Death Is My Comrade

By Stephen Marlowe

With a body in his office and a pocketful of secrets, Drum heads to Moscow.

Eugenie is seventeen, with long legs, blond hair, and an appetite for misery. Daughter of a corrupt millionaire, she has bounced around Europe's finest boarding schools, and Chester Drum knows she's trouble the moment he sees her tearing her blouse to implicate Ilya Alluliev, a Russian diplomat, in rape. The man came to give her a message, an envelope that quickly finds its way to Drum's safe. Inside is an unsigned note claiming that a Russian Nobel Prize -- winning poet is in grave danger. As soon as he reads it, Drum joins the poet on the Kremlin's hit list.

The next day, Drum goes to his office and finds Alluliev on the floor, shot dead. The police cannot help him;Drum will find answers only behind the Iron Curtain. At the height of the Cold War, Drum will risk his life for the sake of a fire-eyed teen with a heart made of ice.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Head of Zeus
• Release date: Jun 1, 2014
• ISBN: 9781784087227

Stephen Marlowe

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 private 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. 

Reviews for Death Is My Comrade

[davewilde-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Published in 1960, this book firmly plants Drum in the midst of the Cold War. Drum is ex FBI agent who now works as a private dick in the DC area, but is often called upon to act in foreign countries where the CIA needs plausible deniability. He's tough, no- nonsense and has all the right connections.
This story takes Drum from the dangers of Washington cocktail parties to the police state of Moscow and across the forests and fields of the Soviet Union. Murders, secret documents, kidnappings, Soviet interrogations, and more are all here as Drum plays hero and involves himself with a cast of characters, including a femme fatale in training, an industrial tycoon, and a Soviet dissident.
This is a good solid read filled with lots of action. It's a spy story without all the crazy gadgets. It's definitely not a soft, cozy tale. There is plenty of violence and backstabbing and there is a sort of hardboiled feel to the way the tale is told. All in all, quite a good read.