 Alternatives: Science Fiction Stories by Stephen
Marlowe A 3 PLAY Book Introduction Stephen Marlowe—born as Milton Lesser on August 7, 1928, to
Norman and Syliva Lesser in Brooklyn, New York—purportedly said: “At the age
of eight, I wanted to be a writer and I never changed my mind.” His
first novel, Earthbound, as by Milton Lesser, was a speculative young
adult job for the John C. Winston Company. Earthbound was released the
same day Marlowe, 23-years-old at the time, reported for his Korean War
service in 1952. According to a 2007 interview with Ed Gorman, Marlowe had
forgotten about contracting for a second book with Winston: “I was
at a winter training exercise at Camp Drum [Western New York], where I was
temporarily attached to the 82nd Airborne. I got a frantic call
from my agent: How [are] you coming on the second Winston novel? I’d
forgotten all about it and it was due in a week. I spent a weekend telling
myself it was impossible. Then on Monday the colonel I worked for, on hearing
of my plight, said, ‘Son, how much are they paying you to write that book?’ I
told him the advance was a thousand bucks. ‘Son,’ he told me, ‘even the U.S.
Army can’t stand between you and that kind of money. Go home and write that
book.’ ” Marlowe
wrote the book, The Star Seekers, in less than a week, delivered it,
but “never had the courage to read it.” The Star Seekers hit
bookshelves in 1953 and has been seldom seen ever since. In the
mid-1950s, Marlowe shifted his focus from science fiction—although he
continued to write speculative tales into the early-1960s—to suspense. He
contributed to mystery pulps like Manhunt, Hunted, and Accused,
and wrote novels for the paperback original market. His first suspense
novel was Catch the Brass Ring, which was one-half of an Ace Double
published in 1954. A year later, Marlowe introduced the character that
made him famous: Chester Drum. Drum was a Washington, D.C. private eye
specializing in international cases. An original idea in the mid-20th
Century since the hardboiled dicks of the era were set in large American
cities like New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles. The
international settings of Drum’s cases are vivid with an exotic realism that came
from Marlowe’s real-life geography hopping. In an interview, Marlowe said,
“[I’ve] lost count of how many places I’ve lived—surely more than a hundred
in twenty-odd countries.” The series was a hit and Gold Medal, the premium
paperback publisher of the day, sold millions of the books. There were 20 Chester Drum novels between
1955, when The Second Longest Night appeared, and 1968 when Drum
Beat—Marianne was published. The novels were accompanied by eight short
stories published in Manhunt, Accused, Ed McBain’s Mystery Magazine,
Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, and Ellery Queen’s Mystery
Magazine. The New York Times mystery critic, Anthony Boucher,
wrote: “few writers of the tough private-eye story can tell it more
accurately than Mr. Marlowe, or with such taut understatement of violence and
sex.” After Gold
Medal dropped Marlowe’s Chester Drum series, he turned to more ambitious hardcover
suspense novels. These big books—longer and more complex than his earlier
novels—had similar exotic settings as the Drum stories. This, along with Marlowe’s
ability to tighten suspense, scene-by-scene, and what Boucher had earlier called
his understated sex and violence gave these books punch. The first of these, Come
Over, Red Rover—if one discounts Marlowe’s 1966 hardcover, The Search
for Bruno Heidler—appeared in 1968. Others of note are Summit
(1970), The Cawthorn Journals (1975), and The Valkyrie Encounter,
which Marlowe called, in that same Ed Gorman interview, his favorite of his own
hardcover suspense novels. The
1980s saw Marlowe pivot again into biographical novels, which the mystery
author and critic Bill Pronzini called “brilliantly conceived [and]
meticulously researched.” The Memoirs of Christopher Columbus appeared
in 1987; The Lighthouse at the End of the World, about Edgar Allan
Poe, in 1995; and The Death and Life of Miguel de Cervantes—which,
according to Pronzini, Marlowe considered his best novel and Ed Gorman called
“his masterpiece”—was published in 1996. Over
his long career, Stephen Marlowe received the Prix Gutenberg du Livre,
a French literary award, in 1988 for The Memoirs of Christopher Columbus
and the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Private Eye Writers of America in
1997. As we
said earlier, Marlowe was born as Milton Lesser, but sometime in the late-1950s
(after his Chester Drum novels had made a big splash) he legally changed his
name to Stephen Marlowe. Shortly after graduating from William & Mary, Marlowe—then
still known as Milton Lesser—married Leona Lang on June 2, 1950. Leona, who
went by Leigh, was a trained psychologist. The couple had two daughters but divorced in the early-1960s. Marlowe then, in 1964, married Ann Humbert in Manhattan.
The pair were married until Marlowe’s death from “myelodysplastic syndrome, a
bone-marrow disorder” on February 22, 2008, in Williamsburg, Virginia. Alternatives:
Science Fiction Stories
features three of Marlowe’s best speculative tales—one novelette and two
shorts. “Divvy Up,” Amazing Stories, 1960, is a dystopian treasure
about one man’s survival in a world where death is a relief from a tortured
and soulless world. Its dark themes would have made for a marvelous episode
of the original The Twilight Zone. “Finders Keepers,” Fantastic
Universe, 1953, is a light-hearted tale about time traveling historians
and a search going all the way back to Adam and Eve. “The Passionate
Pitchman,” Fantastic, 1956, is a slam-bang—read that as exciting—adventure
novelette about gangsters, heists, and teleportation. Now on
with the stories… Cover by Karadraws.com  |
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