This ruled. I knew I had to pick it up when I saw it get praised in the back pages of an issue of Ed Burbaker and Sean Philip's comic book Criminal.
I feel like with successful noir there's often a civic angle that gets overlooked. With Chandler and Hammett, it's often in the form a certain fallenness. We have protagonists who are men of ideals in a world that's given up on such things, gone corrupt. That's sometimes present in in Jim Thompson's books, but there's also an angle of alienation. Protagonists who live apart from any sort of community, in a world that's completely indifferent and/or outright hostile to their existence. Strangely I think it's the indifference that hits harder. When it's done right––and it hits hard in the first half of The Name of the Game is Death––it creates a powerful sense of loneliness.
I really think Marlowe got this, because the protagonist here briefly does find a community. It's small and consists of himself, a love interest, a friend, a dog and a place to drink but what more does a person need? But his need for revenge against the people who killed his partner and stole the score drives him to sabotage any chance he has for a normal life.
The book is hardboiled pulp at its best. It's short and the action doesn't let up. After the cliffhanger ending I look forward to reading the sequel, One Endless Hour, if not the entire series. In true pulp fashion the author wrote ten books but by the third book he changed the protagonist Drake from a cop-hating psychopathic tree surgeon/bank robber into a secret agent.
Details
Title: The Name of the Game is Death
Author: Dan J Marloe
Series: The Man with Nobody's Face
Format: ebook
Length: 320 pages
Date: published January 1962
Publisher: Smashwords Edition
No comments:
Post a Comment