Danger Is My Line

By Stephen Marlowe

Drum guards a killer against an assassin with diplomatic immunity.

Everybody knows George Brandvik killed Jorgen Kolding. As soon as the jury acquits him, Brandvik sells his story to View magazine, confessing to the crime in exchange for a payday. Once the magazine hits newsstands, the death threats start rolling in -- semi-literate garbage which nevertheless must be taken seriously. A reporter from View hires private detective Chester Drum to protect Brandvik, and an hour hasn't gone by before Drum saves the killer's life, disarming a Swedish blonde before she can plug Brandvik in the gut. She is the dead man's daughter, and her diplomatic immunity means she will be deported, not prosecuted. But before she leaves, her bloodlust must be sated.

That afternoon, the reporter and his driver are killed by a car bomb, and Drum sees the Swedish girl fleeing the scene. Soon Brandvik is dead too, gunned down in his bathroom. Drum books tickets to Iceland, to learn if this waifish blonde is really as deadly as she seems.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Head of Zeus
• Release date: Jun 1, 2014
• ISBN: 9781784087203

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 Danger Is My Line

[davewilde-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The Chester Drum series by Marlowe is a terrific, hardboiled private eye/ espionage/ adventure series. Each book generally starts with events in or around Washington D.C., often involving foreign diplomats with immunity, and always takes Drum to an exotic locale.

This one takes him to both Iceland and Sweden and involves a man who was acquitted of a brutal murder of a diplomat, but then confesses to it in a national magazine, Cold War tensions, death threats, a blonde with a motive, an Icelandic stewardess, LSD, car bombings, and a fast paced violent action-filled story.

Although all of the Drum novels are worth reading, the underlying plot in this one is a bit confusing. It's such a good book, though, that hardly matters. And Marlowe does a great job of storytelling.