(1914-1987)
Dan J. Marlowe was a middle-aged businessman who, in the personal turmoil after the death of his wife of many years, decided to abandon his old life. He started writing, and his first novel was published when he was 45. Doorway to Death was a rock-hard thriller about Johnny Killain, a New York tough guy for hire with a background in government and wartime secret service. Marlowe wrote five Killain novels in all. There was nothing in them that had not been done hundreds of times before, but Marlowe could write tough dialogue and scenes of tension and action with the best of them. The Killains were all good, and the best one was the last, Shake a Crooked Town (1961), in which Johnny leaves Times Square to settle accounts with the vicious racketeers running an upstate city.
Marlowe’s most famous book and his best-known character arrived from Fawcett Gold Medal topics in 1962. The Name of the Game Is Death (1962) introduced Earl Drake, an ice-blooded, sociopathic safecracker and stickup man (“You’re amoral,” a prison psychiatrist tells him. “You have no respect for authority. Your values are not civilized values.”). In one of the most ruthless, self-justifying first-person narratives in pop fiction, Drake recounts his curriculum vitae, the grim, disappointing events that led to his life of crime and vengeful murder (basically, society made him do it).
Other first-rate crime novels followed, including Strongarm (1963) and The Vengeance Man (1966). Marlowe revived Earl Drake in 1969, and with Fawcett’s encouragement turned him into a slightly less sociopathic series hero and rather unlikely government operative. Falling in line with Fawcett’s other spy series—Edward Aarons’s Sam Durrell “Assignment” and Philip Allee’s Joe Gall “Contract” topics—the subsequent Earl Drakes were all titled “Operation” Something, including a revised version of Name of the Game, now called Operation Overkill. The topics were fun but more conventional, and some readers believe Marlowe would have had a more memorable series if Drake had remained an underworld sociopath.
Marlowe’s scenes of robbery and safecracking were given a scrupulous authenticity after he became close friends with a real-life crook, Albert F. Nussbaum, then serving a long prison term. Later, Marlowe helped Nussbaum get paroled and begin his own career as a crime writer.
Works
- Backfire (1961);
- Death Deep Down (1965);
- Doom Service (1960);
- Doorway to Death (1959);
- Fatal Frails (1960);
- Flashpoint (1970);
- Four for the Money (1966);
- Killer with a Key (1959);
- Name of the Game Is Death, The (1962);
- Never Live Twice (1964);
- One Endless Hour (1969);
- Operation Breakthrough (1971);
- Operation Checkmate (1972);
- Operation Deathmaker (1975);
- Operation Drumfire (1972);
- Operation Fireball (1969);
- Operation Ham-merlock (1974);
- Operation Stranglehold (1973);
- Operation Whiplash (1973);
- Route of the Red Gold (1967);
- Shake a Crooked Town (1961);
- Strongarm (1963);
- Vengeance Man, The (1966)
