Chester Drum is a crude, street-smart private eye in Washington, DC who manages to get sent on international espionage missions for no good reason. This could be a nice premise for a comic series, but the books take themselves very seriously. The writing is competent pulp level fiction, but nothing worth reprinting.

In this 1956 book, a beautiful Moslem woman on pilgrimage to Mecca is being hunted by a ruthless Moslem killer who leads an Islamic/Communist terror group with members everywhere in the Middle East. So who do you send to find and protect her? A random private eye from Washington who is pretty good with fists and guns, not so good at thinking, who knows no Arabic nor any of the required ritual behavior on the Hajj, who would be instantly killed if he cannot convince everyone he is a devout Moslem. Aside from the difficulty of merely surviving the journey, he has to find the woman who has a four-day head start among the chaos of the largest annual gathering of people in the world AND he has to defeat the terrorist group operating in its element. Oh, and Chester Drum has no passport.

The absurd central adventure is embedded in a larger mystery almost as incredible. It might be fun in a comic book kind of way, but the protagonist is tormented by a delicate conscience incompatible with his violent ways. I don't mean he shoots people and then feels bad about it, I mean he shoots people and stews over the indirect causes until he figures out that he needs to kill somebody else; and that makes him feel bad both in a world-weary and annoyed way. Beautiful women constantly throw themselves at him, he mistreats them, then twists things so that he has to dump them (or occasionally, kill them).

These books were popular in their day, but have only historical interest now. If they weren't so silly, they'd be offensive.