Homicide Is My Game

When Drum picks up a hitchhiker, trouble follows her into the car. A monsoon is hammering Washington, DC, when Chester Drum spots Anita Sparrow on the roadside in the middle of the night. Sixteen, frail, and soaking wet, she is trying to find help for her brother, Donny, a photographer with cerebral palsy who was beaten nearly to death a mile up the road. Drum takes Donny to the hospital and drives Anita home, where he finds her house ransacked, her brother's darkroom destroyed. It seems Donny took a picture of something he wasn't supposed to see, and powerful men will kill to ensure the negative is never developed. On top of it all, Drum soon learns that the Sparrows have ties to some of the biggest names inside the Beltway, and Anita is not as innocent as she appears. Her family story simmers with pornography, corruption, and murder - not polite topics for dinner table conversation, but ones that make Chester Drum feel right at home. Review Quote: "A steadily satisfying series of adventures." - The New York Times Book Review "A cult author for lovers of noir fiction." - Mónica Calvo-Pascual, author of Chaos and Madness "A great pulpster . . . always one of my favorites." - Ed Gorman, author of The Poker Club 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.