Drumbeat - Berlin

An old flame's fiancé is missing, and only Drum can save him from the Soviets. Chester Drum will never love another woman the way he loves Marianne. After years of on-and-off romance, he tells her that his work as a private detective is too dangerous for him to ever marry, so she ends the affair and moves to West Berlin, to report on the Cold War from its front lines. There she falls in love with Quentin Hammond, ace foreign correspondent, and Drum is happy for her until her new man disappears behind the Iron Curtain. She telegraphs for help, and Drum is on the next plane. Hammond was close to winning the scoop of the century, by cooperating with an exiled East German dissident to tunnel beneath the Berlin Wall and free thousands of people from the other side. Before they could complete their audacious scheme, though, the Stasi kidnapped them. Only Drum has the skills to go behind the wall and return with the man who's stolen the woman he loves. Review quote: "Nice taut melodrama, well told." - The New York Times Book Review. "Drum sleuths to his own beat; he is a strong private investigator, who hooks the audience in each tale, short or long." - Harriet Klausner Book Reviews. "Marlowe's buoyant skill and credibility lie in the way he has put breath into [his] characters." - The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. "Langton's sparkling prose and inimitable wit offer a delectable feast for the discriminating reader." - Publishers Weekly. "Like Jane Austen and Barbara Pym, Langton is blessed with the comic spirit - a rare gift of genius to be cherished." - St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Biographical note: Stephen Marlowe (1928-2008) was the author of more than fifty novels, including nearly two dozen featuring globe-trotting private eye Chester Drum. Born Milton Lesser, Marlowe was raised in Brooklyn and attended the College of William and Mary. After several years writing science fiction under his given name, he legally adopted his pen name, and began focusing on Chester Drum, the Washington-based detective who first appeared in The Second Longest Night (1955). Although a private detective akin to Raymond Chandler's characters, Drum was distinguished by his jet-setting lifestyle, which carried him to various exotic locales from Mecca to South America. These espionage-tinged stories won Marlowe acclaim, and he produced more than one a year before ending the series in 1968. After spending the 1970s writing suspense novels like The Summit (1970) and The Cawthorn Journals (1975), Marlowe turned to scholarly historical fiction. He lived much of his life abroad, in Switzerland, Spain, and France, and died in Virginia in 2008.