Dan J. Marlowe was an American crime novelist best remembered for his hard-edged paperback fiction and for The Name of the Game Is Death, one of the major American crime novels of the early 1960s. His work often moves through a world of professional criminals, desperate men, hidden identities, compromised loyalties, and sudden violence, placing him firmly in the tradition of tough American noir and hard-boiled crime writing.Before his wider reputation developed around Earl Drake and his later crime novels, Marlowe wrote the Johnny Killain books, a sequence of hotel-detective mysteries including Doorway to Death, Killer with a Key, Doom Service, The Fatal Frails, and Shake a Crooked Town. Simon & Schuster identifies Marlowe as the author of numerous crime novels, including Doom Service, Operation Flashpoint, and Doorway to Death. The Johnny Killain titles helped establish Marlowe's gift for tight plotting, violent atmosphere, and protagonists who operate in the uneasy borderland between order and corruption.