Vengeance Man

By Dan Marlowe

In this hard-edged thriller, Jim Wilson is a rough-and-tumble road contractor in Moline, South Carolina, a corrupt place where only the most savage survive. Wilson makes no apologies for his ferocity. Raised by an uncle who regularly whipped him, used to taking beatings until he learned to fight back, Wilson lets no-one take advantage of him. After revenging himself on his cheating wife, he takes up with her best friend, an ambitious woman whose ability to connive and manipulate are more than equal to Wilson’s. From that point, the story rushes with locomotive speed toward an explosion of violence. This is one of the finest examples of the work of Dan J. Marlowe (1914-1986), a master of hard-boiled fiction lauded by no less a craftsman than bestselling horror novelist Stephen King.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dan Marlowe
• Release date: Sep 23, 2011
• ISBN: 9781452437842

Dan Marlowe

Dan J. Marlowe (1914-1986), a master of the gun-and-fist suspense novel, has been called “hardest of the hard-boiled” by no less a figure than bestselling horror writer Stephen King. King dedicated his 2005 novel, The Colorado Kid, to Marlowe. In 1967, The New York Times' Anthony Boucher called Marlowe one of the country's top writers of original softcover suspense, numbering him with such authors as John D. MacDonald, Brett Halliday, Donald Hamilton, Richard Stark (a pseudonym for Donald Westlake), and Edward Aarons. Alone and in collaboration, Marlowe wrote more than 25 thrillers. Some of his best work featured an amoral bank robber, Earl Drake, who later morphed into a rebellious but effective secret agent.

Book preview

VENGEANCE MAN

By Dan J. Marlowe

Originally published and copyright © 1966 by Dan J. Marlowe. Copyright © renewed 1994 by Dan J. Marlowe. Copyright © 2011 by Robert Ragan. Dan J. Marlowe by Charles Kelly copyright © 2011. All Rights Reserved. Cover design by J.T. Lindroos. Smashwords Edition.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Dan J. Marlowe

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

DAN J. MARLOWE

By Charles Kelly

The butt-kicking is about to begin. Politically-correct types beware: there’s nothing here for you. Vengeance Man, first published in 1966 as The Vengeance Man, is a throwback to a different time. You’ll feel that from the first page. You’ll also sense the nature of its author, Dan J. Marlowe. Marlowe (1914-1986) was a master of the genre of gun-and-fist. He liked his sex raw and his violence hot. Ripped clothing, bruised flesh, ragged breathing. Horror writer Stephen King calls him the hardest of the hard-boiled.

King issued that accolade in the dedication of King’s 2005 novel, The Colorado Kid. It underlined what many readers already knew. Marlowe was the real item. Hardboiled fans haunt used-book stores and troll online seeking Marlowe’s weathered paperbacks. They probe for details of his life. They wonder why they haven’t seen any of Marlowe’s tales on film. And one of those hardboiled fans is doing more than that. Los Angeles novelist Hugh Gross owns rights to Earl Drake, the writer’s strongest character. Gross is working to get two of Marlowe’s novels made into movies.

Marlowe’s life was a bizarre story that could compare with any he wrote. An unathletic sports fan, Marlowe created he-man characters who could dive, shoot, and copulate with the best of them. Though chubby and unattractive, he himself was hell with the women. He studied to be an accountant and was proud of his business skills, but also spent years as a professional gambler. Though a conservative who served as a city official, he loved booze and a good time. He castigated one popular novel as filth, but praised the book’s literary qualities, spoke out against censorship, and quietly wrote pornography himself. In addition to all that, he was intrigued by fetishistic spanking. Oh, yes. Keep that in mind as you read his books. You’ll see what I’m talking about.

Marlowe was born in Lowell, Mass., in 1914, the son of a printing-press mechanic. His mother died after falling ill in the flu epidemic of 1918. Afterwards, Dan and his brother Don (who went on to become a celebrated scientist), were raised by their grandmother and two aunts. Dan Marlowe attended parochial school in Woburn, Mass., and high school in New London, Conn., then received an accounting certificate from Bentley School of Accounting and Finance in Boston in 1934. For the next seven years, he lived mostly as a professional gambler, playing poker and betting on horses, though he also found time to work as assistant manager of two Connecticut country clubs. Marlowe later worked at an aircraft company, and in 1945 took a job as an office manager and credit manager for a tobacco company in Washington, D.C. He married during this period, but 11 years later his wife died suddenly of acute hemorrhagic pancreatitis.

She died in 1956, when Marlowe was 43 years old. He had considered the idea of being a writer up to this point, but had been too busy. Now he had no constraints. The following year, he moved to New York, rented a hotel room, started working on a book-length story and took an evening novel-writing class at New York University. Near the end of 1958, he sold his first two books, Doorway to Death and Killer with a Key. They and the three novels that followed featured Johnny Killain, a tough military veteran who works as a bellhop in a New York hotel and solves mysteries.

Marlowe wrote one non-Killain novel, Backfire, before producing his masterpiece, The Name of the Game is Death, which was published in 1962. The novel tells the story of a callous bank robber, embittered by social injustice, who finds and kills the people who tortured and murdered his partner while trying to locate stolen money. The New York Times called the book tensely plotted, forcefully written, and extraordinarily effective in its presentation of a viewpoint quite outside humanity’s expected patterns. The protagonist, known by the false names Roy Martin and Chet Arnold, later takes the name Earl Drake in the novel One Endless Hour and uses it consistently in the rest of the Marlowe books about him.

The Name of the Game is Death was so realistic that it impressed a real bank robber. Al Nussbaum read it while on the run from a bank job in Brooklyn, N.Y., in which Nussbaum’s chief partner, Bobby One-Eye Wilcoxson, had machine-gunned a guard to death. Using an assumed name, Nussbaum telephoned Marlowe, who by now had moved to Harbor Beach, Michigan, and asked for tips on writing fiction. Later, Nussbaum followed up with a letter. When the FBI caught up with Nussbaum, they visited Marlowe, suspecting he was an associate of the robber. Marlowe laid their suspicions to rest, but was intrigued by Nussbaum’s cleverness and genuine desire to become a writer. While the robber was serving a long stretch for multiple crimes, Marlowe assisted him by critiquing his work, offering writing advice, and helping him sell his stories. Nussbaum, in turn, assisted Marlowe by advising him on the technical aspects of firearms, burglar alarms, and explosives.

As his relationship with Nussbaum developed, Marlowe was also forging more conventional social ties. Already a member of the local Rotary Club in Harbor Beach, he served on the City Council there from 1967 to 1970. Meanwhile he continued to churn out paperbacks and garner acclaim. In 1967, The New York Times’ Anthony Boucher called him one of the country’s top writers of original softcover suspense, numbering him with such authors as John D. MacDonald, Brett Halliday, Donald Hamilton, Richard Stark (a pseudonym for Donald Westlake), and Edward Aarons. Though he was a master of craft, Marlowe always said his primary motive was making a living. I’m a creature of the marketplace, he told the Harbor Beach Times in an interview following publication of the Boucher article. I’m a businessman in the business of delivering salable words to editors. When I know what an editor wants, that’s what an editor gets from me.

It was no doubt this practical turn of mind that made it easy for Marlowe to collaborate with others, as he did occasionally with Nussbaum and extensively with retired Air Force Col. William C. Odell, a highly decorated World War II veteran considered an expert on night aerial combat. In 1964, Odell was running an advertising agency in Ohio and trying his hand at fiction when his agent suggested Marlowe might be brought in to help rewrite an Odell manuscript. Though that book apparently never was published, Marlowe and Odell began a relationship that continued for years, working together on about a dozen books. Despite the collaboration, Odell got co-credit with Marlowe on only one of those novels, The Raven is a Blood-Red Bird, published in 1967. James Batson, a mutual friend of Marlowe and Odell, said the two decided it was better to give sole credit on the other books to the far-more-marketable Marlowe.

Odell, with his extensive knowledge of military tactics and equipment and foreign settings, was particularly helpful in the production of the Operation books (Operation Fireball, Operation Breakthrough, etc.) in which the bank robber Earl Drake is recruited by a government agent and becomes an operative himself—a change-in-direction requested by Marlowe’s editors to cater to the reading market. For one of those books, Flashpoint (later issued as Operation Flashpoint) Marlowe won the 1971 Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best Paperback Original from the Mystery Writers of America.

In 1977, at 62 years of age, Marlowe was still hard at work. By then he had 25 novels under his belt. But that year he fell victim to terrible headaches while doing research in Florida for what he hoped would be a breakout novel to be published by Bernard Geis, maverick publisher of The Valley of the Dolls. Marlowe managed to drive back to Harbor Beach. But three days later he suffered an attack of amnesia that caused him to forget all the people he had known and everything he had written. The amnesia probably was induced by a stroke, though physicians at the time believed the cause was psychological.

Marlowe’s writing life appeared to be over. But Nussbaum, who by now had been released from prison and was turning out short stories, TV script plots and educational books in Los Angeles, convinced Marlowe to move there and live with him while trying to regain his writing skills. Marlowe did so, and managed to produce a few new stories, a number of easy-reading books for the educational market, and one full-length novel—a generic adventure yarn called Guerilla Games, written as Gar Wilson for the Phoenix Force series published by Gold Eagle—before he died of heart failure in August 1986.

Marlowe’s work can be divided into three categories—the Johnny Killain novels, the quasi-government agent Operation books and the rest. Despite getting the Edgar for an Operation book, Marlowe did his best work in the third group of books, particularly The Name of the Game is Death, One Endless Hour, The Vengeance Man, Strongarm, Never Live Twice, and Four for the Money.

Vengeance Man is his second-best book, behind only The Name of the Game is Death. The protagonist, construction company owner Jim Wilson, demonstrates a ferocity matched only by Earl Drake. The kinky overtones of the sex-and-power relationship Wilson has with Ludmilla Pierson, his murdered wife’s friend, provide the most offbeat example of Marlowe’s heavy-breathing eroticism. The corruption of virtually every important character in the book is thorough. The theme of betrayal is relentless. Vengeance Man starts with a bang, ends with a bang, and gallops like a desperate racehorse in between. Hold on tight. You’re in for a hell of a ride.

Charles Kelly, whose novel Pay Here was published by Point Blank Press, is writing a biography of Dan J. Marlowe.

CHAPTER 1

THE LOW-LYING, late afternoon, Moline, South Carolina, sun streaming through the windshield nearly blinded me as Wing Darlington swung his fender-dented Galaxie into Shadylawn Terrace. His bronzed, corded forearms cradled the steering wheel. He was talking about our chances of being low bidder on the Edmonds Road job. When I saw that my mud-spattered station wagon was the only car at the curb in front of my house, and that my wife Mona’s Pontiac wasn’t in the garage, either, I felt a tingle. Maybe today was the day. Carry me on over to Perry’s, Wing, I said, interrupting his disparaging remarks. I’ll walk back.

He jammed his foot down on the accelerator again and the Galaxie leaped ahead past the big house I couldn’t afford. Wing drives like he does everything else, fast, hard, and often, because Winfield Adair Darlington is a hard-charging country boy who also manages to look like a movie idol. He’s a lean six-footer with perfect features, perfect teeth, and crisp blond hair that curls even when he’s in the water. When he smiles his go-to-hell smile with the white teeth splitting the Spanish-leather hue of his suntan, the women fall down in rows. Although I’m the same mahogany color as Wing, I have more trouble with my women. It might be because my hair is black and I wear it in a flattop. Or because, while I’m just as lean as Wing, I’m two inches taller and twice as wide. Or because I’ve never been asked to enter a Mr. Apollo contest.

He was still needling me as he pulled up in front of Perry’s Liquor Store, a quarter mile from the house. ’Pears like with your father-in-law’s political connections, we should be gettin’ a better smell on these county bids, ol’salty dog, he said.

’Pears like with your ex-girl friend ownin’ a bank an’ your ex-best friend a vice-president in it, we shouldn’t be so stretched out for financin’—I gave it back to him pork gravy style. He grinned at me. Wing and I have been partners for four years in the Darlington-Wilson Construction Company. I’m the engineer and he’s the superintendent. We’re a maverick outfit, specializing in road paving when we can get it, but willing to sink a tooth into anything we get turned loose on. I don’t know any two men in the state who work harder, but that isn’t what cuts the mustard around Moline, South Carolina. If a man who knew his business were asked to rank the contracting firms in and around the city, the Darlington-Wilson Construction Company wouldn’t even make his list. I’d made up my mind a long time ago that I wasn’t going to let it stay that way.

See you in the morning, hoss, Wing called back cheerfully as he drove off.

I went into the liquor shop. Doug Perry had seen me coming and had a fifth of Jack Daniels sacked up beside the cash register. Hot one this evenin’, Jim, he said as I paid him. He was a round man, with a shiny, sweating, bald head. Must be rough on a big man like you.

Not for us local boys, I said, deadpan. It’s only you carpetbaggers from Richmond who mind the heat.

I’ve lived in this town twenty years! Doug began indignantly. Then he laughed as I walked out to the street. Always kiddin’, he called after me.

I took my time going back to the house. Not a breath of the August air was stirring the drooping leaves of the magnolia tree in the front yard. There was a note from Mona on the kitchen table: Shopping with Lud. Back by eight. I read it twice. She could be shopping with Ludmilla Pierson, her best friend, although on the last two Wednesday afternoons, she hadn’t been. I glanced at the kitchen clock. Ten after five. If it was going to happen, this was the time for it to happen. Mona’s father, Judge Tom Harrington, the political bête noire of the Darlington-Wilson Construction Company, had gone over to Charleston on Monday for a prostate operation. With the old wolf out of the way, I just might have a chance. If Andy called . . . I crumpled Mona’s note and threw it into the garbage bag under the sink.

I ignored the sacked-up Jack Daniels and had a bottle of gin down from a shelf and a tray of ice cubes out of the refrigerator when the telephone rang. I could feel my stomach muscles tightening as I went into the front hall to answer it. Jim? It was Andy Martin’s slow drawl. They’re in room twenty-four at the Stardust. I’m leavin’ this instant to pick up my witnesses an’ come by an’ get you. You be ready, y’hear?

I’ll be ready, I said. Then I hung up. Andy Martin was as much as Moline afforded in the way of a private detective, but it seemed that he was enough. It would take him at least fifteen minutes to drive from the Stardust Motel to my place, plus however long it took him to round up his witnesses. I had plenty of time.

I went to the sink and retrieved Mona’s crumpled note from the garbage bag and placed it on the table. I removed the Jack Daniels from the sack, split the plastic seal around the cap with a thumbnail, removed the cap, and took a long double swallow. Then I poured half of the fifth down the sink drain, being careful not to splash it, and rinsed the sink out. I left the still-open fifth and the melting ice cubes on the counter. The gin, I returned to the shelf.

I went back to the telephone and dialed the Pierson number. Jim, Lud, I said when she answered. Is Mona there?

She left just a few minutes ago, my wife’s best woman friend answered promptly. As always, when she spoke to me, Ludmilla Pierson’s voice took on the bright, hard tinkle of crystal. Lud and Mona had been roommates in college. Ludmilla was the only daughter of the deceased town banker; Mona was the only daughter of Judge Tom Harrington, the wheeler-dealer politico who ran things in the county. Wing, Ludmilla, Mona, and I had been in high school together; we were all within a year either way of thirty. We’d knocked around as a group with some crossover dating. Wing hadn’t finished high school, let alone gone to college, but even so, Lud had waited a long time for him to propose to her. When he didn’t, she married George Pierson, whom she was now pulling by the ears up through the bank hierarchy. George and Wing had been best friends in school, but Ludmilla skillfully