After military service in Korea, he was tipped off by science-fiction editor Damon Knight about an opening with the Scott Meredith literary agency.

Meredith, who dreaded advertising an editorial job that would attract literary "wannabes", was rare among agents. Besides traditional representation, his other business was critiquing, for a fee, manuscripts submitted by aspiring authors. Many struggling writers took jobs as editors with Meredith and went on to prolific careers, including Donald Westlake and Lawrence Block. In fact, as the new chief editor, Marlowe's first hiring was one Salvatore Lombino, who would become first Evan Hunter and then Ed McBain.

Marlowe sold short stories to the few remaining pulp magazines, mostly science fiction, and wrote episodes of the Captain Video and Sense of Wonder shows in the new medium of television. His novels were "space opera", short on science and long on intergalactic conflict. He soon left Meredith to write full time, leaving his job to Lombino. His first thriller, Catch the Brass Ring (1954), was set at Coney Island and published under his Stephen Marlowe pseudonym. Although crime buffs assumed the pen name to be a homage to Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe, Lesser had already used it for science-fiction stories as early as 1951. When Lombino had a bestseller with The Blackboard Jungle in 1954, he took Evan Hunter as his legal name. Lesser followed suit in 1960, becoming Stephen Marlowe.
    -OBIT: Stephen Marlowe: US sci-fi and crime writer and early star of Gold Medal books (Michael Carlson, 28 May 2008, The Guardian)

The reason for Drum’s success is twofold. First: Unlike his contemporaries, nearly all of whom plied their trade in a large, urban U.S. environment, his “beat” was international and the cases he investigated of a far-reaching, often volatile political nature. While he maintained an office in Washington – and later, another in Geneva, Switzerland – his cases took him to such global locales as Iceland, India, Russia, Spain, France, Italy, and South America.

And second: Drum’s creator is both a writer of considerable talent and a lifelong globetrotter himself. The respected critic Anthony Boucher, reviewing one of the early Drum novels in the New York Times, said that “very few writers of the tough private-eye story can tell it more accurately than Mr. Marlowe, or with such taut understatement of violence and sex.”

He might have added that Marlowe’s depictions of foreign backgrounds, the result of first-hand experience, are as vividly rendered as they are authentic. And that Chet Drum is a fully realized character, believable as both man and detective – intelligent, tough when he has to be, compassionate yet unsentimental.
    -TRIBUTE: Bill Pronzini on STEPHEN MARLOWE, 1928-2008. (Bill Pronzini, 2/27/08, Mystery File)