FORGOTTEN BOOK: KILLERS ARE MY MEAT

 Killers Are My Meat by Stephen Marlowe  (1957)

Marlowe's Chester Drum was a Washington, D.C.-based private eye who blazed his way through twenty popular paperback novels and seven short stories from 1955 to 1968; an  eighth short story appeared in 1973.  Drum was more than your typical hardboiled P.I., though.  He was an ex-cop and ex-FBI agent who runs his own one-man shop, as do many of his literary ilk.  But Drum's cases often took him around the world and often involved espionage and international skullduggery, from Moscow to Mecca, and from South America to Rome, and twice to Berlin (once before the Wall, and once afterward).  Killers Are My Meat, the third book in the series, finds him in Benares, India -- a city obsessed with death and religion.

Drum is asked to locate and return Gil Sprayregan, a down-on-his-luck P.I., to his wife.  Sprayregan is hiding out, in fear for his life, because of what he learned while investigating Sumitra Mojindar, the wife of the First Secretary of India.  Sumitra was much younger than her husband; she was also gifted with the morals of an alley cat.  Sprayregan discovered some secret about the Indian embassy that made him a target.   Drum located Sprayregan, and promising him protection, brought him back to his wife -- just in time for him to be killed in a hut-and-run.  Distraught, Sprayregan's widow accosted Sumitra and was shot and killed by a servant who was sleeping with the Sumitra.  Diplomatic immunity closed the case.

Sumitra's husband was organizing a large conference of Asian and African nations and had invited Western countries to send observers, but not participants.  One of those was Stewart Varley, who also happened to have been none of Sumitra's lovers.  Varley was going through an existential crisis and was expressing extreme interest in various Oriental religions.  Varley's wife hired Drum to accompany her husband to the conference in Benares with orders to be sure that Varley returned to the States and was lured to stay in India to explore the area's religions.  This gave Drum an opportunity to dig further into Sumitra and her deadly manservants...and to uncover a political plot to overthrow the government and to establish an "India for India" regime.

There's a mystic guru, a mute acolyte, a perky young reporter who has has a past with Drum, her rash lover, a kidnapping, murders, crematoriums, some very nasty thugs, and the constant stink of death.  The Varney is reported dead and Drum rushes to the scene to see the body tossed on a fire.

Marlowe keeps the pace moving at a fast clip, but his description of the filth, abject poverty, and decay of Benares is off-putting.  Still, it's an interesting novel, and one firmly entrenched in its time period.  Drum is a worthwhile hero and its easy to see why the books were so popular in their day.

Stephen Marlowe (1928-2008) was born Milton Lesser but legally changed his name to this pseudonym.  He began writing pulp crime fiction and science fiction, writing as both Lesser and Marlowe, but also as Adam Chase, Andrew Frazier, Jason Ridgeway, C. H. Thames, S. M. Teneshaw, Gerald Vance, Darius John Granger, Stephen wilder, and even Ellery Queen.  He began shifting to mainstream novels with 1961's The Shining, followed  by a number of thrillers and best-selling fictional autobiographies of Goya, Christopher Columbus, Miguel de Cervantes, and Edgar Allan Poe.  A one-time member of the Board of Directors of Mystery Writers of America, he was awarded the French Prix Gutenberg du Livre in 1998 for The Memoirs of Christopher Columbus, and was given a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Private Eye Writers of America in 1997.  His work is both literate and enjoyable; his later novels are especially worthwhile, as is his complete Chester Drum series.