The Name of the Game is Death / One Endless Hour (Dan J. Marlowe Bibliography). This item is unavailable.The Name of the Game is Death / One Endless Hour (Dan J. Marlowe Bibliography)

Stephen King called Marlowe “the hardest of the hard-boiled,” and these two novels are his masterpieces. Here are the two books that introduce Earl Drake, a hardened thief on a mission of vengeance. He’s been shot, burned and put away in an asylum—but they can’t keep him there. Drake is a force to be reckoned with. Barry Gifford said it best: “Nobody wrote tougher prose than Dan J. Marlowe. Nobody.” This volume includes an introduction by Charles Kelly, author of "Gunshots in Another Room: The Forgotten Life of Dan J. Marlowe."

Dan J. Marlowe was born in Lowell, Massachusetts, in 1914, the son of a printing press mechanic. He received an accounting certificate from Bentley School of Accounting and Finance in Boston in 1934, and lived alternately as a professional gambler and an office manager until 1956, when he decided to try his hand at writing. By the end of 1958 he had sold his first two books, featuring detective Johnny Killain. In 1962, Marlowe produced his masterpiece, The Name of the Game is Death, which so impressed a real bank robber, Al Nussbaum, that the two of them started corresponding and eventually became friends and collaborators. At the height of Marlowe s career, having already won the 1971 Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best Paperback Original, he suffered an attack of amnesia. Moving to Los Angeles with Nussbaum, he tried to regain his writing skills. He passed away of heart failure in Tarzana, Calif., in August of 1986.