DIVProtecting an actor takes Drum into the seedy underworld of psychedelia/div DIVTerminal illness and regret go hand-in-hand. Two months ago, Amos Littlejohn was in the prime of life, and had plenty of energy to be enraged when his pregnant daughter was abandoned by her husband, matinee idol Ahmed Shiraz. Now stricken with leukemia, Littlejohn is near death, and beginning to regret taking out a contract on the actor’s life./divDIV /divDIVHe hires international private eye Chester Drum to call off the hit and protect Shiraz until his life is safe. On his first night on the job, Drum’s partner takes a shotgun blast meant for the actor. Wanting nothing more than to wring Shiraz’s neck, Drum follows him to Europe, where he must contend with assassins, beatniks, and the powerful effects of an experimental drug called LSD./div

DIVWhen Drum picks up a hitchhiker, trouble follows her into the car/divDIV A monsoon is hammering Washington, DC, when Chester Drum spots Anita Sparrow on the roadside in the middle of the night. Sixteen, frail, and soaking wet, she is trying to find help for her brother, Donny, a photographer with cerebral palsy who was beaten nearly to death a mile up the road. Drum takes Donny to the hospital and drives Anita home, where he finds her house ransacked, her brother’s darkroom destroyed. It seems Donny took a picture of something he wasn’t supposed to see, and powerful men will kill to ensure the negative is never developed./divDIV /divDIVOn top of it all, Drum soon learns that the Sparrows have ties to some of the biggest names inside the Beltway, and Anita is not as innocent as she appears. Her family story simmers with pornography, corruption, and murder—not polite topics for dinner table conversation, but ones that make Chester Drum feel right at home. /div

Preliminary Material -- INTRODUCTION -- HISTORY AND THE NOVEL: AN OVERVIEW -- MASTERING THE ART: THE HISTORICAL NOVEL AND LOCAL COLOR -- BETWEEN MAGIC AND MADNESS: A PORTRAIT OF SPAIN AND ITS NEUROSES -- POSTMODERN CRITIQUE AND THE HAND OF THE HISTORIAN -- CHAOS, COMPLEXITY AND INTERPRETATION -- BEYOND REFERENCE: HISTORIOGRAPHIC METAFICTION IMPINGED BY SCIENCE FICTION -- THE NOVEL NEVER ENDS: ON ALTERNATIVE WORLDS, JEWISH CONNECTIONS AND INFINITE REGRESS -- CONCLUDING REMARKS -- NOVELS PUBLISHED BY MILTON LESSER UNDER THE FOLLOWING NAMES OR PSEUDONYMS -- SHORT STORIES -- BIBLIOGRAPHY -- INDEX.

DIVA kidnapped intellectual and a dead partner take Drum to South America/div DIVWhen Andy Dineen tires of the FBI, he jumps ship for Langley and joins the CIA to fight the Cold War in Berlin. After years in the spy game, he grows sick of the paperwork, and is considering his options when an old friend, private detective Chester Drum, offers him a job. Drum is surprised when his old academy classmate takes him up on it, and shocked when it gets Dineen killed./divDIV /divDIVDineen’s first and last case is a stint as a bodyguard for a South American intellectual who’s writing an exposé of his nation’s savage dictator. When the strongman’s thugs kidnap the author and bludgeon Dineen, Drum rushes to the hospital just in time to watch his friend die. Avenging Dineen will mean a trip to South America, and infiltrating a palace whose secret police are not half as dangerous as the despot’s daughter./div

DIVWith a body in his office and a pocketful of secrets, Drum heads to Moscow/div DIVEugenie is seventeen, with long legs, blond hair, and an appetite for misery. Daughter of a corrupt millionaire, she has bounced around Europe’s finest boarding schools, and Chester Drum knows she’s trouble the moment he sees her tearing her blouse to implicate Ilya Alluliev, a Russian diplomat, in rape. The man came to give her a message, an envelope that quickly finds its way to Drum’s safe. Inside is an unsigned note claiming that a Russian Nobel Prize–winning poet is in grave danger. As soon as he reads it, Drum joins the poet on the Kremlin’s hit list./divDIV /divDIVThe next day, Drum goes to his office and finds Alluliev on the floor, shot dead. The police cannot help him; Drum will find answers only behind the Iron Curtain. At the height of the Cold War, Drum will risk his life for the sake of a fire-eyed teen with a heart made of ice./div

DIVTo find his ex-wife’s killer, Drum takes on the Communist Party/divDIV Deirdre Hartsell loved life too much to shoot herself in her pretty head. She’d been a high-society party girl since her days at college, and her two greatest passions were keeping up appearances and having a roaring good time. Women like that don’t kill themselves, and Deirdre’s father wants to prove that his girl didn’t die by her own hand. To get the truth, he hires Washington DC’s sharpest private detective, Chester Drum. After all, Drum knew Deirdre better than anyone—he was married to her./divDIV /divDIVBut in a town built on lies, Deirdre lived with more than her fair share of secrets, and the first thing Drum learns is that his late ex-wife was a prominent member of the Communist Party, supporting the local cell with endless donations from her fat checkbook. Did leftist sympathies get Deirdre killed? The truth lies in Venezuela—and Chester Drum has gone farther than that for answers before./div

DIVA drive-by killing puts Drum on the scent of a Washington sex scandal/div DIVWhen Chester Drum first took a crack at detective work, PI Gil Sprayregan offered to split a case with him, giving the rookie half the fee and more credit than he deserved. Years later, Drum is established and Gil is at the tail end of a long, slow fall,/divDIVdrinking heavily and considering blackmail to make ends meet. When he gets in over his head, Sprayregan’s wife begs Drum to help. But her husband has already taken the first step on the road to oblivion./divDIV /divDIVDrum takes a dinghy out to Sprayregan’s Chesapeake hideout. When they return, a car full of gangsters kills Sprayregan and puts Drum in the hospital. Drum doesn’t mourn the man who gave him his first break, but to the new widow, he owes a debt. No matter how well connected they are, he will break the men who gunned down Gil Sprayregan./div

DIVTo recover his license, Drum must unlock the mystery of a professor’s suicide/div DIVDuncan Hadley Lord seems too happy to kill himself. But then, he has no reason to sleep around, either. For three months the history professor has carried on an affair with a call girl, and for the last few weeks Chester Drum and his partner, rookie PI Jerry Trowbridge, have watched him do it. When Lord steps onto a fourth-story window ledge on Homecoming night, Drum gets through the police cordon just in time to watch the professor fall to earth./divDIV /divDIVAn embittered local sheriff, convinced that Drum and his partner were blackmailing the professor, has their license revoked. To salvage his business, Drum must find the real reason for Lord’s suicide. He has tangled with politicians, thieves, and spies, but no detective can truly know treachery until he steps into the hallowed halls of a college campus./div

A PI heads from DC to Saudi Arabia to save the life of a client targeted by a hit man. Nothing will stop the beautiful Fawzia Totah and her lover, US Army colonel Lyman Tyler, from boarding a plane for the Middle East to make their pilgrimage to Mecca. So Fawzia hires Washington PI Chester Drum to serve as bodyguard until she’s safely out of the country. But Lyman’s wealthy mother, Davisa, doesn’t want Fawzia to go anywhere safely. The violently bigoted, socially connected woman comes from old Virginia money, and she’s not about to let this former dancer from Jordan risk her precious Southern reputation. Not only is her son prepared to convert to Islam for the woman he loves, he’s also already married. When Davisa hires a hit man to track down Fawzia and take her out, Drum has no choice but to follow. However, Davisa’s motives aren’t as simple as they first seem—and the road to Mecca has a sudden turn no one will see coming. This is a twisting, fast-paced mystery in the vintage series that “combined elements of the hard-boiled detective story and the international espionage thriller” by a recipient of the Private Eye Writers of America’s lifetime achievement award (The New York Times). Mecca for Murder is the 2nd book in the Chester Drum Mysteries, but you may enjoy reading the series in any order.

DIVDrum confronts a senator to save the life of a drunken old friend/div DIVWhen Chester Drum knew him, Jack Morley was a Washington player, just a few promotions away from becoming Secretary of State. A bad divorce and a nervous breakdown later, Morley has hit rock bottom, and works in Paris for the Army ghoul squad, confirming the deaths of World War II soldiers long ago reported missing in action. Morley is content to spend the rest of his life wallowing in the bottom of a Pernod bottle, until word gets out that he is blackmailing a US senator—an accusation that could cost him his life./divDIV /divDIVThough disgusted by his old friend’s drunkenness, Drum agrees to make Morley’s case to the senator. Blackmailer or no, Morley has stumbled onto a conspiracy that dates back to the end of the war. If Drum can’t get to the bottom of it, Morley won’t be the only one to die./div