Rob Price
Gutbrain Records
rob + gutbrain.com = email


2018 September 19 • Wednesday

On the way to picking up some more Dan J. Marlowe titles, I came across a whole book about him! Charles Kelly's Gunshots in Another Room: The Forgotten Life of Dan J. Marlowe is the kind of very specific reference book that I love, an attempt to discover, arrange and present all the relevant information about a not especially well known author.

The first line is "The headaches seemed to well up from the green hell enveloping him, pounding pain emerging from the sticky heat pungent with saw grass, moss, cypress and brackish water".

Right away we're off in new territory. I didn't know that Marlowe suffered these headaches and that they led to eventual amnesia, most likely the result of a stroke. This almost gives him the chance to enact one of his own novels, Never Die Twice, about an amnesiac, though the parallel pretty much ends there.

Another revelation was his long relationship with convicted bankrobber Al Nussbaum, who got in touch with Marlowe after being impressed with The Name of the Game Is Death, the first in a long-running series about a bank robber eventually known as Earl Drake.

Nussbaum and Marlowe traded practical advice, about crime and writingm respectively, and Marlowe helped Nussbaum to get published and paroled.

Later in life Nussbaum returned the favor, helping the amnesia-stricken Marlowe to write and publish again. The two even lived together in Los Angeles.

Kelly relates the characters and their settings very well and does an excellent job conveying the texture of Marlowe's life: his work, his politics, his sexual activities and turn-ons, his friendships and travels. It's a better biography than most, despite the limited amount of information that can be known.

Sometimes Kelly has to take a guess at the title of a story or pick between two conflicting accounts of an event and he's always upfront about his sources and decisions.

As a book that's a window onto an extinct species of professional writing and one of its more interesting practitioners, Kelly's must be one of the best.