Slice of P.I.: “Killers Are My Meat”

(Part of a series celebrating fictional private eyes.)



Killers Are My Meat, by “Stephen Marlowe,” aka Milton Lesser (Gold Medal, 1957)—the third novel in his series about globe-trotting, Washington, D.C.-based gumshoe Chester Drum. The artwork here, by Gerald Powell, boasts one of the giant heads that often popped up on this genre’s paperback covers during the mid-20th century.

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.

Because I Needed a Marlowe Fix …

Terror Is My Trade, by “Stephen Marlowe,” aka Milton Lesser (Gold Medal, 1956)—the seventh novel in his series featuring globe-trotting, Washington, D.C.-based private eye Chester Drum. Illustration by Gerald Powell.

Two-fer Tuesdays: Strike a Pose, Dear

A twice-monthly pairing of book covers that just seem to go together. Click on either of these images to open up an enlargement.



If I recall correctly, I’ve had the cover scan from Stephen Marlowe’s Model for Murder (Graphic, 1955) ever since I launched Killer Covers in January 2009, but couldn’t ever seem to find a proper way to showcase it. The same cover artist, Walter Popp, created the front for another novel in my collection, 1957’s Call Me Deadly, by Hal Braham, which I used in a blog gallery a couple of years back. But only now does Model for Murder finally gets it time to shine.

As I said, the illustrator responsible for that cover was Walter Popp, who, according to the essential blog Field Guide to Wild American Pulp Artists, was born in New York City in 1920, later studied art at the New York Phoenix School of Design, and went on to attend the Shriverham American University in England, and eventually the Art Students League of New York. Popp created covers and interior illustrations for periodicals such as Amazing Stories, Fantastic Mysteries, Western Story Round-Up, True Detective, and the fondly remembered Manhunt. (You can look over some of his magazine efforts here.) Beginning in the 1950s, though, he turned to painting covers for paperback book publishers such as Ace, Popular Library, Flying Eagle Publications, and Graphic, the last of which issued the above edition of Model for Murder. Popp died in 2002.

The author of this novel was Stephen Marlowe, born Milton Lesser in Brooklyn in 1928. As Wikipedia explains, Lesser/Marlowe penned science-fiction novels and even fictional autobiographies during his career (he died in Virginia in 2008). But “he is best known for his detective character Chester Drum, whom he created in the 1955 novel The Second Longest Night.” Model for Murder appears to have been Marlowe’s fifth novel, “a fairly standard tough-guy crime story,” as a reviewer named Shawn put it on the Goodreads site. The book’s back-cover copy offers some plot details:

Pretty Phyllis Kirk was an interviewer for the Kincaid morals report--a shocker that out-Kinseyed Kinsey! In her possession were intimate secrets about the town’s best people, secrets for which she was killed by someone planning blackmail …

Suspicion fell on Wilson Wompler, the cheesecake king, already working a blackmail racket with photos posed by his lovely models. A private eye, a couple of ex-convicts and a lady wrestler tangled to produce the real killer, a couple of murders later. But first the cute daughter of Pop Grujdzak, a Bible-quoting cop, had to pose for Wompler in her sister’s lingerie!

If you’re interested in learning more about this book, note that publisher Armchair Fiction reprinted Model for Murder last year as one of its “extra large paperback editions of the best in classic Mystery-Crime novels,” complete with the original Popp cover.

Sharing the same title (but that’s all) with Marlowe’s 1955 work is Robert Kyle’s Model for Murder, first published in 1959 by Dell Books and shown above, right. You may remember that Kyle was a pseudonym used by Robert Terrall (1914-2009), the prolific creator of New York private eye Ben Gates, introduced in the 1958 novel Blackmail, Inc. Gates returned a year later in Model for Murder, about which the blog Alpha-60 Books writes:

This one doesn’t waste no time with the usual introductions. On the first page there’s a mandatory “I'm private investigator” monologue; next we learn that we are in New York and that our gumshoe is already on the case. He’s about to hand $500 to a girl blackmailing his client (page two) when she starts shooting at him through the closed door. And then, for some strange reason (or is she simply pissed off at herself for failing to kill him?), she decides to shoot herself!?! And we are still in the middle of the third page!

Great start! And it gets better--proxy endorsement letter (something related to the stock exchange trading), stolen jewelry and counterfeit money are objects of desires in this one. They are of course also the reasons for the mayhem that follows. Blackmail, murder, robberies from the past, fucked-up families, sleazy hotels (and fancy hotels with sleazy detectives), gangsters, G-men, cops, jazz clubs, beautiful women, tough guys … and our private dick in the middle of all this. Used and eventually betrayed by his client.

I think Model for Murder is the only one of the five Gates novels I don’t own. Which is pretty darn sad, when I realize that its cover was painted by one of my favorite book artists, Robert McGinnis. I’ll definitely have to track down a copy someday.