several years before adaopting the Marlowe
pseudonym for his crime fiction. Eventually, as Marlowe
became his most popular persona, he eventually adopted it as
his legal name.
As Marlowe, he is perhaps best-remembered for his long series
featuring DC-based private eye Chet Drum. A faitful follower
of what I've called elsewhere "The Marlowe Paradigm,"
(30-ish, unmarried, male, American, ex-cop, operating a
one-man agency, out of a large US city, telling his own
stories in the first person), which may have explained the
pen name he chose, Stephen Marlowe added one new ingredient
to this familiar recipe: world travel.
Each new Marlowe novel found Chet Drum in a different foreign
locale. He made a pilgrimage to Mecca, wound up in Rome for
the 1960 Olympics, worked with Mounties when a case took him
north of the Canadian border, investigated a case that
started out in Gorky Park years before Martin Crux Smith ever
heard of the place, traded his snap-brim fedora for a pith
helmet while searching for a missing person in the Sahara,
etc., etc., etc.
Probably the only Drum novel that didn't have at least a
partially foreign setting was his cross-over collboration
with Richard Prather, DOUBLE IN TROUBLE, in which Drum and
Shell Scott found themselves getting in each other's way
while they conducted separate investigations into a corrupt
labor union.
The Drum series went through two iterations of title
patterns. After the first two unpatterned titles, THE SECOND
LONGEST NIGHT and MECCA FOR MURDER, each book used a
variation on Chandler's "Trouble Is My Business." Hence,
PERIL IS MY PAY, JEOPARDY IS MY JOB, MANHUNT IS MY MISSION,
DANGER IS MY LINE, etc. In the early '60's, after one
unpatterned transition title, FRANCESCA, he adopted a
different title pattern, prefacing a reference to the female
involved in the case or to the setting, with the phrase DRUM
BEAT. Hence DRUM BEAT - BERLIN, DRUM BEAT - ERICA, DRUM BEAT
- MADRID, and the last book in the series, DRUM BEAT -
MARIANNE.
After dropping the Drum series, Marlowe went on to write
hardback "blockbuster" novels, some, like THE SUMMIT and THE
CAWTHORN JOURNALS, criminous, and others, like 1492, about
the Columbus voyage, not.
An enviable career. He'll be missed.
JIM DOHERTY
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