The Professor

“I’d taken the law into my own hands, and I liked the feel of it.” Woah. None more hard-boiled. A guns-blazing bank robbery and getaway gets intercut with a rivetting back story (don’t mess with this guy’s friends or pets) that rivals “The Catcher In The Rye” for top notch characterful storytelling. Our “hero” is on a short fuse from the cradle – he’s Not A Team Player - but circumstances drive him to walk down some very mean streets. You do not want to cross this guy but by God is he a hell of a read.

This is the book for anyone who can't stand the modern veneration of ‘the team’. "Animals I like. People I can do without", "The bastard rubbed me completely the wrong way", "That day I quit the human race." There are many elements to the plot - bank heist, revenge thriller, road novel – but the “find the loot” narrative is clear and the characters complex. The corrupt cop and his floozy are painted fairy thinly, but narrator Drake (named some way down the novel line) drinks with transient friends, looks after maimed dogs, and in his youth got obsessively incensed by the injustices all around him. What drove him over the edge into absolute darkness (and lets be clear, this man is a murderer and rapist) is very relateable which will make this a – lets be polite – conflicting read for anyone who cleaves to their moral absolutes. After 50 or so pages of scorching storytelling (I can completely see why Stephen King tipped his hat to Marlowe in his dedication at the start of “The Colorado Kid”) the pace shifts down a gear in the middle as our anti-hero murders his way across country and inveigles himself into a small town trying to find out what has happened to his mute partner and the stash. Hilariously, he sets about searching for a lead on foot, road by road until he comes up against two problems: a local police thug and his abused missus, and a previous business partner who really should know not to go into a swamp on an Airboat with friend Drake. The finale is rip-roaring firey mayhem with a great reappearance from drinking pal Jed and Kaiser the dog that had this reader going “oh no!” aloud on the London Underground.

Then, oh boy, there’s Hazel and her cowboy boots - "the model for all women for all time" – and for me she is along with Drake, the soaring break-out character which made the "So long, baby..." moment very hard to read. Page after page of this novel has quoteable lines on it (“Fifty percent of us liked it” is one of the greatest brutal lines I’ve ever read), it’s fantastically well written (Drake arrives back at the bar fresh from murdering someone and gets immediately involved in a conversation about the "unmitigated dullness of life in a small town”) and in fact more so in this reader’s opinion than many more self-conciously serious novels. Marlowe – beyond his literary namesake – is a new name to me, one whose oeuvre I fully intend to laser onto the back of my eyeballs, and someone who cursory researches suggest had a rather, ah, interesting life himself. Fingers crossed “The Name Of The Game Is Death” is not the pinnacle of his work but representative of it. Either way, on the basis of this, it’s a mystery to me why this man isn’t more widely known outside of we lovers of pitch-black, hard boiled, guns-blazing, man-fic. "Somebody else will have to explain it you."