The Vengeance Man

by Dan J. Marlowe

Book by Marlowe, Dan J.

Genres: Crime, Noir, Mystery, Fiction

160 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1966

About the author

aka Albert Avellano, Jaime Sandaval, Gar Wilson (house name)

Dan J. Marlowe was a middle-aged businessman who, in the personal turmoil after the death of his wife of many years, decided to abandon his old life. He started writing, and his first novel was published when he was 45.

Marlowe's most famous book and his best-known character arrived from Fawcett Gold Medal Books in 1962 ("The Name of the Game Is Death").

Reviews

[Dave · Rating 5 out of 5]

Jim Wilson’s wife Mona is a rich, spoiled brat. She also sleeps around with every guy in town, not caring if she rubs it in Jim’s face. Jim has a private detective follow her and, after hearing her best friend lie about where Mona was and the detective trail her to a shady motel on the edge of town, Jim steels himself with a few shots of liquor, takes his . 38 and heads out to the motel, where he breaks down the motel room door, catches Mona and her current paramour in the act and pours a volume of lead into Mona’s face and into the poor sap who was putting it to her. Most authors would spend fifty or sixty percent of the book discussing how anguished Jim was and what a hellish bitch Mona was, slowing ratcheting up the tension until Jim can’t take it anymore and pulls the trigger. Not Dan Marlowe. He has Jim hunt down his cheating wife in just a couple of short, deliciously hard-boiled pages and has the grand jury decide his case by the end of the first chapter. There is so much in that first chapter that Marlowe wouldn’t have been crazy to repeat it more than once. It is really that chock full of the good pulpy stuff that you are probably looking for.

However, that first chapter is just Marlowe’s opening salvo and Jim Wilson turns out to be a mean, crafty bastard that makes Thompson’s Lou Ford look like a piker. There isn’t room for two kings in this small Southern town and Wilson is out to take down his former father-in-law and make himself the king, no matter what it takes and no matter who gets in the way. He will turn to strong-arm tactics, blackmail, arm- twisting, and whatever else it takes. But, he’s not the only one so inclined and “Lud,” his dead wife’s best friend, may just be his match in craftiness and cleverness and underhandedness. The back-and-forth sparring between those two is almost too much to bear.

The entire book is dripping with hard-boiled goodness. The tension is thick throughout and there are points where the Southern style noir prose is just fantastic. Jim is one of the good-old-boys, not adverse to pumping his lawyer’s secretary for information while they rendezvous in a secret woodsy cabin. Jim is also debonair enough to mingle at the country club where the backroom deals are made.

This book is properly considered to be one of Marlowe’s best

[Still · Rating 4 out of 5]

A quart of James M. Cain French-pressed through a gallon of Jim Thompson.
Friggin' brilliant writing!

I can't believe Marlowe squeezed this much story into 160 pages.
It's a complicated tale of cuckoldry, lesbianism, foiled machismo, and triple crosses.

I didn't say anything. Women are always trying to justify themselves to men. And to themselves. A waste of time and breath. ...
"You -- scared me last night" she went on. "And after- after what happened- well, I shouldn't have come. I don't know why I came."

"You came because you like getting shafted..."

One reason I kept coming back to her when I kept telling myself I really didn't have the time to fool around was that she was good in bed. She enjoyed it, and she worked at it.
"Not so --fast!" she protested breathlessly, but she popped her weasel before I did....

This is a tough, hardboiled read.
Lotsa praise abound for Jim Thompson but hardly anyone remembers Dan J. Marlowe.
Shame on all of you.
This one's a keeper.

[Jamie · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars. A scheming, power hungry, oversexed good ol' southern country boy who feels emasculated by his unfaithful, lesbian wife reaches a breaking point and wants a little revenge. Of course, the best revenge is living well, which is just what he plans to do after cutting her out of the picture and clawing his way, via blackmail and a little murder, to the top of the local power establishment, becoming the county's new de facto "Boss Hogg".

Tightly plotted and expertly written this was a lot of fun, but fell short of Marlowe's hardboiled crime tour de force, The Name of the Game Is Death, which remains one of my all time favorite crime pulps. If you're not familiar with Marlowe, I highly recommend starting with that!

[WJEP · Rating 5 out of 5]

This has the most hard-boiled first chapter of all noir crime books.

[Steven · Rating 4 out of 5]

Jim Wilson, our first person narrator, is a sociopath, but he is not pretending to be a rube as the sociopathic narrators in Jim Thompson novels do. As the novel begins he is waiting for a private detective to call and tell him in which hotel and room he can find his cheating wife. Then he carefully sets it up to look like a crime of passion before going to the hotel and killing her in cold blood. Then he tells us how he is going to beat the rap at the inquest, and he does. And then he takes revenge on the cop who beat him during the interrogation by breaking his shins and making him crawl out of the swamp to save his life. That out of the way, he sets in motion a plan to ruthlessly take over as the power broker in the small South Carolina town where he lives, but with ambitions to expand his power base from there using is road construction business as the platform to take control of the county and more. To Wilson, everyone is an object to be remorselessly manipulated to achieve his goals. And Marlowe knocks it out of the park with this portrait of a small town corruption, and especially with the sociopathic personalities - and Wilson is not the only one; Marlowe adroitly provides him several sociopathic foils. Although Marlowe dishes out a bunch of incendiary 5-star scenes, the plot at times reads a bit made up as it goes, with back story suddenly interrupting the flow to help make sense of some of the action. Although that is not much of a distraction in this Gold Medal paperback noir classic.

[Steve · Rating 4 out of 5]

"The gun went off by itself, five times."

Yeah, this is as hard-boiled as it gets. The only reason I'm not giving this 5 stars is the lack of believable character motivation after a piece of rough (and shocking) motel justice in the opening pages. That justice is dispensed by tough guy, and road contractor, Jim Wilson. The object, Mona, is Wilson's trashy cheating wife. She's also the daughter of the town's Mr. Big. So Wilson better be careful. But Wilson's got a plan. He's a man of plans. And if they don't work, there's always the .38 he keeps in the glove compartment of his car. After this opening, as a reader, you're asking yourself, where can Marlowe take this story? Well, plenty of places, all of them sleazy and dark. Interestingly, as the novel goes on, Marlowe slowly reveals Wilson as perhaps the most honorable character in a cast filled with predatory lizards. But there's other stuff, a lot of it sexual, that put Marlowe right up there with Jim Thompson in the world of Kink-noir. The ending screams for a movie version by the Coen brothers, or maybe even David Lynch.

Note: You can get this cheap as an e-book.

[Mark · Rating 4 out of 5]

Best read in one sitting, THE VENGEANCE MAN is a nasty little Gold Medal bon-bon. Beyond the genre trappings (revenge, femme fatale, tough guys good and bad) what's most interesting to me is how this short novel starts out "hard-boiled" (classically, a ruthless man out for gain or revenge) but then shifts to "noir" (classically, everything goes wrong for a protagonist because of how decisions, usually involving women, are made). Additionally this novel offers some great insight into small-town politics (it's sort of a darker SC version of John D. MacDonald's take on FL); a Jim Thompson-esque first-person narrator; and the kind of ending only Dan Marlowe could write.

[Matt Sears · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Nobody laughs at me and gets away with it.

Not even my cheating wife—a couple of bullets through the guts took care of her.

Not even the crooked senator.

Not even the blackmailing lesbian.

Not even the extortionist who'd taken the incriminating pictures.

But there were still some wise guys left who really believed they could kill me before I kill them. That's what damn fools are made of...” –The Back Cover

Original printing 1962, this is a 1974 reprint. 9fc cover price, 191 pages

Dan J. Marlowe’s The Vengeance Man is one hard-boiled murder story by, and a pretty sick and twisted one at that. A departure from the standard noir novel, Vengeance Man follows Jim Wilson, an out-and-out sociopath, as he ruthlessly climbs to power in the south. The book opens with Wilson shooting his adulteress wife in a motel after setting up a series of events to make it seem like a “crime of passion,” rather than the calculated murder it actually was. Soon released from jail because of juror sentiment rather than a technicality, Wilson embarks on a reign of terror that both revenges himself upon people, and, of course, benefits him financially.

Marlowe waits until after the inaugural murder to reveal that not only is Jim Wilson the sole benefactor of his late wife’s small fortune, but that he was cheating as well. In fact, all of his acts of revenge are undermined by the double standards he has for himself. Fortunately, we’re not expected to like Wilson, or any of the immoral characters throughout this book, considering they all spend the novel backstabbing and climbing over each other like obstacles. In just under 200 pages, our protagonist murders, blackmails, steals, and even rapes, in a one man orgy of hatred and greed. This doesn’t sound like a pleasant book, but Marlowe pulls it off almost perfectly.

The man could write. Oftentimes, Marlowe reminded me of Faulkner—a perverted and violent Faulkner, but Faulkner nonetheless. You get the vibe that Wilson, as the narrator, gives up trying to sugar coat his story after the first chapter. He goes on to unleash a torrent of woman-hating, absolute greed, and ferocity, all of which somehow didn’t get watered down by an editor. The end result: The Vengeance Man is a powerful book. Anti-hero in Jim Wilson is surrounded by a cast of characters just as immoral and debauched as he is, all of whom are in over their heads and are punished much worse than they deserve.

I recommend this book, but not to someone looking to get a chuckle out of a book with a shitty cover, as this is some intense reading. I know this write-up was all very vague, but almost any details would have been spoilers, this being a noir novel after all.

pulpaweek.blogspot.com

[Jim Thomsen · Rating 3 out of 5]

THE VENGEANCE MAN is one of Dan J. Marlowe's better hardboiled crime thrillers, happily stewed in its world of simmering hatreds and with a few nifty last-act story twists to boot. But the misogyny toward women is hard to overlook, even as an artifact of its time. Women in this novel are either dreary simpletons, dopey sexpots or dead-eyed shrews, to a degree that's so unrelenting that at times it feels almost personal. Or maybe no almost about it.:

"Women are always trying to justify themselves to men. And to themselves. A waste of time and breath. A lot of foofaraw for nothing."

"I tipped her onto her back and filled my hands. Then I flipped her onto her belly and filled them again. My response was automatic. 'You really do have a big *ss, girl,' I told her. 'Let’s put it to work.'"

"Ever since I was a little girl, I’ve wanted to be a part of the power elite in the state. I had a good start with the family money, but I needed a man."

And ....

“There’s no reason we can’t get along,” she said coaxingly.

“We will get along, but not in bed.”

“But why? Will you please tell me why?”

“Because I’m all through letting women like you emasculate me. That’s why.”

My advice: Read this novel to better appreciate the craft that informed top-drawer works of the time like THE NAME OF THE GAME IS DEATH and FOUR FOR THE MONEY. Enjoy seeing a man like Jim Wilson, blinded by hatred and greed and a thimbleful of cold justification, go after — and get — exactly what he deserves in the end. Enjoy trying to fix your eye on the character whose motives don't quite fit for most of the story, and wonder why, and what that means. Then toss this one aside and bleach it out of your brain pan.

[The Professor · Rating 3 out of 5]

“There was no future where I was”. Jim Wilson blows his cheatin’ wife away, maims her lover, is immediately arrested, walks free and then gets down to work. Dan J. Marlowe – he of the cosy crime novel “The Name Of The Game Is Death” – has many plates spinning here and while “Vengeance” doesn’t quite reach the rip-roaring heights of “Name” it’s a nice tight shot of whisky nonetheless.

For a novel with “Vengeance” in the title this turns out to feature much more political shenanigans and power games than I expected, albeit with an unreconstructed male protagonist who is likely to beat people senseless to make his point. It’s a novel which features murder, rape (“This one needed to be shown who was in charge”), a back-story of violent retribution against a religious bigot Uncle, shirtless fisticuffs in a back yard and thanks to Dan’s personal peccadillos a notable number of slaps across the bottom but there is too much going on to dismiss the novel as just a collection of dinosaur man-fic tropes. “Vengeance” is a sort of proto-“Chinatown”, arguably influenced by what Jim Thompson had been doing and the novel has half an eye on the bigger games in town, the road engineering contracts and the secret cabal of rootin’-tootin’ big-wigs who get to divvy them out. The hook of the novel turns out to be less about whether bad boy Wilson will face justice but whether he will succeed in ending up as one of these bigwigs with Ludmilla as eminence grise behind his throne. Arguably, Marlowe’s ambitious narrative scope is hamstrung by the page count here which is a pity; it would have been delicious to see grunting neanderthal Wilson and steely-eyed socialite Ludmilla running things, falling out, then going to war with each other but the demands of the form means this is a version of Macbeth which ends before the throne is claimed. We never get the ultimate indictment of this corrupt community: Wilson as head honcho.

Sadly, there are a couple of additional dissonances. First, if it weren’t for that pesky designin’ broad Ludmilla (“a clear and present danger of a type other than I’d imagined”) who is mighty fine and sharp with it Wilson would have got away with his plottin’. Women, eh? Ludmilla is a schemer and not much else and Marlowe misses an obvious trick not giving her a few extra characterful grace notes or making her more Livia-like. She’s a force of nature but she’s certainly no Hazel. Secondly, sexual fluidity ain’t what it used to be; Wilson’s affrontary that his wife was an iceberg with him but playing around with Ludmilla – at one point unwittingly on a film then used to blackmail her – certainly plays into the theme-ette of emasculation (“I’m all through with letting women like you emasculate me”) but it lands as unsophisticated even for these waters. Marlowe gives no authorial signals that Wilson’s distaste is personal so it reads as product-of-his-environment stuff and Ludmilla certainly suspects the scandal will ruin her socially but beyond that there is not much more evidence to suggest Marlowe was indicting small-town bigotry or the zeitgeist in the way Jim Thompson would. Marlowe’s background as purveyor of sauce (not least in this novel) doesn’t help matters, lending the suspicion that this flirtation with lesbianism is a little bit of out of date sensationalism – even for 1966, 14 years after Highsmith’s “The Price Of Salt” – dropped into place with an eye on sales.

That said, there are some fun switcheroos – murderer Wilson having to play detective in trying to track down Ludmilla’s hired killer; his withholding of sex from Ludmilla as a power game – and there are some enjoyable novelistic pauses in the action as we get to join our loveable hero heading home, mixing himself a drink and throwing a steak on the grill. Author Marlowe is also fond of the occasional Gallicism so despite whether or not you think Jim Wilson would actually come out with it Marlowe’s prose is dotted with coup de foudre, inamorata, prèmiere danseuse and of course Ludmilla is distinguished by a “patrician hauteur”. It all makes for a blistering read – a strong narrative told in good prose – but Ludmilla and Mona should have run off with each other and we readers should have got one notch more vengeful retribution from a novel called “The Vengeance Man”. “I’m not playing tiddledywinks with you goddam people”.

[Two Envelopes And A Phone · Rating 4 out of 5]

Everyone's lousy. The main character is especially disgusting. A frothing maelstrom of foul acts. My constant fear that certain people wouldn't get what they deserve.

This is great story-telling, but it's hardcore hardboiled and not for everybody. I had to wait until the end of the book to see if the whole thing was a message I don't like. My rating should suggest that I was able to cope with how it all flushed along and out. If you can't take books with no good people, don't take this book with you. For fans of Pop. 1280, The Killer Inside Me, the Thompson stuff.

A sordid, sleazy, nasty little tale, probably on of the best of its kind. And as I mentioned, when all is said and done, the grim reaping is a direct result of what got soughed. I'm okay with that.

[Chris Orlet · Rating 2 out of 5]

Hate not finishing books. But the narrator was such a cocky, sleazeball I didn't want to spend any more time with him. Enjoyed The Name of the Game is Death by same author. Love noir, but prefer the narrators who are regular joes to the asshole narrators.

[Andrew Nette · Rating 4 out of 5]

Loved this. Nasty as hell.

[Freddie the Know-it-all · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Moby Dick of Monte Cristo

Loved it. Everyone loves revengeance. Will read it again soon.

[David Way · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars This one starts off really strong..then gets a little slow good ending

[George K. · Rating 4 out of 5]

In this novel, my fourth by Dan J. Marlowe, we don't have bank robberies, muggers and stuff, but a man who kills his cheating wife and get away with it. And not only that... OK, i don't think that is as good as the first two Earl Drake novels, but is still gritty, hard-boiled and noir. The prose is amazing, the plot interesting and the narrator a sociopath guy like a Jim Thompson's character. If you'are a fan of pulp fiction, you'll find a treasure here!

Ελληνικά:

"Ο εκδικητής", εκδόσεις Άγκυρα.

Τέταρτο βιβλίο του Νταν Τζ. Μάρλοου που διαβάζω και αυτή την φορά δεν έχουμε να κάνουμε με ληστές τραπεζών και σχέδια για την καλύτερη δυνατή μπάζα, αλλά με μια ιστορία εκδίκησης ενός απατημένου συζύγου... και όχι μόνο.

Η ιστορία διαδραματίζεται στην πόλη Μολίν της Νότιας Καρολίνας και πρωταγωνιστής είναι ο Τζιμ Γουίλσον που δουλεύει ως μηχανικός σε μια κατασκευαστική εταιρεία. Ο Γουίλσον πιάνει στα πράσα την γυναίκα του μ'έναν άλλο άντρα και την σκοτώνει. Ο φόνος φαίνεται να είναι εν βρασμώ ψυχής και λόγω των περίεργων νόμων της πολιτείας αθωώνεται, μόνο που ο φόνος ήταν προμελετημένος και με στόχο ο Γουίλσον να αποκτήσει κάποια χρήματα και δύναμη στην τοπική κοινωνία για το καλό της εταιρείας του και παράλληλα να χτυπήσει τον πατέρα της νεκρής πλέον γυναίκας του, που είναι ένας από τους δικαστές της πόλης με μεγάλη επιρροή παντού. Ο Γουίλσον θα έρθει αντιμέτωπος τόσο με την διαφθορά στα ανώτερα δημόσια κλιμάκια της πόλης, όσο και με μια γυναίκα που έχει δικά της σχέδια...

Τα σχόλια που διάβασα σε διάφορα αμερικάνικα blogs που ασχολούνται με την παλπ αστυνομική λογοτεχνία ήταν αν μη τι άλλο θετικά για το βιβλίο και μπορώ να πω ότι δεν έλεγαν ψέματα. Σαν φαν του είδους έμεινα ευχαριστημένος, διάβασα μια σκληρή αστυνομική ιστορία με ενδιαφέρουσα πλοκή, αρκετή δράση, νουάρ ατμόσφαιρα και έναν αντιήρωα που αφηγούνταν σε πρώτο πρόσωπο, ο οποίος μου θύμισε έντονα χαρακτήρα του Τζιμ Τόμσον. Ναι μεν δεν μπορείς να τον συμπαθήσεις με αυτά που κάνει, από την άλλη όμως δεν μπορείς να λυπηθείς τους υπόλοιπους γιατί είναι το ίδιο σκατά.

Η αλήθεια είναι ότι ήθελα κάποια παραπάνω πράγματα και ίσως περισσότερη μαυρίλα απ'όση υπήρχε, παρόλ'αυτά σίγουρα έμεινα ευχαριστημένος. Το βιβλίο προτείνεται αποκλειστικά και μόνο στους φαν της παλπ αστυνομικής λογοτεχνίας.

[John · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this as part of the Stark House three-in-one volume A Trio of Gold Medals, ISBN 978-933586-14-4. I'm noting it here, though, because I'll be wanting to note the other two novels in that volume separately.

What you have to remember at the outset is that all but one of the major and supporting characters in this tale are vile; the only one who isn't, so far as I recall, is the legal secretary who's the mistress of the main protagonist and narrator, Jim Wilson. He's half of a small-time construction company in Moline, SC. His partner Whit seems less corrupt but it proves is into group sex with underage girls. Jim himself is married to Mona, daughter of the local corrupt power broker Tom Harrington; after years of being sexually rejected by her, Jim engineers a situation whereby he can murder her without much fear of prosecution. Of course, that leaves him open to blackmail by Mona's lesbian lover Ludmilla "Lud" Pierson, who's married to local banker George. But Lud reckons that, if George could have an "accident", she and Jim could marry and take over the whole of this end of the state . . .

It goes on like this until there's a final, bloody denouement. In the interim there's a fair amount of violence and great kaboodles of loveless, alarmingly unsubtle sex. (When Jim's asked by a counselor what his favourite part of lovemaking is, he answers: "ramming it home.") The book's very readable but it leaves a nasty taste in the mouth -- which, of course, is exactly what it's designed to do.

The Stark House edition is very spick as a physical object but is marred by lots of little typographical errors. To be fair, proofreading OCRed texts is always a bit of a nightmare, but I feel just a bit more of an effort could have been made.

[Eric · Rating 3 out of 5]

taut and fun but motivations -- specifically of Lud - made little sense.