Stephen Marlowe

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  • Bibliography:
    50 Books (1 Series)
  • First Book:
    January 1956
  • Latest Book:
    June 2023
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Full Series List in Order

Chester Drum

1 - The Second Longest Night (1956)
2 - Murder Is My Dish (1956)
3 - Mecca for Murder (1956)
4 - Trouble Is My Name (1957)
5 - Killers Are My Meat (1957)
6 - Violence Is My Business (1958)
7 - Terror Is My Trade (1958)
8 - Homicide Is My Game (1959)
9 - Peril Is My Pay (1960)
10 - Danger Is My Line (1960)
11 - Death Is My Comrade (1960)
12 - Manhunt Is My Mission (1961)
13 - Jeopardy Is My Job (1962)
14 - Francesca (1963)
15 - Drumbeat - Berlin (1964)
16 - Drumbeat- Dominique (1965)
17 - Drumbeat - Madrid (1966)
18 - Drumbeat - Erica (1967)
19 - Drumbeat - Marianne (1968)

Book List in Order: 50 titles

  • Mecca for Murder

    Chester Drum - 3

    A PI heads from DC to Saudi Arabia to save the life of a client targeted by a hit man.   Nothing will stop the beautiful Fawzia Totah and her lover, US Army colonel Lyman Tyler, from boarding a plane for the Middle East to make their pilgrimage...

  • Murder Is My Dish

    Chester Drum - 2

    A kidnapped intellectual and a dead partner take Drum to South America When Andy Dineen tires of the FBI, he jumps ship for Langley and joins the CIA to fight the Cold War in Berlin. After years in the spy game, he grows sick of the paperwork, and...

  • The Second Longest Night

    Chester Drum - 1

    To find his ex-wife's killer, Drum takes on the Communist Party Deirdre Hartsell loved life too much to shoot herself in her pretty head. She'd been a high-society party girl since her days at college, and her two greatest passions were keeping up...

  • Killers Are My Meat

    Chester Drum - 5

    A drive-by killing puts Drum on the scent of a Washington sex scandal When Chester Drum first took a crack at detective work, PI Gil Sprayregan offered to split a case with him, giving the rookie half the fee and more credit than he deserved. Year...

  • Trouble Is My Name

    Chester Drum - 4

    A missing politician sucks Drum into the three-ring circus of Cold War Germany On the eve of becoming a vice-presidential candidate, Fred Severing vanishes in Germany, where he made his name twelve years earlier during the madness that followed Wo...

  • Terror Is My Trade

    Chester Drum - 7

    Crossing the Atlantic on NATO's behalf, Drum tangles with mobsters, blackmail, and murder As the H.M.S. Queen Victoria pulls out of New York Harbor, danger encircles Chester Drum. He's sailing for Europe on the largest luxury liner ever built, b...

  • Violence Is My Business

    Chester Drum - 6

    To recover his license, Drum must unlock the mystery of a professor's suicide Duncan Hadley Lord seems too happy to kill himself. But then, he has no reason to sleep around, either. For three months the history professor has carried on an affair w...

  • Homicide Is My Game

    Chester Drum - 8

    When Drum picks up a hitchhiker, trouble follows her into the car A monsoon is hammering Washington, DC, when Chester Drum spots Anita Sparrow on the roadside in the middle of the night. Sixteen, frail, and soaking wet, she is trying to find help ...

  • Danger Is My Line

    Chester Drum - 10

    Drum guards a killer against an assassin with diplomatic immunity Everybody knows George Brandvik killed Jorgen Kolding. As soon as the jury acquits him, Brandvik sells his story to View magazine, confessing to the crime in exchange for a payday...



  • Death Is My Comrade

    Chester Drum - 11

    With a body in his office and a pocketful of secrets, Drum heads to Moscow Eugenie is seventeen, with long legs, blond hair, and an appetite for misery. Daughter of a corrupt millionaire, she has bounced around Europe's finest boarding schools, an...

  • Peril Is My Pay

    Chester Drum - 9

    In Rome for the Olympics, Drum witnesses an assassination When he was in college, Kyle Ryder picked up athletic records effortlessly. Now he picks up girls. An Olympic-quality javelin thrower, he has recently fallen for a Czechoslovakian Amazon na...

  • Manhunt Is My Mission

    Chester Drum - 12

    Caught in the middle of an Arab civil war, Drum looks for a missing surgeon Chester Drum knows it's over for Qasr Tabuk when he sees the city's prostitutes taking flight. He came to this war-torn Arab country in search of an American surgeon, Turn...

  • Jeopardy Is My Job

    Chester Drum - 13

    Chester Drum flies to Spain's Costa del Sol to investigate kidnapping and murder among the expatriate set, who drink always, work never, and love only themselves....

  • Francesca

    Chester Drum - 14

    A world-class criminal consultant asks Drum to keep him out of prison Axel Spade's Geneva office is tidier than one would expect from a man who's wanted in twenty-six countries. A consulting criminal who sells advice on smuggling, fraud, and curre...

  • Drumbeat - Berlin

    Chester Drum - 15

    An old flame's fianc is missing, and only Drum can save him from the Soviets Chester Drum will never love another woman the way he loves Marianne. After years of on-and-off romance, he tells her that his work as a private detective is too dangerou...

  • Drumbeat- Dominique

    Chester Drum - 16

    Drum confronts a senator to save the life of a drunken old friend When Chester Drum knew him, Jack Morley was a Washington player, just a few promotions away from becoming Secretary of State. A bad divorce and a nervous breakdown later, Morley has...

  • Drumbeat - Madrid

    Chester Drum - 17

    In Spain for a wedding, Drum must rescue the kidnapped bride Although a fugitive from twenty-six world governments, Axel Spade has minimal trouble crossing the border into Spain. Though briefly arrested, the guards let him go when they learn the i...

  • Drumbeat - Erica

    Chester Drum - 18

    Protecting an actor takes Drum into the seedy underworld of psychedelia Terminal illness and regret go hand-in-hand. Two months ago, Amos Littlejohn was in the prime of life, and had plenty of energy to be enraged when his pregnant daughter was ab...

  • Drumbeat - Marianne

    Chester Drum - 19

    A sadistic KGB colonel hires Drum to locate a dead man Axel Spade would not have liked the way he died. An international fugitive, Spade would have preferred being gored by a bull or gunned down by Interpol to dying quietly in his bed. But a weak ...



  • Translation

  • The Valkyrie Encounter

    A gripping, fact-based novel of the military Wehrmacht plot to assassinate Hitler and overthrow the Nazi regime, complicated by the American/British and Russian interest and involvement in the outcome. 352 pages....

  • Deborah's Legacy

    Deborah was young and innocent; Benton was worldly and experienced. Hers was a quiet fire; his was and inferno or rage and revenge. But as the world rumbled with the thunder of battle, they were struck by the lightning of passion. A moment's attra...

  • The Memoirs of Christopher Columbus

    In this novel, Christopher Columbus tells the story of his life and recalls the first fateful love of his youth, thoughts on his Portuguese wife, his Spanish mistress, and Queen Isabella, and his discovery of the New World...

  • The Death and Life of Miguel Cervantes

    This is the story of my death and life, in which fiction and that lesser truth, history, from time to time form a seamless whole. Speaking is the hero of Stephen Marlowe's brilliant new novel. He is Don Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra: son of a barber-s...

  • The Lighthouse at the End of the World

    The year is 1849 and Edgar Allan Poe, famous and infamous, has disappeared, only to reappear mortally ill. What had he done? The book follows a phantom Poe, viewed through the tinted lenses of his fictional detective, C. August Dupin....

  • Drumbeat: The Chester Drum Casebook

    Shamus Award-winning author

    Drum is a first-rate private investigator of the old school -- no trendy neuroses or navel-gazing for him. Though he's an intelligent, compassionate man, he's also a man of action who never hesitates to do what's right. ...

  • Catch The Brass Ring

    He was all set for a free ride-in a hearse! First pulp novel by author Marlowe (Milton Lesser), who'd already written many science fiction titles. Gideon Fray observes the deadly underside of Coney Island....

  • Nineteen Fifty-Six

  • Black Eyes and the Daily Grind

    During a safari on Venus, a well-to-do couple happen to cross paths with a tiny bundle of fur with amazing powers of persuasion. A few weeks later, they return to Earth with their fuzzy ball of fur -- which they have christened with the sobriquet "Bl...



  • Home is Where You Left It

    In the 22nd century, Earth's natural resources have dwindled to the point of extinction, and as a result, the residents of the planet are on a never-ending quest to find new places to inhabit on other worlds. But some of these planets are already pop...

  • Quest of the Golden Ape

  • Summer Snow Storm

    It's no surprise that meteorologists sometimes make less-than-accurate predictions about the day's weather. But when a cadre of top-ranking weather experts fail to catch wind of a freak summer snow storm, all hell breaks loose. Amidst this turmoil, a...

  • World Beyond Pluto

    What happens when a hardened criminal on the run for his life gets mixed up with an all-girl symphony traveling between lesser-populated planets in a futile attempt to bring culture to their rowdy inhabitants? Well, to put it mildly, hijinks ensue. R...

  • Johnny Mayhem

    This Halcyon Classics ebook contains three "Johnny Mayhem" stories by American science fiction/mystery author Milton Lesser, who wrote under the pseudonym Stephen Marlowe (among others).Marlowe (1928-2008) also wrote fictional autobiographies of Chri...

  • Man Who Would Not Die

    “The definitive history of the studio” created by the larger-than-life team of Spielberg, Geffen, and Katzenberg (Los Angeles Times).
     
    For sixty years, since the birth of United Artists, the studio landscape was unchanged....

  • My Shipmate: Columbus

    In this rollicking alternate-history romp, a college student picks a classroom fight about the traditional account of Christopher Columbus's "discovery" of America. At first, he doesn't have any facts with which to shore up his hunch. But soon, throu...

  • Model for Murder

    Pretty Phyllis Kirk was an interviewer for the Kinkaid Morals Report -- the shocker that out-Kinseyed Kinsey. In her possession were secrets about the intimate lives of some very important people. Phyllis didn't live very long... Jason Chase was a pr...

  • Think Yourself to Death

    Stephen Marlowe (born Milton Lesser) was an American author of science fiction, mystery novels, and fictional autobiographies of Christopher Columbus, Miguel de Cervantes, and Edgar Allan Poe. This is one of those stories....

  • A Place in the Sun

    One of the most unforgettable characters from the golden era of science fiction, Johnny Mayhem is a shapeshifter who can assume the guise of any person. In the pulse-pounding short story "A Place in the Sun," Mayhem is ordered to save a spacecraft th...



  • Recruit for Andromeda

    When Kit Temple is drafted for the Nowhere Journey, he figures that he'll leave his home, his girl, and the Earth for good. For although the draftees are always promised "rotation," not a man has ever returned from that mysterious flight into the unk...

  • Stephen Marlowe

    Stephen Marlowe (1928 - 2008 ) was an American author of science fiction, mystery novels and fictional autobiographies of Christopher Columbus, Miguel de Cervantes, and Edgar Allan Poe. He is best known for his detective character Chester Drum, whom ...

  • Violence Is My Business/Turn Left for Murder

    VIOLENCE IS MY BUSINESS Duncan Lord has everything to live for -- a professorship at a prestigious college, the prospect of a top government job, an apparently happy marriage. Yet Chester Drum, hired to find out who the professor is sleeping with, pe...

  • Voyage To Eternity

    American-born Stephen Marlowe was a prolific writer who made his mark in several genres, including science fiction. In the gripping page-turner Voyage to Eternity, the galaxy is engaged in a seemingly endless war of epic proportions. When young Chris...

  • Prison of a Billion Years

  • Slaves to the Metal Horde

    Johnny Hope knew the robot armies had been created to serve Man. But war and a plague had destroyed civilization, leaving humans as -- Slaves To The Metal Horde...

  • Tyrants of Time

    Do dictators rise to power by accident? What if their ascendency is planned throughout history by men of the future who play with time as if it were a toy. And what if 1955 is their key year.......

  • Picnic

    Burt was tired of taking his family out to the asteroids for a picnic every weekend. But with a wife and two spoiled brats to goad him into the regular routine, what could a man do? Only, as it turned out, this particular picnic wasn't quite regular ...

  • Divvy Up

    In a post-apocalyptic city, scavenger Hardesty schemes to steal valuables off a condemned man's corpse. When his partner jumps the gun, killing the man early, Hardesty stays behind to loot the body. But the man's vengeful widow catches him red-handed...

  • Blonde Bait

    BLONDE BAITChuck Odlum feels like a kept husband. His beautiful wife, Inez, owns a ski resort, where he has to answer to her every beck and call. All they do these days is argue. Chuck wants more out of life. Then Bunny Kemp shows up, blonde and invi...



  • Recruit from Andromeda

    • / Science Fiction
    • Buy

    When the first strong sunlight of May covered the tree-arched avenues of Center City with green, the riots started.The people gathered in angry knots outside the city hall, met in the park and littered its walks with newspapers and magazines as they ...

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

Stephen Marlowe has published 50 books.

Stephen Marlowe does not have a new book coming out soon. The latest book, Blonde Bait, was published in June 2023.

The first book by Stephen Marlowe, Mecca for Murder, was published in January 1956.

Yes. Stephen Marlowe has 1 series.
Pseudonyms / Co-Author
Author Series
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