Stephen Marlowe

 

A little piece about Stephen Marlowe for… Alternatives: Science Fiction Stories by Stephen Marlowe A 3 PLAY Book   Introduction     Stephen Marlowe—born as Milton Lesser on August 7, 1928, to Norman and Syliva Lesser in Brooklyn, New York—purportedly said: “At the age of eight, I wanted to be a writer and I never changed my mind.” And was he ever a writer. After graduating with a Bachelor of Arts in philosophy from William & Mary in 1949, with a referral from science fiction writer Damon Knight, Marlowe took a job with the famous Scott Meredith Literary Agency. The same place writers like Ed McBain, Donald E. Westlake, Lester del Rey, and Lawrence Block, started their careers. He sold his first story, a science fiction novelette titled “All Heroes Are Hated!,” to Amazing Stories in 1950. Marlowe, after that first sale, concentrated almost exclusively on science fiction throughout the first half of the decade; publishing dozens of stories in pulps and digests like Imagination, Marvel Science Stories, Galaxy, and Fantastic. His first novel, Earthbound, as by Milton Lesser, was a speculative young adult job for the John C. Winston Company. Earthbound was released the same day Marlowe, 23-years-old at the time, reported for his Korean War service in 1952. According to a 2007 interview with Ed Gorman, Marlowe had forgotten about contracting for a second book with Winston: “I was at a winter training exercise at Camp Drum [Western New York], where I was temporarily attached to the 82nd Airborne. I got a frantic call from my agent: How [are] you coming on the second Winston novel? I’d forgotten all about it and it was due in a week. I spent a weekend telling myself it was impossible. Then on Monday the colonel I worked for, on hearing of my plight, said, ‘Son, how much are they paying you to write that book?’ I told him the advance was a thousand bucks. ‘Son,’ he told me, ‘even the U.S. Army can’t stand between you and that kind of money. Go home and write that book.’ ” Marlowe wrote the book, The Star Seekers, in less than a week, delivered it, but “never had the courage to read it.” The Star Seekers hit bookshelves in 1953 and has been seldom seen ever since. In the mid-1950s, Marlowe shifted his focus from science fiction—although he continued to write speculative tales into the early-1960s—to suspense. He contributed to mystery pulps like Manhunt, Hunted, and Accused, and wrote novels for the paperback original market. His first suspense novel was Catch the Brass Ring, which was one-half of an Ace Double published in 1954. A year later, Marlowe introduced the character that made him famous: Chester Drum. Drum was a Washington, D.C. private eye specializing in international cases. An original idea in the mid-20th Century since the hardboiled dicks of the era were set in large American cities like New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles. The international settings of Drum’s cases are vivid with an exotic realism that came from Marlowe’s real-life geography hopping. In an interview, Marlowe said, “[I’ve] lost count of how many places I’ve lived—surely more than a hundred in twenty-odd countries.” The series was a hit and Gold Medal, the premium paperback publisher of the day, sold millions of the books.  There were 20 Chester Drum novels between 1955, when The Second Longest Night appeared, and 1968 when Drum Beat—Marianne was published. The novels were accompanied by eight short stories published in Manhunt, Accused, Ed McBain’s Mystery Magazine, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, and Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. The New York Times mystery critic, Anthony Boucher, wrote: “few writers of the tough private-eye story can tell it more accurately than Mr. Marlowe, or with such taut understatement of violence and sex.” After Gold Medal dropped Marlowe’s Chester Drum series, he turned to more ambitious hardcover suspense novels. These big books—longer and more complex than his earlier novels—had similar exotic settings as the Drum stories. This, along with Marlowe’s ability to tighten suspense, scene-by-scene, and what Boucher had earlier called his understated sex and violence gave these books punch. The first of these, Come Over, Red Rover—if one discounts Marlowe’s 1966 hardcover, The Search for Bruno Heidler—appeared in 1968. Others of note are Summit (1970), The Cawthorn Journals (1975), and The Valkyrie Encounter, which Marlowe called, in that same Ed Gorman interview, his favorite of his own hardcover suspense novels.    The 1980s saw Marlowe pivot again into biographical novels, which the mystery author and critic Bill Pronzini called “brilliantly conceived [and] meticulously researched.” The Memoirs of Christopher Columbus appeared in 1987; The Lighthouse at the End of the World, about Edgar Allan Poe, in 1995; and The Death and Life of Miguel de Cervantes—which, according to Pronzini, Marlowe considered his best novel and Ed Gorman called “his masterpiece”—was published in 1996. Over his long career, Stephen Marlowe received the Prix Gutenberg du Livre, a French literary award, in 1988 for The Memoirs of Christopher Columbus and the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Private Eye Writers of America in 1997. As we said earlier, Marlowe was born as Milton Lesser, but sometime in the late-1950s (after his Chester Drum novels had made a big splash) he legally changed his name to Stephen Marlowe. Shortly after graduating from William & Mary, Marlowe—then still known as Milton Lesser—married Leona Lang on June 2, 1950. Leona, who went by Leigh, was a trained psychologist. The couple had two daughters but divorced in the early-1960s. Marlowe then, in 1964, married Ann Humbert in Manhattan. The pair were married until Marlowe’s death from “myelodysplastic syndrome, a bone-marrow disorder” on February 22, 2008, in Williamsburg, Virginia. Alternatives: Science Fiction Stories features three of Marlowe’s best speculative tales—one novelette and two shorts. “Divvy Up,” Amazing Stories, 1960, is a dystopian treasure about one man’s survival in a world where death is a relief from a tortured and soulless world. Its dark themes would have made for a marvelous episode of the original The Twilight Zone. “Finders Keepers,” Fantastic Universe, 1953, is a light-hearted tale about time traveling historians and a search going all the way back to Adam and Eve. “The Passionate Pitchman,” Fantastic, 1956, is a slam-bang—read that as exciting—adventure novelette about gangsters, heists, and teleportation. Now on with the stories…   Cover by Karadraws.com

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