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Stephen Marlowe - Translation - Prentice-Hall - 1976 (jacket design by Hal Siegel, photo by Martin Dall)

#witches #translated #occult #vintage #translation #prentice-hall #stephen marlowe #novel #1976 #hal siegel #martin dall

Murder is My Dish (1957) is an early entry in the Chester Drum (aka Drum Beat) by Stephen Marlowe (aka Milton Lesser). Drum is a private eye with an FBI background who often gets involved in foreign intrigue. In this one his pursuit of the killers of a colleague takes him to a fictional country very much based on the Dominican Republic under the rule of the dictator Rafael Trujillo. One of his antagonists is modeled on the once-notorious Porfirio Rubirosa, a gigolo with numerous celebrity wives and ties to shady fixers and killers -- a figure much written of in the men's magazines of the time. Anyway, Drum ends up with the manuscript of an explosive expose of the dictatorship and hopes of avenging his friend by killing the dictator's head goon. His ability to maneuver amidst the local power players seems a little implausible and Marlowe uses the dictator's crazy daughter both to meet an apparent quota of titillation and as a dea ex machina to eliminate Drum's main enemy. This is no masterpiece but I dig this continuation of the hard-boiled genre and especially appreciate the bloat-free narratives of this era. Like most paperback originals of the 1950s, this gets the job done in under 200 pages and doesn't feel like it's missing anything important. Then again, I don't feel the modern urge to know why a protagonist chooses a particular job, chooses to get up in the morning, or simply is who he or she is -- but I'll leave it at that before I sound even more like the old man yelling at the cloud. I like older, terser pop fiction and I'll try to honor them by writing terse reviews going forward.