Dan J. Marlowe and Earl Drake, 2: One Endless Hour (alias Operation Endless Hour)

(NB: This post also appears on The Violent World of Parker blog.)

For Part 1, go here.

Seven years after ruthless career criminal (and Parker parallel) Earl Drake made his debut in Dan J. Marlowe's violent, twisted The Name of the Game is Death (Gold Medal, 1962), Drake returned to print in a new full-length novel. Except now things were different for both Marlowe and Drake... and they were about to take a turn for the bizarre...

Dan J. Marlowe had continued to write in the wake of The Name of the Game is Death – indeed, for many, the years 1962–1969 marked the high point of his crime fiction writing career, encompassing standalone classics like Strongarm (1963), Four for the Money (1966) and The Vengeance Man (also 1966); see "Playing with Fire" and "The Gold Medal Corner" by Josef Hoffman and Bill Crider on the Mystery*File site. But Marlowe had also become friends with a real-life convicted criminal: Al Nussbaum. Nussbaum had read The Name of the Game is Death whilst on the run from the FBI following a string of bank robberies with his partner Bobby Wilcoxson, and was duly impressed; he wrote a number of letters to Marlowe (using the alias "Carl Fisher"), and once imprisoned (sentenced to forty years, he was paroled in the early 1970s), Nussbaum kept up his correspondence with Marlowe.

The result was an (unpublished, I believe, due to FBI objections) article titled "Anatomy of a Crime Wave", detailing Nussbaum's exploits. But what Nussbaum – and, it must be said, Marlowe's publisher, Gold Medal – really wanted to read was a sequel to The Name of the Game is Death. According to Josef Hoffman's Mystery*File piece, "Nussbaum suggested to Marlowe that he go through the novel for him, looking out for the elements which constituted the figure of the hero, and for ways in which the story might be continued. Nussbaum then produced an outline of the character for the series, gave him a name, and drew up a 60-page concept for the sequel." The name Nussbaum came up with was Earl Drake. (Presumably this means the couple of mentions of the Earl Drake alias in later editions of The Name of the Game is Death/Operation Overkill must have been inserted as part of the revisions and edits the novel underwent – see previous post.)

Marlowe wrote the sequel "in three weeks flat", and Earl Drake was reborn in One Endless Hour (1969, later retitled Operation Endless Hour). When we left Drake in The Name of the Game is Death, he'd been burned to a crisp in a car-related conflagration after a shootout with the cops and landed up in prison hospital, wrapped head-to-toe in bandages, in terrible pain but utterly unrepentant. Handily, One Endless Hour recaps these final moments (again, slightly rewritten), and then picks up the story with Drake still on the prison ward, beginning to plan a breakout. This first part of the novel is perhaps the best, and plays like a fucked-up One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (as in, Ken Kesey's 1962 novel), with Drake taking the role of Chief Bromden, narrating events while everyone on the ward believes him to be a vegetable

Enlisting the aid of the plastic surgeon who reconstructs his ruined face (shades of Richard Stark's Parker in The Man with the Getaway Face there, although the surgeon is unable to reconstitute Drake's hair; henceforth he has to wear a wig), Drake eventually effects his escape (leaving behind one corpse, naturally) and goes looking for the money he never managed to recover in the first book. The cash is long gone, however – although Drake does get to tie up one loose end – and so, short on funds, Drake seeks out Robert "the Schemer" Frenz, an underworld figure who provides ready-to-go plans for bank jobs "for a fee or a percentage of the gross". The resultant robbery (or rather, robberies) takes up the remainder of the book, providing a fair bit of excitement and climaxing, in a spooky echo of the previous book's finale, in a flaming car crash (Josef Hoffman's Mystery*File article draws attention to the repeated reappearance of fiery motifs in the Earl Drake series).

That One Endless Hour isn't quite the equal of The Name of the Game is Death perhaps won't come as a huge surprise – few books by any crime novelist scale those lofty heights – but it's still an effective crime thriller, and Drake is as compelling – and repulsive – a creation as ever (although not quite as murderous here). In "the Schemer" one can detect Marlowe and Nussbaum trying out a possible series character, setting up potential sequels... but in fact after this point the series would start to diverge from the blueprint it had established, gradually leaving crime fiction behind and veering into a whole other genre...

For Part 3, go here.

Dan J. Marlowe and Earl Drake, 1: The Name of the Game is Death (alias Operation Overkill)

(NB: This post also appears – with comments – on The Violent World of Parker blog.)

In 1962, one of America's leading genre publishers issued a paperback original by an author who'd only been a novelist a few years, but already had a handful of successful, critically praised crime works under his belt. Starring a violent career criminal who operates under various aliases and is respected in the underworld for his ability to plan and take down dangerous scores, the book was stunning: gripping, edgy, original. The author had no intention of penning a sequel to the novel – indeed, his leading man almost dies at the end of the story – but after some encouragement from his publisher he elected to extend his memorable antihero's literary life into a series. Armed with a new face following plastic surgery, the cunning and lethal criminal would go on to execute a number of spectacular heists (some of them going spectacularly awry), find himself pitted against mobsters and gangsters, and even wind up working for the US government.

So far, so familiar, at least to fans of Donald E. Westlake's pseudonymous Richard Stark/Parker novels. Except it's not Stark we're talking about here, or Parker, or The Hunter/Point Blank; it's Dan J. Marlowe, Earl Drake... and The Name of the Game is Death.

Published in the States in the same year as The Hunter by Gold Medal – who would eventually pick up the rights to the Parkers after Pocket Books issued the initial eight – The Name of the Game is Death – later retitled Operation Overkill – was Dan James Marlowe's seventh novel (his debut, Doorway to Death, featuring hotel detective Johnny Killain, was issued by Avon in 1959), but the first to star Earl Drake. Drake isn't actually called Drake for the bulk of the novel (and may, in fact, never once be called that in the original printing of the book... I'll return to that shortly) – "Earl Drake" is merely a name he gives to an associate – but after this initial outing the Drake alias would stick.

Written in the first person from Drake's perspective (and here we encounter an essential difference to the third-person Parker series), The Name of the Game is Death begins in the midst of a robbery, as Drake, his partner in crime Bunny, and a young kid doing the driving hit a Phoenix bank. It's a blistering opening to the book: tense, chaotic, and climaxing in a bloody shootout in which the kid is killed ("The left side of his head was gone") and Drake is wounded. Drake and Bunny split up, Bunny taking most of the cash, with the intention of mailing Drake his share at the rate of a thousand dollars per week. But after three packages the deliveries stop, so Drake sets off to Hudson, Florida to find out where his share of the money is and what happened to Bunny.

If the blood-soaked opening of The Name of the Game is Death isn't indication enough, it quickly becomes even more apparent that Drake is a very bad man indeed. A hapless doctor who Drake forces to tend to his injury meets a sticky end, and Drake's trip to Hudson involves another murder and sets up more to come. Interspersed amongst all this are flashbacks to Drake's youth and young adulthood, via which we learn just how fucked up an individual he is: as a child he mercilessly tormented a fat kid who'd killed his cat and exacted a bruising vengeance on a corrupt cop, and by the time he was twenty-three he had already killed two men.

The picture of Drake that emerges isn't a million miles away from, say, Lou Ford in Jim Thompson's The Killer Inside Me (1952) – and this is the key to The Name of the Game is Death. Much as Ford is the driving force behind The Killer Inside Me, compelling even as he repels, Earl Drake is the reason The Name of the Game is Death is so powerful (I made it my number one read of last year). Dan J. Marlowe isn't much of a stylist, but Drake is so fascinatingly monstrous it's hard not to root for him. And once Drake, now calling himself Chet Arnold, gets to Hudson (setting himself up as a tree surgeon while he investigates Bunny's disappearance), we learn he also has problems getting it up; his first attempt to make it with a buxom redheaded bar-owner named Hazel ends in flaccid disappointment.

Reportedly, the original edition of The Name of the Game is Death implicitly links Drake's eventual sexual success with Hazel to his taste for killing, although this inference is removed from later US and UK editions. And that's not the only change, either; I've only read the 1973 UK Coronet printing of the book (retitled Operation Overkill), but this post on the Mystery*File blog details some of the other alterations. Although the majority of these seem to be simple copy edits (and actually improvements in many cases), it may well be that the name "Earl Drake" was inserted at a later date, too.

As to why Marlowe made these changes to his text... I'll be exploring that over the course of the rest of this week's posts. Because it would be seven years before Chet Arnold/Earl Drake reappeared, by which point Dan J. Marlowe had become friendly with a real-life criminal who would help to shape the remainder of the series... and despite the allusions at the beginning of this post, that series would end up taking quite a different path to that of Richard Stark and Parker...

For Part 2, go here.

Game Without Rules (Hodder & Stoughton, 1968) by Michael Gilbert: Book Review, plus Mr Calder and Mr Behrens (Hodder, 1982)

Well look at that: Existential Ennui is five years old today. Now, before we get all carried away n'shit (shyeah, right), I should point out that 1 February is really only technically Existential Ennui's birthday. When I originally set this blog up in 2007, it was as a back-up to another, long-defunct blog; I didn't really begin posting properly on Existential Ennui until July 2009, and Existential Ennui didn't really become what it is today – i.e. a pompous, pretentious, prolix books blog – until the following year. So I'll forgo any celebrations, if you don't mind – not that anyone would be celebrating the anniversary of this utter waste of everybody's time anyway – and carry on regardless, with a spot more spy fiction.

And if you've been following my series of posts on spy fiction series, you might have noticed that the tendency has been to post an introductory essay to whichever spy series I'm blogging about at that juncture and follow that with one or more subsequent posts on various novels in that series. But not this time. This time, just for a change, I'm keeping it all in one single, solitary post – partly because, including Monday's post on Desmond Cory's Secret Ministry, by the end of the week I'll have posted three pretty lengthy reviews*, and I'm afraid I can only devote so much time and effort to this blog (and yes, astonishing as it may seem, a certain amount of time and effort does go into Existential Ennui); but also because this particular spy series doesn't consist of novels, but rather of short stories...

First published in hardback in the UK by Hodder & Stoughton in 1968 – the year following the 1967 US Harper and Row first edition – under an attractive dustjacket designed by the appealingly monikered Mick and Ging, Game Without Rules is a collection of short stories by crime and suspense writer (and lawyer) Michael Gilbert, starring two late-middle-aged British Intelligence operatives named Mr. Calder and Mr. Behrens. The Hodder edition seen here is quite hard to come by these days – there are only a few on AbeBooks at the moment, and a presentable example will set you back at least £50–£100 – but in truth the book isn't common in any edition; it fell out of print years ago and at time of writing AbeBooks has just twenty copies in total.

Most of the stories in this collection originally appeared in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine in the early- to mid-1960s – which is probably why, despite Gilbert being British, the American edition of the collection preceded the British one – and they are, quite simply, some of the best espionage tales I've ever read. Resting somewhere on the spy slide rule between John le Carré's Smiley stories and Anthony Price's David Audley novels – I wouldn't be at all surprised if Mr. Gilbert were an influence on Mr. Price in particular – the Calder and Behrens tales share with le Carré's work a healthy distrust of the establishment and with Price's an unshakable belief in the seriousness of the Soviet threat. But in common with both of those authors' novels they're also fine mysteries, with plausible scenarios, deft characterisation, believable dialogue, lashings of wry observation and wonderful pay-offs.

Both in their fifties, Samuel Behrens and Daniel Joseph Calder work for Mr. Fortescue, ostensibly the manager of the Westminster branch of the London and Home Counties Bank – where he is based – but in fact "the controller and paymaster of a bunch of middle-aged cutthroats known as the 'E' (or External) Branch of the Joint Services Standing Intelligence Committee" ("The Spoilers"). Behrens and Calder live not far from each other in the Kentish North Downs, in a fictional village named Lamperdown; Behrens lives with his aunt in the The Old Rectory, and Calder lives with his loyal Persian deerhound, Rasselas, in a cottage on Hyde Hill overlooking the village. The two men do not reside close by each other by chance; we learn that they do so in order to watch over one another, their line of work frequently being a dangerous one.

Gilbert's Calder and Behrens stories are clipped and economical – of necessity, being short – but still manage to pack a hell of a lot in; at one point in "The Spoilers" nothing less than the survival of democracy in Britain seems to be at stake, while the European chase in "Cross-Over" could fuel an entire Bond novel. Indeed, reading one of these short tales is akin to reading a full novel, so complete is the experience.

As characters, Calder and Behrens (and Fortescue) can be ruthless, but they're also pragmatic; while in "The Road to Damascus" an enemy agent is summarily executed by Mr. Calder upon a signal from Mr. Behrens, in "On Slay Down" a target is ultimately made an offer rather than, well, offed. But Calder and Behrens are certainly devious – as are the plots in which they find themselves, full of twists and hidden agendas; "Prometheus Unbound", for example, which sees Mr. Calder losing his marbles and boasts a tense pursuit and stand-off in London's Latin Quarter, genuinely keeps you guessing right up till the very end. And in Mr. Calder's dog, Rasselas, the two men possess a secret weapon who helps resolve more than a few plot points – although Rasselas also provides perhaps the most affecting moment in the entire book.

Game Without Rules isn't the only collection of Calder and Behrens stories; a second collection, Mr Calder & Mr Behrens, followed the first one in 1982, again published by Hodder & Stoughton in the UK. As with Game Without Rules, though, Mr Calder & Mr Behrens has slipped out of print, and there are currently fewer than twenty copies of any edition on AbeBooks (although they are more affordable than copies of the former). And of those (fewer than) twenty, only one is the Hodder first: an ex-library copy, possibly missing its jacket. My Hodder first came from the always-dependable Richard Sylvanus Williams of Winterton in North Lincs, but I've yet to read it. My learned friend Olman has, however, and you can find his review here, along with one or two other Michael Gilbert reviews (Olman's something of a Gilbert aficionado). There's also a good overview of all of Gilbert's work here, and a fine Guardian obituary by the late critic and crime novelist H. R. F. Keating here.

I'll be returning to Messrs Calder, Behrens and indeed Gilbert before too long – I have a couple of other Michael Gilbert books besides Mr Calder & Mr Behrens to blog about, one of which is a collection of short stories featuring a policeman who makes a brief guest appearance in Game Without Rules. Next, though: a spy series which began life as a crime series...

*UPDATE 2/2/12: At least, that was the plan. It now looks unlikely that I'll have time to finish that third review before the week's out, so it'll have to wait a while. Hey: that's blogging!