The Name of the Game is Death

THE NAME OF THE GAME IS DEATH

By Dan J. Marlowe

Originally published and copyright © 1962 by Dan J. Marlowe. Copyright © renewed 1990. The Writer and the Robber by Charles Kelly copyright © 2011. All Rights Reserved. Smashwords Edition. Cover design by J.T. Lindroos.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

The Writer and the Robber

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

The Writer and the Robber

By Charles Kelly

The Name of the Game is Death is the masterwork of Dan J. Marlowe (1914-1986), a quirky man whose conventional surface masked a taste for the rakish and an intuitive understanding of criminality. Bestselling author Stephen King once called Marlowe the hardest of the hard-boiled, a tribute to Marlowe’s ability to evoke the lives of characters to whom violence is as normal as a cup of coffee. As a result of writing this novel, Marlowe met such a character in the flesh.

In 1962, when The Name of the Game is Death was issued as a paperback by Fawcett Gold Medal, Marlowe was living a quiet life in Harbor Beach, Michigan, a small town on the shore of Lake Huron 125 miles north of Detroit. At the time, he was in his late 40s, though photos of him make him look much younger, due to the youthful chubbiness of his face.

Marlowe, who had grown up on the East Coast, had sought out Harbor Beach because it offered cheap living and a congenial community. He knew that making a living as a writer would be difficult, and he wanted to keep his expenses as low as possible.

By the time The Name of the Game is Death came out, Marlowe had published six paperback novels. The first five, featuring Johnny Killain, a crime-busting muscle-bound bellhop (!) who operated out of a New York hotel, were Doorway to Death (1959), Killer With a Key (1959), Doom Service (1960), The Fatal Frails (1960), and Shake a Crooked Town (1960). The fifth, Backfire (1961), was a police drama that evoked the work of Ed McBain, author of the 87th Precinct novels.

While all were competent, hard-bitten tales, Marlowe had yet to produce a truly memorable character, and hadn’t hit his stride as a writer. Looking back, it appears that Marlowe was still learning the mechanics of writing and plotting, and hadn’t been able to exploit his emotional connection with the dark side of life. No doubt he had struggled to do so, since his life had been a mix of the mundane and the raffish.

Marlowe had been born in Lowell, Mass., in 1914, the son of a printing-press mechanic. In 1934, he received an accounting certificate from Bentley School of Accounting and Finance in Boston. This appeared to pave the way for an obscure life buried among account books. But Marlowe took a different tack, at least to some degree. For the next seven years, he lived mostly as a professional gambler, playing poker and betting on horses. Along the way, he also found time to serve 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 in 1956, his wife died suddenly of acute hemorrhagic pancreatitis.

At the time of her death, Marlowe was 43 years old. He hit the road and the bottle, trying to figure out what he wanted to do with the rest of his life. In the end, he decided to become a writer. 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, and his career was off and running.

In his first few years as a writer, Marlowe moved around quite a bit, living—among other places--in New York, New Hampshire, Florida and Maryland. Apparently he also spent time in Phoenix, Arizona, the setting for the bank robbery that kicks off The Name of the Game is Death.

The book follows the adventures of a callous bank robber, embittered by social injustice, who finds and kills the people who tortured and murdered his partner. (This edition closely replicates the 1962 version. It lacks the polish of later editions, but retains the original’s raw power.) 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. Drake, Marlowe’s best character, would later be featured in many more novels.

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. Nussbaum apparently believed the traits exhibited by Marlowe’s main character were mirrored in Wilcoxson’s personality.

Wilcoxson was an interesting character study, but Nussbaum himself was an original. A firearms expert, bomb-maker, airplane pilot, chess player and accomplished safecracker, he often was blunt about his attraction to crime. He once told a judge, Crime has always been a combination game and livelihood for me. Ever since I was about sixteen, I've made my living, at least partially, from some kind of illegal activity. It was usually profitable and always exciting, like a chess game for cash prizes, and that's the way I thought of it. I can't say which held my interest more, the fun or the money, but I enjoyed playing the game.

Nussbaum, a voracious reader, was intrigued by Marlowe’s accomplishment. The robber was also attracted by the idea of writing fiction himself, Nussbaum telephoned Marlowe using an assumed name 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 fascinated 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. He also convinced Marlowe that he should write a sequel to The Name of the Game is Death. Marlowe did so, producing One Endless Hour, published in 1969.

As his relationship with Nussbaum developed, Marlowe was continuing to produce 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.

Several years prior to Marlowe’s death, Marlowe and Nussbaum had decided that their lifestyles—Nussbaum liked to stay up late, Marlowe preferred to get to bed early, rise early and get to the typewriter—were incompatible, and Nussbaum moved out. He eventually moved back to Buffalo, N.Y., to be closer to his family. However, he and Marlowe remained friends all their lives, even though that occasionally made things uncomfortable for Marlowe.

In 1982, Nussbaum was suspected in a bank extortion in Peoria, Ill. That didn’t surprise the cops: they never believed Nussbaum had gone straight. After he moved out of LA, investigators would come around and hassle Marlowe about his knowledge of where Nussbaum was and what he was doing. Marlowe always put them off. During a 1985 visit from federal marshals—the second of two visits in a short period--Marlowe firmly took the part of his friend against the forces of law and order. In a letter, he told Nussbaum what had happened. Marlowe had jousted with the marshals and put them on the defensive. He had adopted—in fact, had probably absorbed--the viewpoint of a world-weary crook.

‘They’ wanted to talk to me downtown, he wrote. I gave them back the same jive: too old, too ill, couldn’t be removed from medication…Anyway, they went off with no more satisfaction than the first time. The bastards hang on, don’t they?

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

CHAPTER 1

FROM THE BACK SEAT of the Olds I could see the kid’s cotton gloves flash white on the steering wheel as he swung off Van Buren onto Central Avenue. On the right up ahead the strong late September Phoenix sunshine blazed off the bank’s white stone front till it hurt the eyes. The damn building looked as big as the purple buttes on the rim of the desert.

Beside me Bunny chewed gum rhythmically, his hands relaxed in his lap. Up front, in three-quarter profile the kid’s face was like chalk, but he teamed the car perfectly into a tight-fitting space right in front of the bank.

Nobody said a word. I climbed out on the sidewalk side, and Bunny got out opposite and walked around the rear to join me. His dark glasses and bright yellow hair glinted in the sun. The thick, livid scar across his throat was nearly hidden in his week-old beard. Across the street the big clock said five minutes to three. Under it on another dial a long thermometer needle rested on ninety-four. A shirt-sleeved man stood idly beneath the clock.

We crossed the sidewalk and passed through the bank’s outer glass doors. I’m five ten, but Bunny towered over me six inches. I could see the rolled-up canvas sack under his arm. In the vestibule the air conditioning bit hard at the sweat on my face and arms. Bunny led the way through into the main floor lobby. He went left. I went right. Two guards on the main floor.

I found my guard showing an old man how to fill out a deposit slip. I moved in behind the guard, and when I saw Bunny’s arm go up across the way I slammed the red-creased neck in front of me with a solid chunk of Smith & Wesson. He went down without a sound. The old man kept right on writing. I heard a choked gurgle from Bunny’s guard. That was all.

I took my first good look around while I switched to the Colt Woodsman. If we hadn’t gotten those two, we were nowhere. A dozen to fifteen customers, scattered. I fired the Woodsman three times, taking out glass high in the tellers’ cages each time. Shattering glass is an impressive sound. In the echoing lobby the glass and the little Woodsman sounded like a turret of sixteen-inchers in a china closet.

All right, everybody, I said, loud and clear. Everybody stand still and nobody gets hurt.

Nobody moved. Nobody breathed. Bunny vaulted the low gate up in front. I jammed the Woodsman back in my pants, and balanced the Smith & Wesson again in my palm. If somebody fast-pitched us, I might need the three heavier caliber bullets I’d saved by directing traffic with the Woodsman.

Inside the railing with Bunny, two big-assed women huddled together against the door leading into the cages, empty trays in their hands. Right where they should have been at two minutes to three. Bunny motioned with his gun at the cage door. They stared at him, cow-eyed. Inside the cages there wasn’t a sound. Bunny whipped the flat of his automatic up against the jawline of the nearer woman. She fell over sideways, mewling. Someone inside opened the door. Bunny stepped in quickly, herding everyone to the rear. He began yanking out cash drawers. Bundles of hundreds and twenties went into the sack. Everything else went to the floor.

The only thing I could hear was the whimpering of the woman on the floor and the clatter and bang as Bunny emptied and dumped drawers. On my left something moved. I turned, and the movement stopped. Dead ahead on the balcony overhead I caught a rapid blur of gray. I belted the guard over backward with the first shot I banged up there. Bunny never even turned his head.

Two minutes, I’d figured, after we took out the first guards. Two and a half, tops. All over town now bells would be ringing, but in sixty seconds we’d be gone. I did a slow turn, eyes skimming the balcony and the main floor. Nothing.

Bunny burst out the cage door, hugging the sack to his big chest. He jumped the railing, landing on his toes. I fell in six feet behind him, and we went out through the vestibule at a fast walk. Bunny had just reached out to open the right hand outer glass door when there was a sharp crack-crack-crack from behind us. The best part of the door blew right out onto the sidewalk. Heat rolled in through the splintered glass in an arid wave.

Bunny unhunched his neck and started again for the Olds. Out on the sidewalk I whirled and took down the remaining half of the door. One high and one low. It made a hell of a noise. Anyone coming through that vestibule in a hurry should have thought again about his hurry with a square yard of glass in his hair.

When I turned I caught a flash of the shirt-sleeved man