McGinnis Nine-Nine: Drum Struck

Part of a celebration of Robert McGinnis’ XCIXth birthday.




With this being the final day of Killer Covers’ 99th birthday tribute to famous American artist Robert McGinnis, let us dip back into his extensive portfolio of crime and thriller novel fronts.

The author Stephen Marlowe was actually born Milton Lesser in Brooklyn, New York, in early August of 1928. He went on to pen dozens of books, some under his own moniker, but others behind a flurry of pen names, including Adam Chase, Andrew Frazer, Jason Ridgway, C.H. Thames, Darius John Granger, and once (for 1961’s Dead Man’s Tale), Ellery Queen. His most-implemented alias, though—by far—was Stephen Marlowe. And it in that guise that he published 20 tales starring itinerant private investigator Chester “Chet” Drum.

The Web site Spy Guys and Gals describes Drum thusly:

He works out of Washington, D.C. That may be where his office is, but his beat is really the world, or at least a good part of it. Very few private eyes of fiction spend more time travelling to interesting places in Europe and the Americas than does Drum. Sometimes he is fighting spies, theirs and ours, and sometimes he works with them. Sometimes his cases are standard fare, such as blackmail and bodyguarding, and other times it is helping to take down a dictator or free a political prisoner.

Drum has a law degree, acquired so he could quit his policeman’s job and join the FBI. Having done that for a few years, he quit the Bureau and hung up his shingle in the nation’s capital, using many of his contacts [to] find paying customers. While he at times has an assistant, he keeps his agency a small affair but is now seldom without work and, unlike many other hard-boiled detectives of his time, is not constantly broke and wallowing in booze. Drum definitely makes ends meet, drinks in moderation, usually, and tends to avoid fights when possible.

That “when possible,” though, is not often and Drum’s escapades show that trouble seems to naturally follow him. Told in a first-person style, the books give the reader an excellent insight into the character’s mind as Drum goes up against very interesting opponents. The plots are fairly standard-type detective stories but with an international touch that truly make them special.

The earliest Drum yarn, The Second Longest Night, arrived in 1955 and quickly birthed sequels graced with titles in a distinctive pattern: Killers Are My Meat (1957), Murder Is My Dish (1957), Terror Is My Trade (1958), Homicide Is My Game (1959) … well, you get the idea. Among that mix Lesser (who eventually adopted Stephen Marlowe as his legal name) collaborated on a book, 1959’s Double in Trouble, which yoked Chet Drum to Richard S. Prather’s phenomenally successful (but sometimes outlandish) gumshoe, Shell Scott, on a case that encompassed kidnapping, blackmail, and labor politics.

Marlowe’s final five Drum books, released originally in the 1960s, established a different consistency: their names all began with the words Drum Beat. McGinnis painted covers for all of those but the first, Drum Beat—Berlin. As you can see by scrolling through this post, they make an attractive set, in more ways than one.





Although Marlowe also produced science-fiction works (1953’s The Star Seekers and 1965’s Secret of the Black Planet, for example), it’s his crime fiction that cemented him in literary memory. In 1997, the Private Eye Writers of America bestowed upon him The Eye, its Shamus Award for Lifetime Achievement. He died six years later at age 79.

Robert McGinnis has already outlasted Marlowe by 20 years, and has given us a proliferation of painted treasures. If you’d like to see more of the paperback fronts he created during his six-decades-long career, check out previous Killer Covers tributes here and here.