Stephen Marlowe | Books | The Guardian

Stephen Marlowe

Although best-known for his series of pacey novels featuring the private eye Chester Drum, Stephen Marlowe, who has died after a long illness aged 79, was a prolific author who produced more than 60 novels under a variety of names, including his own.

Marlowe was born Milton Lesser in Brooklyn, New York. He sold his first science-fiction novel, Somewhere I'll Find You, while studying philosophy at the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia. After military service in Korea, he was tipped off by science-fiction editor Damon Knight about an opening with the Scott Meredith literary agency.

Meredith, who dreaded advertising an editorial job that would attract literary "wannabes", was rare among agents. Besides traditional representation, his other business was critiquing, for a fee, manuscripts submitted by aspiring authors. Many struggling writers took jobs as editors with Meredith and went on to prolific careers, including Donald Westlake and Lawrence Block. In fact, as the new chief editor, Marlowe's first hiring was one Salvatore Lombino, who would become first Evan Hunter and then Ed McBain.

Marlowe sold short stories to the few remaining pulp magazines, mostly science fiction, and wrote episodes of the Captain Video and Sense of Wonder shows in the new medium of television. His novels were "space opera", short on science and long on intergalactic conflict. He soon left Meredith to write full time, leaving his job to Lombino. His first thriller, Catch the Brass Ring (1954), was set at Coney Island and published under his Stephen Marlowe pseudonym. Although crime buffs assumed the pen name to be a homage to Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe, Lesser had already used it for science-fiction stories as early as 1951. When Lombino had a bestseller with The Blackboard Jungle in 1954, he took Evan Hunter as his legal name. Lesser followed suit in 1960, becoming Stephen Marlowe.

By then, the Chester Drum books, paperback originals for Gold Medal books, were a huge success. The series began in 1955 with The Second Longest Night, and continued until 1968. They were often set in exotic locations, including Gorky Park in Moscow, long before Martin Cruz Smith got there. There was as much espionage as detection in the Drum series, which allowed a smooth transition to the James Bond spy-era craze in the early 1960s. But the peak of Drum's popularity came when Marlowe teamed up with another of Gold Medal's most popular detectives, Shell Scott, the creation of Richard S Prather.

The two wrote Double in Trouble (1959) by alternating chapters, communicating by phone and post, then edited it together at Prather's home in Laguna Beach, with Prather's wife Tina acting as final arbiter in the event of disagreements. The Prathers' happy marriage helped convince Marlowe to end his own first marriage, to Leigh Lang. He married Ann Humbert in 1964.

Marlowe's noms de plume included Andrew Frazer, who wrote a series of stories featuring the private eye Duncan Pride; Jason Ridgway, some of whose mysteries were published as an adjunct to the popular Believe It or Not cartoon strip; pulp SF author Adam Chase; and, for the novel Dead Man's Tale (1961), Ellery Queen. Meredith represented Fred Dannay and Manfred Lee, who had created the Queen character; he assigned ghosting on the series to many of his clients. Marlowe also wrote under a number of "house names", such as SM Tenneshaw or CH Thames, shared with other authors. As Thames, he produced short novels published as half-books in the Ace Doubles series.

In his 60s, Marlowe revived his career with historical novels. US publishers were initially deterred from Memoirs of Christopher Columbus (1987) because of its period dialogue, but after publication in Britain, it became a bestseller in the US. Marlowe followed with Lighthouse at the End of the World (1995, featuring Edgar Allan Poe) and The Death and Life of Miguel de Cervantes (1996).

In retirement, he found many of his old novels being reprinted, and his memories of the paperback novel era sought after by fans and historians. He received the French Prix Gutenberg in 1988 and a life achievement award from the Private Eye Writers of America in 1997. He is survived by Ann and two daughters from his first marriage.

· Stephen Marlowe (Milton Lesser), writer, born August 7 1928; died February 22 2008

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