Re: RARA-AVIS: Chet Drum (was Phillips & Brussels bookstores)

From: JIM DOHERTY ( jimdohertyjr@yahoo.com)
Date: 16 May 2002


Jeremy,

Re your question below:

> I have never seen any reference to Chet Drum
> anywhere
> at all. Are they in the same vein as Gall, Helm and
> Durrrell? Are they widely available? Are they any
> good?

Chet Drum was a popular PI character in the '50s and
'60s who appeared in a long series of Gold Medal novels written by Stephen Marlowe (a pseudonym of Milton Lesser, who later went to court and made it his legal name).

Drum followed the Chandler paradigm in virtually all respects (30-ish, unmarried ex-cop, operating a one man agency in a large US city, telling his own stories in the first person). To this familiar recipe was added a new ingredient, world travel. Thous Drum was based in Washington, DC, almost all of his cases take him to a different foreign country. He's made the pilgrimage to Mecca, solved a murder in Moscow's Gorky Park years before Martin Cruz Smith ever ehard of the place, made it to Rome in time for the 1960 Olympics, and had two cases in Berlin, one before the Wall, one after. Like many PIs in the 50s and 60s, a lot of his cases involved espionage. In fact, this was the case with Drum more often than not, given the international nature of his cases. Kevin Smith has a page on Drum at his THRILLING DETECTIVE website. You can find it at:

http://www.thrillingdetective.com/drum.html

You can find his books in used stores if you're willing to dig.

JIM DOHERTY

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