Stephen Marlowe (1928–2008) was born Milton Lesser in New York and wrote some good science fiction under that name. He later legally changed his name to Stephen Marlowe and wrote quite a bit of pulp crime fiction under that name.
Chuck Odlum is the ski instructor at the Whiteface Lake Hotel and he also owns the hotel. Well, almost. His wife Inez owns the hotel. It’s at best a moderately successful marriage. Chuck feels that his wife treats him like an irresponsible kid. Which she does, and perhaps she’s right to do so. Either way it irks Chuck a bit. On the other hand things are great between them in the bedroom. It’s the kind of marriage that could easily last, unless some outside factor intervenes.
The outside factor in this case is a blonde. Her name is Bunny. She’s married. Maybe everything would have been OK if only Chuck had been able to forget those extraordinary blue eyes of hers, and the way her posterior looks in tight ski pants. Bunny is very young, very pretty and very blonde. Perhaps inevitably one of her ski lessons ends with the two of them tearing each other’s clothes off.
This in itself was not necessarily going to lead to disaster, but there are two complicating factors - a dead body and a Gladstone bag containing a huge amount of money.
Chuck is a fairly typical noir protagonist. He’s not a bad guy really. Having a weakness for cute blue eyes and shapely female posteriors doesn’t make him a bad guy, it just makes him human. His nagging feeling that his wife has no great respect for him does make him vulnerable to the lure of easy money. He could buy his own ski resort. Then he would be somebody. We do eventually realise why his wife has never trusted him to make important decisions. His judgment is not always sound and he has a knack for finding justifications for his errors of judgment. He’s not stupid but he’s not overly smart; he’s not wicked but he’s not overly virtuous. He’s an ideal noir protagonist. We like him enough to care what happens to him but we figure he’s likely to get himself into real trouble.
Bunny is a femme fatale of sorts but she’s one of that interesting variety who might turn out to be a devious spider woman or might just as easily turn out to be a kind of female noir protagonist, led to do questionable things by certain character flaws. She’s a bad girl but we like her anyway.
There are murders in this tale, but they’re not straightforward murders. There’s some degree of ambiguity about them. They’re the kinds of murders a person could commit and still be able to believe that they weren’t really murder.
There’s a solid noir plot. The protagonists make small mistakes but they’re mistakes they could get away with if they just got one or two lucky breaks. We do get a feeling of noirish impending doom, or at the very least a feeling that these people are not likely to come out of this unscathed.
There is a slight hardboiled edge to Marlowe’s prose.
The sleaze factor is fairly mild but Chuck is definitely a protagonist driven by lust. Maybe there’s love as well, but lust is where it all begins.
This is a very satisfying work of noir fiction by a somewhat underrated writer. Highly recommended.
I’ve reviewed a couple of the science fiction novels written by this author as Milton Lesser - Somewhere I’ll Find You from 1947 and Slaves to the Metal Horde from 1954. They’re both quite decent stories. I’ve also reviewed his very good 1955 hardboiled crime novel, written as Stephen Marlowe, Model for Murder.
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