Gravetapping byBen Boulden |
Dan
J. Marlowe. The name alone brings an echo of the hardboiled—
“I’ll
be leaving one of these days, and the day I do they’ll never forget it.”
He
wrote in the heyday of the paperback original. His best work was
published by Gold Medal, and his novels stand above most of his contemporaries
as hard, uncompromising masterpieces of hardboiled crime and
suspense.
His
life was as strange as his fiction: he is likely the plainest womanizer
exported by Massachusetts; he gambled professionally for several years; he
befriended, lived with, and co-wrote several short stories with the notorious
bank robber Al Nussbaum; and late in life he developed memory loss and
something called aphasia—“partial or total inability to write and understand
words.”
And
all that is only the beginning. Not to mention it was parroted from
the introduction, written by Marlowe’s biographer Charles Kelly, to the new
trade paperback double published by Stark House Press. It features
two of Marlowe’s best novels, which really, are two halves a single
story: The Name of the Game is Death (Gold Medal 1962),
and One Endless Hour(Gold Medal 1969).
The
novels tell the genesis story of Marlowe’s Earl Drake series
character. Drake is not a likable man. He is a bank
robber with a predilection for killing people. He doesn’t kill
simply to kill, but kill he does. The Name of the Game is
Death opens at the scene of a botched bank robbery with Drake shot in
the escape. He and his partner split up, and Drake finds a doctor
and a dark place to hide until he is recuperated and the heat is off, which is
when the story really begins. His partner went missing with the
money, and Drake is broke. The rest of Name of the
Game is Drake’s search for his partner, and the money, and One
Endless Hour is the fallout.
The
two novels merge into one complete and engrossing story, which is not to say
either is dependent on the other; both are complete with beginning, middle, and
end. However the plot in One Endless Hour is built
directly from Name of the Game. In fact, the final
chapter of Name of the Game is included, with a few
adjustments as the Prologue to One Endless Hour.
Name
of the Game is
the stronger of the two novels. It includes an exposition of Drake’s
childhood, explaining (without apologizing) for Drake’s seeming amoral
character. Its backstory emphasis and character development is
reminiscent of John D. MacDonald, but only just. Its prose is raw
and hardboiled—
“I
swear both his feet were off the ground when he fired at me. The
odds must have been sixty thousand to one, but he took me in the left upper
arm. It smashed me back against the car. I steadied
myself with a hand on the roof and put two a yard behind each other right through
his belt buckle. If they had their windows open they could have
heard him across town.”
—and
it is more thematically related to Jim Thompson than John D.
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