Peril Is My Pay

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.Review quote:An enjoyable ... pursuit-thriller. - The New York Times Book Review A great pulpster ... always one of my favorites. - Ed Gorman, author of The Poker Club Drum sleuths to his own beat; he is a strong private investigator, who hooks the audience in each tale, short or long. - Harriet Klausner Book ReviewsBiographical note:Stephen Marlowe (1928-2008) was the author of more than fifty novels, including nearly two dozen featuring globe-trotting private eye Chester Drum. Born Milton Lesser, Marlowe was raised in Brooklyn and attended the College of William and Mary. After several years writing science fiction under his given name, he legally adopted his pen name, and began focusing on Chester Drum, the Washington-based detective who first appeared in The Second Longest Night (1955).Although a detective akin to Raymond Chandler's characters, Drum was distinguished by his jet-setting lifestyle, which carried him to various exotic locales from Mecca to South America. These espionage-tinged stories won Marlowe acclaim, and he produced more than one a year before ending the series in 1968. After spending the 1970s writing suspense novels like The Summit (1970) and The Cawthorn Journals (1975), Marlowe turned to scholarly historical fiction. He lived much of his life abroad, in Switzerland, Spain, and France, and died in Virginia in 2008.