Stephen King called Marlowe the hardest of the hard-boiled, and these two novels are his masterpieces. Here are the two books that introduce Earl Drake, a hardened thief on a mission of vengeance. He s been shot, burned and put away in an asylum but they can t keep him there. Drake is a force to be reckoned with. Barry Gifford said it best: Nobody wrote tougher prose than Dan J. Marlowe. Nobody. This volume includes an introduction by Charles Kelly, author of Gunshots in Another Room: The Forgotten Life of Dan J. Marlowe.