Dortmunder Daze / Parker Progress Report for Donald E. Westlake Day: a Review of Jimmy the Kid (Dortmunder #3, 1974), feat. Child Heist

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

As you'll no doubt already be aware if you've read Violent World of Parker supremo Trent's earlier post, today is Donald E. Westlake Day. Instigated by Patti Abbott to mark the imminent publication by Hard Case Crime/Titan Books of the "lost" Westlake novel The Comedy is Finished (imminent in the States, anyway; I don't think it's out in the UK till April, so I'll be reviewing it on Existential Ennui nearer that pub date), all over the web today fine folk are posting reviews of an array of Westlake works. Trent's already reviewed Westlake's 2004 standalone novel Money for Nothing, and for my part, I'm pressing on with my ongoing reviews of Westlake's two best-known series: the serious novels starring taciturn crime automaton Parker (written, of course, under the alias Richard Stark), and the not-so-serious ones starring hard-luck heister John Dortmunder (written, of course, as, er, well, Donald E. Westlake). And it just so happens that I've serendipitously reached a juncture at which those two otherwise independent-from-one-another series intersect: Jimmy the Kid.

First published by Evans in the US in 1974 and Hodder in the UK in 1975, Jimmy the Kid – the third Dortmunder novel, following The Hot Rock (1970) and Bank Shot (1972) – is in many ways the culmination of the inter-book experiments Westlake had been running since he'd spun the first Alan Grofield solo novel, The Damsel (1967), out of the eighth Parker novel, The Handle (1966; and even earlier if you count Westlake's sleaze paperback collaborations with the likes of Lawrence Block) – see Plunder Squad's crossover with Joe Gores's Dead Skip, Butcher's Moon's revisiting of characters and plot threads from across the whole Parker series, and so on. Jimmy the Kid, however, goes one better. The story sees Dortmunder and his luckless crew – Andy Kelp, Stan Murch, Murch's Mom and Dortmunder's girlfriend, May – enacting an elaborate scheme to kidnap a kid for a ransom. But the plan has come from a novel place: a novel, in fact; a novel Kelp read during a brief stay inside; a novel titled Child Heist, written by an author named Richard Stark, and starring a taciturn crime automaton known as Parker...

It's a metafictional conceit worthy of James Hogg or Laurence Sterne: not merely a book-within-a-book, but a book-within-a-book written by the author's pseudonymous alter ego, in the authentically flat, pared-back style of that alter ego, and featuring that alter ego's most famous creation. Entire chapters of the Parker vehicle Child Heist are stitched into Jimmy the Kid, alongside subsequent chapters where Dortmunder and co. attempt to follow Parker and co.'s plans (and usually screw them up). Moreover, Child Heist is itself a work of fiction – i.e., it's a fictional piece of fiction. Outside of Jimmy the Kid, it doesn't exist – there's is no Parker novel called Child Heist. And to cap it all, towards the end of Jimmy the Kid, the similarly fictional author Richard Stark also puts in an appearance (as does his lawyer).

At a near-forty year remove, it's difficult to imagine what readers in 1974 would have made of all this. For sure, even if they'd heard of Richard Stark or knew his work, few would have been aware of the relationship between Stark and Westlake – after all, even today, outside of hardcore Parker nuts like us lot, to what extent is Joe Reading Public truly cognizant of Westlake's "dark half" (or indeed Stark's lighter one)? And even for those fortunate enough to have made the connection back then, with little in the way of bibliographical guidance in that pre-internet era, to be presented with the tantalising prospect of a "missing" Parker novel must have been maddening (and judging by the search terms I see in Existential Ennui's back-of-house stats, still is for some Parker neophytes).

It's a shame, then, that Jimmy the Kid the novel doesn't quite live up to the promise of Jimmy the Kid the meta-experiment. The innate absurdity of the set-up doesn't especially translate into belly laughs, although there are certainly moments that raise a smile and occasionally a chuckle. For my money (ahem), the preceding Dortmunder novel, Bank Shot, is the better book. There, the equally ludicrous scenario which plays out is matched by an expertly executed, gradually escalating climactic joke; in Jimmy the Kid, while there is a comedic twist, it's perhaps too heavily telegraphed to be completely effective.

Mind you, the way it's handled is both inventive and amusing, and does at least set Dortmunder up for one last, well-aimed kick in the teeth. And anyway, for the Dortmunder fan, the Parker completist, and for those interested in the literary games Westlake played, Jimmy the Kid is pretty much indispensable: a unique book in the Westlake canon. Which is why for many – Trent among them – it's a cause for celebration that after years spent languishing in semi-obscurity as an out-of-print curio, Jimmy the Kid is now readily available for the Kindle. Although it's perhaps less of a cause for celebration for those of us who forked out for first editions of the damn thing...

Next on Existential Ennui, kicking off a short run of George Pelecanos posts, we move from a novel featuring a metafictional guest appearance from Parker, to another, more recent novel which also boasts a meta-Parker appearance...

Get Shorty by Elmore Leonard: a British First Edition (Viking/Penguin, 1990)

Just a wee (er, ish) addendum to Monday's post on Elmore Leonard's new novel Raylan and its relationship to Justified, the TV show which both inspired it and was itself inspired by earlier Leonard/Raylan Givens stories – I mentioned in that post that Martin Amis once described Leonard's 1990 novel Get Shorty – which was, of course, filmed (quite successfully, although not as successfully as Justified) by Barry Sonnenfeld in 1995, with John Travolta in the role of gangster-turned-movie mogul Chili Palmer, and followed by a sequel, the not-quite-as-good Be Cool, in 1999, which was also filmed (rather less successfully), this time by F. Gary Gray in 2005 – as "a masterpiece", and that I wholeheartedly agreed with his assessment. (That Amis quote, by the way, I spotted the other weekend in this excellent Guardian essay on Leonard by Philip Hensher.) But it struck me whilst writing that post that despite Get Shorty being not only my favourite Elmore Leonard work but also one of my favourite novels, period, I didn't actually own a copy (I believe I borrowed the one I read from Beckenham Library in the early-'90s).

Naturally I immediately set about rectifying this egregious state of affairs, and went in search of a first edition of the book. A straightforward task, you might reasonably assume, since first editions of Get Shorty litter the likes of AbeBooks and Amazon Marketplace like bodies litter Leonard's backlist. Ah, but you see, the vast majority of those are the American first edition, published by Delacorte Press; the British first edition is in much shorter supply – and even shorter now that I have this:

A near-fine copy of the British first edition/first impression, published by Viking/Penguin in the same year as the Delacorte first, 1990, my acquisition of which reduces the available number of British firsts on AbeBooks worldwide to, currently, eight – and two of those are ex-library. Of course, since the Viking edition and the Delacorte edition are virtually identical – same dustjacket design, same interiors (bar the copyright page) – you'd be forgiven for wondering why I'd want the British edition anyway, especially since it's probably printed, like most British editions of American books, on what's almost certainly an inferior paper stock. But I'm afraid the only explanations I can offer there are (i) because it's scarcer than the American one; (ii) because I'm British myself, and therefore guided by a misplaced pride in my homeland; and (iii) because I'm an idiot.

The jacket design is uncredited, but it's done in the same "big book look" style as the covers of all of Leonard's novels around this early-1990s period – see also Maximum Bob (1991), Rum Punch (1992) and the Raylan Givens novels Pronto (1993) and Riding the Rap (1995) – and will be very familiar to readers of a certain age (i.e., my age). I know that the illustrations on the covers of those last two are by Mark Taylor, so it's a fairly safe bet that the illo of the Hollywood sign on Get Shorty is by Mr. Taylor, too.

Anyway. Next up: it's Donald E. Westlake Day!

Justified: Raylan Givens in Raylan by Elmore Leonard (Book / TV Show Review)

Way back in the dim and distant past – in fact around this time last year, oddly enough – I posted a series of reviews of Elmore Leonard's crime fiction stories featuring US Marshal Raylan Givens, comparing them to the TV show they inspired, Justified – my belaboured point being that Justified is the most faithful adaptation – in spirit, tone, characterization and even dialogue – of Leonard's work yet seen. Those three posts – on the novels Pronto (1993) and Riding the Rap (1995) and the short story "Fire in the Hole" (2002), plus an introductory piece – proved pretty popular, together receiving thousands of hits from fans of Justified investigating the source material. The final one in particular, on "Fire in the Hole", ended 2011 as the most viewed post of the year on Existential Ennui, and continues to attract a fair bit of traffic even now (perhaps understandably, given each episode of Justified boasts the legend "Based on the short story 'Fire in the Hole' by Elmore Leonard" in its titles).

Justified is now into its third season in the States and seemingly going from strength to strength, but an unexpected bonus of the show's creative success has been that it inspired Elmore Leonard – an executive producer on Justified – to pen further Raylan Givens stories, something I doubt he'd have done if the show hadn't existed. Indeed, according to Justified's creator and show runner, Graham Yost (quoted in this recent Reuters piece), it was the actor who plays Raylan, Timothy Olyphant, who suggested to Leonard that he write some more Raylan tales – and those tales in turn inspired aspects of Justified's second season and reportedly even its third (Leonard was showing his new stories to Yost and co. as he wrote them).

The end result of Olyphant's intervention, the prosaically titled Raylan, is published in hardback by Weidenfeld & Nicolson in the UK on Thursday (it's been out in the US for about a month already), and the first thing to note is that it isn't so much a novel as three short stories – or, more accurately, novellas – stitched together – a consequence of the way the book was written; according to Yost, Leonard wrote one story, then just kept going until he had three. But the three separate tales aren't presented as such, and so even though there are plot strands which tie them together, there's an episodic feel to the work, with noticeable changes of direction. Moreover, the relationship between Leonard's book and Justified isn't quite so clear cut this time; whereas previously the show's makers lifted Leonard's Raylan stories almost verbatim, this time they've been more selective, taking elements and scenes and altering them as they've seen fit. (Leonard's instructions to Yost regarding the novel were, "Hang it up and strip it for parts.")

The main plot in the first third of Raylan hasn't yet shown up in Justified, and centres on the illegal removing of internal organs from unwitting victims around Harlan County, Kentucky, where Raylan grew up and now lives and works (having been exiled there in "Fire in the Hole"). But it does involve Pervis Crowe and his feckless offspring Dickie and Coover – and it's these three characters, in an altered form, that Yost and his team made the focus of the second season of Justified. While in the book the Crowes are distantly related to the hapless Dewey Crowe, in the show they become the Bennetts, and Pervis changes from patriarch to matriarch, in the form of Mags Bennett. Hopefully that organ-stealing story will turn up in Justified at some point though, because it's a classic example of the way Leonard confounds expectations – the kicker is that the organ thieves are selling them back to their original "owners" – and climaxes with Raylan naked bar his boots in a bathtub filled with ice (steady, ladies).

Story #2 forms the basis of Justified season two's main arc, and sees Raylan assigned to protect hard-assed operator Carol Conlan of M-T Mining, a company seeking to buy the presumed coal-rich Big Black Mountain, which, it transpires, is owned by Pervis Crowe. Here we see the return of Boyd Crowder, Raylan's former friend and now nemesis. Boyd is working for M-T, and gets mixed up in a shooting when a disgruntled local vents his frustration at the way the mining company has been polluting the area. This part of the book hinges on a town meeting to discuss M-T's plans, during the course of which Raylan fatally undermines Carol's argument, and amidst all the – admittedly enjoyable – gunplay of Raylan, to my mind it's this scene which is the highlight of the entire enterprise; it's notable that it's duly transported wholesale – along with Carol – to season two of Justified.

Now, those familiar with Leonard's original "Fire in the Hole" story might, at this point, be wondering how on earth Boyd Crowder can feature in Raylan, since, counter to the events of Justified, Boyd died at the end of Leonard's tale. Leonard offers no explanation for Boyd's miraculous resurrection, although he does slyly address it in a couple of lines from Raylan during a tense standoff: "You thinking about the time I shot you and you rose from the dead? It only happens once in your life." But it's clear throughout Raylan that Justified didn't merely reignite Leonard's interest in the character of Givens; seems the writer fell back in love with much of the cast of Harlan County, not just Boyd but also Ava (it was Leonard's idea to have those two getting together, something that again plays out in Justified season two) and especially Raylan's long-suffering boss, Art Mullen, who features repeatedly in the book.

The final section of Raylan again changes tack, setting Givens on the trail of twenty-three year old Rachel Nevada, alias Jackie Nevada. Jackie is something of a card sharp, but she may also be mixed up in a string of bank robberies, so Raylan heads over to Lexington to get to the bottom of things, in the process partnering up with Marshal Bill Nichols. Nichols has already made an earlier appearance in Raylan, in a scene which is one of the most wryly amusing in the book: 

Nichols said, "You've shot and killed a man?"

"Yes, I have," Raylan said.

"An armed fugitive?"

"More than one," Raylan said.

"It doesn't matter how many, does it?"

"Not a bit," Raylan said. "Once or twice I might've been lucky."

"You get to where you have to pull—"

"Knowing you better shoot to kill," Raylan said.

Nichols gave Raylan a nod.

They knew each other.

Essentially, Nichols is an older version of Raylan, and though Leonard doesn't do much with him in Raylan, one senses the author is setting him up for further appearances down the line. The same goes for Jackie Nevada, with whom Raylan really hits it off – and Graham Yost having stated that he and his fellow writers and producers will be using further bits of Raylan in season three of Justified (and season four, if there is one), I wouldn't be at all surprised if both Jackie and Nichols make it onto our TV screens at some point.

Martin Amis once said of Elmore Leonard that Leonard is "incapable of writing an uninteresting sentence" (Amis also favourably reviewed Riding the Rap, and called Get Shorty – quite correctly in my opinion – "a masterpiece"), and that's as true of Raylan as of any others of Leonard's novels and stories. Due to its origins it's not the most tightly plotted of his books, but in its charmingly meandering way it's as sublime – not to mention purely pleasurable – a reading experience as you could wish for. That's down to Leonard's by-this-juncture utterly effortless storytelling, not to mention his beautifully idiosyncratic and allusive dialogue, the way he can lightly sketch characters who nevertheless fair leap from the page, and the occasional emotional gut-punches he seeds throughout the book.

But Raylan also exerts a strange fascination for the way it came into being. It's been called an "alternate universe" version of Justified in some quarters, but that strikes me as an inadequate explanation for what it actually is: a piece of Elmore Leonard fiction inspired by a television show that was in turn inspired by another piece of Elmore Leonard fiction; art, imitating art, imitating art, the one feeding off the other, feeding off the other, and so on. And if Leonard, suitably inspired by what the makers of Justified have done with the stories he wrote having been inspired by what they'd done with the original stories he wrote, chooses to write yet more Raylan Givens stories, which the makers of Justified then base further stories on...

...well then I think my head might just explode.

Dan J. Marlowe and Earl Drake, 5: Collecting the Man with Nobody's Face, inc. Bibliography

(NB: A version of this post also appears on The Violent World of Parker blog.)

For Part 1, go here; for Part 2, here; for Part 3, here; and for Part 4, go here.

Dan J. Marlowe's final Earl Drake espionage adventure, Operation Counterpunch, appeared in 1976, by which point the series numbered twelve volumes, including the initial two hard-boiled crime works, The Name of the Game is Death (1962) and One Endless Hour (1969). In the States all of the novels had been published as paperback originals by Fawcett Gold Medal, which meant that in the UK, Hodder Fawcett/Coronet had acquired the rights (much as Coronet had begun publishing Richard Stark's Parker novels once Fawcett in the US picked up the rights as of 1967's The Rare Coin Score). But as it happened, Coronet wasn't the only publisher to issue the Earl Drake novels in Britain in the early '70s...

In 1973, British publisher Gold Lion (no relation to Gold Medal... I don't think) issued the initial six Earl Drake novels over successive month... all of them in hardback with dustjackets – the only time any of Marlowe's novels have appeared in that format. Evidently Gold Lion – a publisher which would only exist for a couple of years – were on something of an American crime thriller acquisition spree at that juncture, because in the same year they also published three Parker novels as hardbacks – see this post from last year. Like those three Parkers, the dustjacket designs on the Drakes were variously illustrative and photographic – perhaps the most striking being the photo covers of The Name of the Game is Death (the interior of which is the revised 1973 Gold Medal text) and Operation Fireball – and also like those Parkers, all of the Drake hardbacks have since become incredibly scarce. To give you an indication, at present AbeBooks has just four Drake Gold Lions listed, three of those being copies of the same book, Operation Breakthrough.

Over in the States all twelve of the Fawcett Gold Medal paperbacks – two of which, Operations Fireball and Flashpoint, boast Robert McGinnis cover art (the latter of those, in its 1972 retitled edition, I nabbed at November's London Paperback & Pulp Bookfair) – can be acquired fairly easily online, although if you're seeking first editions, it can be a bit of a minefield working out which are first printings and which are later printings. One thing to bear in mind especially is which version of the debut Drake, The Name of the Game is Death, you want. As I outlined in the previous post, for hard-boiled crime aficionados, the original 1962 printing is probably preferable (if pricey; a cheaper alternative is the later Black Lizard edition of that version), while for those with more of an interest in the Earl Drake series as a whole, the 1973 revised edition may well suit.

In the UK, only the revised edition was ever published, in hardback by the aforementioned Gold Lion in 1973 under the novel's original title, and in paperback by Coronet that same year under the new title Operation Overkill, although retaining the interior running head The Name of the Game is Death:

Coronet issued all of the Drake novels – bar the final one, which to my knowledge they never published – from 1972 to 1977, although not always in the correct order (I believe they actually began with the sixth one, Operation Drumfire). They did, however, add the appellation "Operation" to all of the titles, even One Endless Hour, which became Operation Endless Hour. The covers of the Coronet editions are all variations on the same theme, a curious mixture of photography and illustration, with a photo of leggy model – the same model on each cover, I believe – collaged into line-and-wash artwork, all set against a white background. I rather like them.

Most of the Coronet editions are in relatively plentiful supply online, apart from the first two, Operation Overkill and Operation Endless Hour, which are becoming uncommon, and the final Drake novel Coronet published, Operation Deathmaker, which is highly uncommon. As for the final Drake novel overall, Operation Counterpunch, the only option there if you want a copy is the US Gold Medal edition.

Mind you, I say the final Drake novel overall: there's a level of disagreement online as to the correct running order of the entire series. Each of the four bibliographies I've been referring to throughout this run of posts – Mystery*File, Thrilling Detective, Fantastic Fiction and Spy Guys & Gals – has the books in a slightly different order. This confusion seems to have arisen because Gold Medal, who originally didn't number the books at all, introduced a numbering system midway through the run, adding numbers to the covers of the earlier volumes as they reprinted them. But then to add to the muddle, it appears as if the publisher numbered some volumes earlier or later than where in the sequence they originally appeared.

For my Earl Drake bibliography I've gone with the Spy Guys & Gals running order, even though the copyright dates given suggest that Spy Guys & Gals used the later Gold Medal numbering. I've done this partly because, broadly speaking, I've found the site to be accurate in matters to do with spy fiction (although I'll happily revise the running order if a compelling case to do so is presented to me), but also because their list handily includes pithy synopses of all of the novels and a fair-minded overview. The Gold Medal pub dates I've chiefly taken from the Mystery*File bibliography (which in turn was adapted from Allen J. Hubin's Crime Fiction IV), while the Gold Lion and Coronet pub dates I researched myself.

(UPDATE: It's since been pointed out by Violent World of Parker reader Jason that the Thrilling Detective running order is the correct one, so I've changed the below bibliography accordingly.)

DAN J. MARLOWE'S EARL DRAKE NOVELS: A BIBLIOGRAPHY

1. The Name of the Game is Death (US Fawcett Gold Medal PB, 1962; revised edn. 1973 / UK Gold Lion HB, 1973) / Operation Overkill (UK Hodder Fawcett Coronet PB, 1973)

2. One Endless Hour (US Gold Medal PB, 1969 / UK Gold Lion HB, 1973) / Operation Endless Hour (UK Coronet PB, 1975)

3. Operation Fireball (US Gold Medal PB, 1969 / UK Gold Lion HB, 1973 / UK Coronet PB, 1974)

4. Flashpoint (US Gold Medal PB, 1970) / Operation Flashpoint (US Gold Medal PB, 1972 / UK Gold Lion HB, 1973 / UK Coronet PB, 1973)

5. Operation Breakthrough (US Gold Medal PB, 1971 / UK Gold Lion HB, 1973 / UK Coronet PB, 1973)
 
6. Operation Drumfire (US Gold Medal PB, 1972 / UK Coronet PB, 1972 / UK Gold Lion HB, 1973)

7. Operation Checkmate (US Gold Medal PB, 1972 / UK Coronet PB, 1973)

8. Operation Stranglehold (US Gold Medal PB, 1973 / UK Coronet PB, 1974)

9. Operation Whiplash (US Gold Medal PB, 1973 / UK Coronet PB, 1974)

10. Operation Hammerlock (US Gold Medal PB, 1974 / UK Coronet PB, 1975)

11. Operation Deathmaker (US Gold Medal PB, 1975 / UK Coronet PB, 1977)

12. Operation Counterpunch (US Gold Medal PB, 1976)

Next up on Existential Ennui: the return of Raylan Givens...

Dan J. Marlowe and Earl Drake, 4: the Richard Stark and Parker of Spy Fiction

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

For Part 1, go here; for Part 2, go here; for Part 3, go here.
 
Much as Donald "Richard Stark" Westlake had done in his eighth Parker novel, The Handle (Pocket Books, 1966), with the third Earl Drake thriller, Operation Fireball (1969), Dan J. Marlowe turned his narrator-protagonist from a violent career criminal into a reluctant operative for the US government ("The man with nobody's face", as Drake became known, due to the plastic surgery he'd undergone in his second outing, One Endless Hour). But unlike Parker, for Earl Drake this vocational change was to become effectively permanent, and much of the remainder of his literary career (the twelfth and final Drake novel, Operation Counterpunch, was published in 1976) would be directed by his new "handler", Treasury Agent Karl Erikson.

Whether this switch to spy fiction was at the behest of Marlowe's publisher, Gold Medal, as Josef Hoffman (among other Marlowe commentators) suggests (see the Mystery*File article "Playing with Fire"), or the influence of Marlowe's friend – and by-this-point collaborator – the convicted criminal Al Nussbaum, or indeed simply a literary choice, I'm not in a position to determine for certain. Hoffman reasons in his piece that Gold Medal pushed Marlowe in the direction of the espionage thriller because the publisher was already home to another series starring an unrepentant criminal – the aforementioned Parker, whose initial outing, The Hunter, was published in the same year (1962) as the debut Earl Drake novel, The Name of the Game is Death – and consequently Gold Medal felt the market couldn't support a similar series.

If true, that strikes me as being short-sighted on the publisher's part. After all, reportedly Gold Medal had been eager for a sequel to The Name of the Game is Death, so for them to later insist Marlowe turn the series into an espionage one seems counterintuitive. Furthermore, it's worth noting that from 1969 to 1976 Dan Marlowe would write Earl Drake adventures almost exclusively, forsaking completely the standalone crime works he'd previously penned as well. If the considerations for turning the Earl Drake series into a spy series rather than a crime one were entirely commercial, as Hoffman maintains, why didn't Marlowe write other books besides – books he was more interested in writing?

I wonder how much of this is a selective rewriting of history on the part of modern day aficionados of mid-twentieth century hard-boiled crime fiction. By and large the Drake spy thrillers are dismissed out of hand by fans who – understandably – prize the coruscating hard-boiled crime works of the 1950s and '60s above their corresponding spy confections. But to have lasted seven years and ten books as a spy series (the series as a whole having lasted fourteen years, although there was a considerable gap between The Name of the Game is Death and One Endless Hour), Marlowe's post-One Endless Hour novels must have had something going for them – indeed, the series may only have been curtailed because Marlowe suffered a suspected stroke in 1977. And even if sales alone aren't a marker of quality, then surely the fact that the only one of Marlowe's around fifty novels and novellas (after an eight-year gap he knocked out twenty younger reader novellas from 1983 to his death in 1986) to win an Edgar Allan Poe Award was one of his Earl Drake spy thrillers (Flashpoint, 1970, alias Operation Flashpoint, the fourth book in the series, which won the Best Paperback Original prize).

For me, this prejudice against the Drake spy novels is typified by the attitude towards the debut Drake outing, The Name of the Game is Death (1962). Widely – and justifiably – hailed as Dan J. Marlowe's towering achievement, the novel was later rewritten – presumably by Marlowe himself, although it's claimed at the insistence of Gold Medal – for a 1972 revised edition (published as Operation Overkill in the UK in 1973) – one revision being the insertion of the name "Earl Drake" as one of the narrator's many aliases. The critical consensus these days is that the original is the superior beast, legend having it that the novel was drastically toned down for its '72 reissue, so as to make Drake more palatable now that he was an "heroic" secret agent. In fact that doesn't appear to be the case at all. As this Mystery*File post demonstrates, most of the revisions are editorial in nature – often to the benefit of the text – the exceptions being two subtle alterations to do with Drake's sexuality. Drake is just as vicious and murderous in the revised edition, so to claim that he and the book were "toned down" is disingenuous.

The inference, of course, is that the original work is as Marlowe intended it – "authenticity" being the trait prized above all others nowadays – and that both the later version and by extension the Drake spy works were essentially written for a paycheck. But historically much great art has been created on commission, and Marlowe, like all professional writers, undoubtedly wrote for money as much as anything – and that's probably as true of The Name of the Game is Death as it is of the later Drake novels. Like his contemporaries in the hard-boiled field – Jim Thompson, Westlake, Peter Rabe – Marlowe wrote fast and frequently – the only way to make a living wage from paperback crime fiction. Based on the available evidence, I'm leery of ascribing motives to the choices Marlowe made: who's to say how hard he fought to stop The Name of the Game is Death being rewritten – if indeed he fought at all. Perhaps the revised version is as Marlowe intended, not the original. (If anyone can offer any informed insights here, I'd welcome your thoughts.)

Ultimately, what you make of the Drake spy books rests on which side of the genre fence you find yourself – hard-boiled crime fan or international espionage freak. (Even more ultimately, in the grand scheme of things, it's entirely likely that, other than me and possibly Bill Crider, nobody gives a damn whether the Drake spy novels are better or worse than the Drake crime novels anyway, so this whole post may well have been a complete waste of everyone's time.) Personally, I've plenty of time for both, and I'm not alone: as the indispensable Spy Guys & Gals site points out, there's much to enjoy with the Drake spy novels, Drake's unusual origin as a lawless killer lending them an added frisson. And for book collectors, there's plenty to investigate, too, as we'll discover in the final post in this run...

Dan J. Marlowe and Earl Drake, 3: Operation Fireball; from Crime Thrillers to Spy Thrillers

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

For Part 1, go here; for Part 2, go here.

The same year as the sophomore Earl Drake adventure, One Endless Hour, appeared, the third Drake outing also hit. And it was here that the template for the remainder of the series began to be established...

Published in paperback by Gold Medal in the States in 1969 (and by Coronet in the UK in 1974... although there was actually a British hardback edition published ahead of that; more on that in the final post in this series), Operation Fireball marked something of a departure for both Dan J. Marlowe and Earl Drake. Up to this point, Marlowe had been writing hard-boiled crime fiction – not just the two previous Drake novels, but many other standalone crime works besides (see Josef Hoffman's Mystery*File article "Playing with Fire"). But with Operation Fireball, the author changed direction, pitching his amoral career criminal antihero into what is essentially a spy thriller.

Once again picking up almost directly after the preceding novel – which ended with Drake out of pocket following another heist-gone-wrong and wondering whether he should look up his Amazonian, flame-haired flame from The Name of the Game is Death, Hazel Andrews – Operation Fireball opens with Drake driving towards Ely, Nevada, where Hazel is looking after her father's ranch. No sooner has he arrived and reacquainted himself with Hazel's ample delights, however, than Hazel's dad gets into a spot of bother with the local unruly teens. Being a dab hand with a firearm, Drake elects to settle the matter the old-fashioned way: he shoots them.

Contrary to appearances, this encounter with the teenagers is the first sign of a softening of Drake's character, although in truth it's a matter of degrees: the feral youths wind up with severe gunshot wounds but they do at least escape with their lives. Even so, Drake thinks it best if he lights out, and heads back to San Diego, where he spots a message to one of his aliases on a noticeboard in one of his old haunts, requesting he call a number. The independently wealthy Hazel had offered to support Drake, but since he's not the kind of guy who'd ever be happy as a kept man he follows up the message, and soon he's involved in a scheme to retrieve a cool two million in cash from, of all places, Havana.

Drake's contact is a loose associate named Slater, but the real brains behind the operation is a man Drake doesn't know: Karl Erikson. Tall, statuesque and blond, the mysterious Erikson is compared to a viking more than once – a military type with useful links to his former profession. It's Erikson who manages to smuggle Drake, Slater and a third man, Chico Wilson, onto a US navy vessel and from there to Guantanamo and Cuba – a perilous journey that's one of the best bits of the book – and it's Erikson whose knowledge of Castro's Communist regime (portrayed here in a pitiless manner by an obviously – some might say justly – unsympathetic Marlowe) and whose familiarity with military equipment and skill with a weapon saves the day more than once.

Indeed, though Drake may be reunited with Hazel in Operation Fireball – she provides the financial backing that makes the scheme viable, and even lends a hand operating the radio back in Florida – there's actually another love story at the heart of the novel: that of Drake and Erikson. Drake's narration regarding "the big man" frequently verges on the fawning, while his descriptions of Erikson's confident handling of tense situations at times becomes so gushing that you half expect the orchestra to swell and the two of them to fall into a passionate clinch. In fact, so supremely able is Erikson that Drake is effectively sidelined for much of the action, reduced to the role of ineffectual onlooker while Erikson kicks Commie ass.

That said, Operation Fireball is still a gripping read, certainly pacier than One Endless Hour. And though the plot is more outlandish than those of its two predecessors, as an action/spy thriller it works very well. The incursion into a nightmarish Cuba is fraught with danger, and only a half-baked reveal from Hazel and Erikson at the end of the novel lets the side down. But both of Drake's "love interests" would soon return, as the espionage elements introduced in Operation Fireball increasingly came to characterize the series as a whole – a turn of events that not every fan of Dan J. Marlowe was terribly pleased about...

For Part 4, go here.