Chester Drum Series by Stephen Marlowe
Chester Drum #1
Chester Drum #3
Killers Are My Meat
Stephen Marlowe
A drive-by killing puts Drum on the scent of a Washington sex scandalWhen 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. Years later, Drum is established and Gil is at the tail end of a long, slow fall,drinking heavily and considering blackmail to make ends meet. When he gets in over his head, Sprayregan’s wife begs Drum to help. But her husband has already taken the first step on the road to oblivion.Drum takes a dinghy out to Sprayregan’s Chesapeake hideout. When they return, a car full of gangsters kills Sprayregan and puts Drum in the hospital. Drum doesn’t mourn the man who gave him his first break, but to the new widow, he owes a debt. No matter how well connected they are, he will break the men who gunned down Gil Sprayregan.
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Chester Drum #6
Violence Is My Business
Stephen Marlowe
To recover his license, Drum must unlock the mystery of a professor’s suicideDuncan 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 with a call girl, and for the last few weeks Chester Drum and his partner, rookie PI Jerry Trowbridge, have watched him do it. When Lord steps onto a fourth-story window ledge on Homecoming night, Drum gets through the police cordon just in time to watch the professor fall to earth. An embittered local sheriff, convinced that Drum and his partner were blackmailing the professor, has their license revoked. To salvage his business, Drum must find the real reason for Lord’s suicide. He has tangled with politicians, thieves, and spies, but no detective can truly know treachery until he steps into the hallowed halls of a college campus.
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Chester Drum #9
Danger Is My Line
Stephen Marlowe
Drum guards a killer against an assassin with diplomatic immunityEverybody 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. Once the magazine hits newsstands, the death threats start rolling in—semi-literate garbage which nevertheless must be taken seriously. A reporter from View hires private detective Chester Drum to protect Brandvik, and an hour hasn’t gone by before Drum saves the killer’s life, disarming a Swedish blonde before she can plug Brandvik in the gut. She is the dead man’s daughter, and her diplomatic immunity means she will be deported, not prosecuted. But before she leaves, her bloodlust must be sated. That afternoon, the reporter and his driver are killed by a car bomb, and Drum sees the Swedish girl fleeing the scene. Soon Brandvik is dead too, gunned down in his bathroom. Drum books tickets to Iceland, to learn if this waifish blonde is really as deadly as she seems.
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Chester Drum #11
Peril Is My Pay
Stephen Marlowe
In Rome for the Olympics, Drum witnesses an assassinationWhen 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 named Hilda, whose weapon of choice is the discus. On the eve of the Rome summer Olympics, Kyle’s father hires private detective Chester Drum to follow his son. He doesn’t mind the girl—it’s her Soviet handlers who make him nervous. The Olympic torch hasn’t even been lit when their love affair takes its first casualty. Their Italian go-between, Signor Mozzoni, is crossing the street when a Citroën runs him down. With their protector dead, Kyle and his girlfriend vanish. If Drum doesn’t find the missing athletes quickly, the Soviet trainers will give them a workout from which they’ll never recover.
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Chester Drum #12
Manhunt Is My Mission
Stephen Marlowe
Caught in the middle of an Arab civil war, Drum looks for a missing surgeonChester 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, Turner Capeheart, who disappeared when the rebels took up arms. His search turned up nothing, and now that the working girls are leaving, he decides to do the same. Death is coming to Qasr Tabuk, and though Drum may evade it for now, it will haunt him as long as he remains in this blighted desert land. On the road out of town, he offers a lift to a girl whose car has broken down. She is Samia Falcon, daughter of the rebel leader, and she knows where Dr. Capeheart is hiding. An army stands between them and the rebels, but Chester Drum doesn’t mind being outnumbered.
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Chester Drum #13
Jeopardy Is My Job
Stephen Marlowe
Drum looks for a missing American in a sea of degenerate expatsAn American has vanished in Spain, and it’s his father, not his wife, who wants him found. When Chester Drum arrives in Iberia, legs aching from the three-thousand-mile flight, he finds Andrea Hartshorn not panicked, not mourning, but hosting the party of the year. World-weary expatriates mill about the villa, guzzling her liquor and dancing, without a thought for their missing countryman. Andrea is far from sober, but finally Drum gets her to open up. Of course she wants her husband back. But more than that, she wants her daughter. Robbie was last seen going south to Fuengirola, to confront a crippled bullfighter named Ruy Fuentes, who had been courting the Hartshorns’ toreador-mad daughter. Drum sets out to find the missing Hartshorns, and learns that in Spain, a bull’s horn is not the only romantic way to die.
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Chester Drum #14
Francesca
Stephen Marlowe
A world-class criminal consultant asks Drum to keep him out of prisonAxel 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 currency manipulation, Spade operates in style by staying on the good side of the American and Swiss authorities. But when his future son-in-law disappears after defrauding American servicemen of three million dollars, Spade becomes a target of Interpol, the CIA, and every GI with an empty wallet and a gun. He flies Washington PI Chester Drum to Switzerland to find the lost loot. But the sight of Spade’s hired goons manhandling a ruined American soldier sours Drum on helping the crook. When the destitute GI is found stabbed to death in his hotel room, Drum resolves to bring the killers to justice, no matter how stylish they might be. And of course, he won’t mind if he finds three million bucks along the way.
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Chester Drum #15
Drumbeat Berlin
Stephen Marlowe
An old flame’s fiancé is missing, and only Drum can save him from the SovietsChester 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 dangerous for him to ever marry, so she ends the affair and moves to West Berlin, to report on the Cold War from its front lines. There she falls in love with Quentin Hammond, ace foreign correspondent, and Drum is happy for her until her new man disappears behind the Iron Curtain. She telegraphs for help, and Drum is on the next plane. Hammond was close to winning the scoop of the century, by cooperating with an exiled East German dissident to tunnel beneath the Berlin Wall and free thousands of people from the other side. Before they could complete their audacious scheme, though, the Stasi kidnapped them. Only Drum has the skills to go behind the wall and return with the man who’s stolen the woman he loves.
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Chester Drum #17
Drumbeat Madrid
Stephen Marlowe
In Spain for a wedding, Drum must rescue the kidnapped brideAlthough 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 identity of his future father-in-law: Colonel Santiago Sotomayor, whose name can open the lock of any Spanish dungeon. And so Spade and his best man, Washington PI Chester Drum, cross the frontier. Sotomayor is not thrilled to see his daughter become the sixth Mrs. Spade, but he has given his begrudging consent. The wedding party comes off like any jet-set gathering, complete with one of the fiancée’s ex-lovers making threats against Spade’s life. But one key piece never arrives: the bride. She has been kidnapped, and to get her back, Drum and Spade will pit their wits against the toughest thugs and slipperiest bureaucrats that Fascist Spain has to offer.
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Chester Drum #18
Drumbeat Erica
Stephen Marlowe
Protecting an actor takes Drum into the seedy underworld of psychedeliaTerminal 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 abandoned by her husband, matinee idol Ahmed Shiraz. Now stricken with leukemia, Littlejohn is near death, and beginning to regret taking out a contract on the actor’s life. He hires international private eye Chester Drum to call off the hit and protect Shiraz until his life is safe. On his first night on the job, Drum’s partner takes a shotgun blast meant for the actor. Wanting nothing more than to wring Shiraz’s neck, Drum follows him to Europe, where he must contend with assassins, beatniks, and the powerful effects of an experimental drug called LSD.
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Chester Drum #19
Drumbeat Marianne
Stephen Marlowe
A sadistic KGB colonel hires Drum to locate a dead manAxel 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 heart claimed him in his sleep, and so Chester Drum, Washington PI and the closest thing Spade had to a friend, scatters his ashes in the Atlantic. Drum’s old flame, Marianne Baker, is by his side, but she leaves before grief has a chance to reignite their faded passion. That night, Drum is awoken by a KGB operative who has kidnapped Marianne. Axel Spade is alive, the agent insists, and he wants Drum to find him. To save Marianne, Drum will do the impossible, and bring Axel Spade back from the dead.
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