Manhunt Is My Mission

By Stephen Marlowe

Caught in the middle of an Arab civil war, Drum looks for a missing surgeon.

Chester Drum knows it's over for Qasr Tabuk when he sees the city's prostitutes taking flight. He came to this war-torn Arab country in search of an American surgeon, Turner Capeheart, who disappeared when the rebels took up arms. His search turned up nothing, and now that the working girls are leaving, he decides to do the same. Death is coming to Qasr Tabuk, and though Drum may evade it for now, it will haunt him as long as he remains in this blighted desert land.

On the road out of town, he offers a lift to a girl whose car has broken down. She is Samia Falcon, daughter of the rebel leader, and she knows where Dr. Capeheart is hiding. An army stands between them and the rebels, but Chester Drum doesn't mind being outnumbered.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Head of Zeus
• Release date: Jun 1, 2014
• ISBN: 9781784087210

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 Manhunt Is My Mission

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

In the thirteenth Chester Drum novel, “Manhunt is My Mission,” Marlowe drops all pretense that he is writing hardboiled detective novels and plunges Drum full-steam ahead into a crazy Middle Eastern adventure more akin to Lawrence of Arabia than to Phillip Marlowe. Drum finds himself in an imaginary Middle Eastern monarchy beset by a violent civil war between a British-style foreign legion and a Muslim fundamentalist terrorist organization. In the midst of bitter battle, Drum rescues damsels in distress and an American doctor who is determined to be where he can do the most good for the most people.

This top-notch novel, that is an adventure/war novel as much as anything else, takes the reader through the throes of siege of the major city, the refugees wandering through the desert, the brutality of the soldiers, the Westerners fleeing to the last ship to sail from the port, leaving behind whoever is left to fend for themselves in the violence, anarchy, and dictatorship, and kangaroo courts that remains. This story is chock-full of adventure and action and there is almost no let up from beginning to end. This was written in the mid-sixties and, even then, Marlowe manages to trace a post-Colonial history of the region where even the most benevolent dictators are co-opted by fundamentalist forces beyond their control and the tentacles of terrorism emanate from there even to the States.

Don’t pick this up, thinking it is a who-done-it or a tangle-with-the- local-mafia-hoods type of tale. For a great adventure story, I thought it was terrific and absolutely, without reservation, do recommend it.