Murder Is My Dish

A kidnapped intellectual and a dead partner take Drum to South America. When Andy Dineen tires of the FBI, he jumps ship for Langley and joins the CIA to fight the Cold War in Berlin. After years in the spy game, he grows sick of the paperwork, and is considering his options when an old friend, private detective Chester Drum, offers him a job. Drum is surprised when his old academy classmate takes him up on it, and shocked when it gets Dineen killed. Dineen's first and last case is a stint as a bodyguard for a South American intellectual who's writing an exposé of his nation's savage dictator. When the strongman's thugs kidnap the author and bludgeon Dineen, Drum rushes to the hospital just in time to watch his friend die. Avenging Dineen will mean a trip to South America, and infiltrating a palace whose secret police are not half as dangerous as the despot's daughter. Review Quote: "Hard-boiled ... in both action and telling." - The New York Times Book Review "A great pulpster ... always one of my favorites." - Ed Gorman, author of The Poker Club "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 private detective who first appeared in The Second Longest Night (1955). Although a 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.