Stephen Marlowe, born Milton Lesser in Brooklyn, New York, in 1928, was a prolific American novelist who made significant contributions to mid-twentieth-century popular fiction. Writing under his birth name as well as a variety of pseudonyms, he established a versatile career that spanned multiple genres, including science fiction, mystery, and historical fiction.
Marlowe is perhaps best remembered for creating the private eye Chester Drum, a character who debuted in the 1955 novel The Second Longest Night. Drum was a Washington, D.C.-based investigator whose cases frequently took him on international adventures, distinguishing him from the typical localized hardboiled detectives of the era. Throughout his career, Marlowe also published works under several pen names, including Adam Chase, Andrew Frazer, C.H. Thames, Jason Ridgway, Stephen Wilder, and the collaborative pseudonym Ellery Queen.
In his later career, Marlowe shifted his focus toward literary historical fiction. He received acclaim for his detailed fictional autobiographies of prominent historical and cultural figures. Among these works were imagined life stories of the Spanish painter Francisco Goya, the explorer Christopher Columbus, the seminal Spanish novelist Miguel de Cervantes, and the American master of the macabre, Edgar Allan Poe. Marlowe passed away in Williamsburg, Virginia, in 2008 at the age of 79.
