THE NAME OF THE GAME IS DEATH - Dan J. Marlowe

'Roy' and 'Bunny' (these are the names they know each other by but not likely to be their actual names) are bank robbers. In their latest heist things don't go as smoothly as they'd hoped in Phoenix and Roy, who killed three men, gets clipped, taking a bullet in the arm. The duo split up so that Roy can lay low and recover (and to throw off the search for two men).

There's a contingency plan for just such an event - Bunny heads east with the money and the two will meet up later to divide their loot.  Until they meet, Bunny sends regular checks to Roy so that he can stay where he is until he's ready to travel. Roy just needs to stay out of sight and avoid the dragnet looking for the bank robbers, then travel 2000 miles and meet up with his partner in crime. Nothing to it.

But the checks stop coming and Roy learns that something has happened to Bunny and their money. Roy has to travel incognito to the rural town that Bunny was supposed to be in and find out what happened and where his money is. To do this, thought, Roy has to take on the role of a traveling laborer so that he can take stock of the people whom Bunny interacted with.

When I think of the dark, hard-boiled, shoot-'em-up thriller novel (not the hard-boiled detective books), this is exactly the sort of book I imagine.  We're in the life of someone you probably would never want to hang around with. A bank robber ad a killer with very little moral compass. And yet ... we want to know what's happened.

We easily get caught up in the mystery of what happened to Bunny and the money. Whether Roy ever reunites with either really isn't as important as just knowing.

It's a short book (not even 150 pages) which was fairly standard for pulp, paperback fiction of this sort (I tend to think of this as 1950's hard-boiled fiction, but this book was published in the very early 1960's). Even so, we manage to get into the psyche of Roy Martin and know what he's capable of, so his descending on the small town is rife with tension and danger.

Author Dan J. Marlowe's prose is tight and gritty, suiting the story perfectly. I wondered why I wasn't more familiar with Marlowe's work but a quick Google search filled me in a bit as to why he didn't make it bigger (even though this is considered a classic in the genre).

You can't be squeamish and you can't be prudish to read a book  like this.  There's plenty of violence and sex as you would expect (hope?) in such a story. But it's this enigma of a character, Roy Martin (aka Chet Arnold, aka ...), who holds the story together, despite (or maybe because of) his darker side.

Looking for a good book? The Name of the Game is Death by Dan J. Marlowe is a classic in the hard-boiled fiction genre. Sharp writing and wicked characters with lots of sex and violence define the genre and the book.

I received a digital copy of this book from the publisher, in a collection of novels, through Netgalley, in exchange for an honest review.

4 stars

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The Name of the Game is Death

author: Dan J. Marlowe

publisher: Vintage

ISBN: 9780679738480

paperback, 138 pages