time of his death he was planning to return to England and complete a tenth novel, Black and White. Novelist Nicholas Royle calls Marlowe one of the two biggest influences on him as a writer. "Both flit in and out of genres, appealing to genre readers and mainstream readers at the same time. And both write beautifully, which I aspire to do." Career Theatre In 1960 he adapted a story, The Seven Who Were Hanged by Leonid Andreyev, for the stage. The 60 Theatre Group first produced the play at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 1961, and later took it to a student theatre festival in Zadar, Croatia (then Yugoslavia). It was produced in London as The Scarecrow in 1964, and won the Foyle award. In 1962 Marlowe adapted Maxim Gorki's book The Lower Depths for the London stage. Novels Marlowe also wrote nine novels and a fragment of a tenth. Alex Hamilton believes that "the notion of the successful man who loses his way is the key preoccupation in Marlowe's books." He published his first novel A Dandy in Aspic in 1966. The idea for the book began when he travelled to Berlin on a Ford Foundation grant to attend a "colloquium on creative writing" with Günter Grass and Uwe Johnson. Marlowe wrote the books in four weeks while working as a clerk at National Benzole and struggling with a play that he'd been attempting to write. The book was a best-seller and was subsequently filmed. Spy author Alan Furst calls the book wonderful and terrific. Nicholas Royle cites the novel as the fifth greatest debut novel ever written, though adding that Marlowe would go on to write "even better novels". According to Alex Hamilton, the American and British editions have different endings owing to the American publisher's dislike for the protagonist's death in a car accident. According to a 1976 interview, Marlowe believed that his 1969 novel A Single Summer With L.B.: The Summer of 1816 was his finest. In 1979 actor Robert Powell said that he intended to produce and star in an adaptation of the novel; Powell would play Lord Byron. Marlowe returned to the world of espionage in his 1970 novel Echoes of Celandine which was subsequently filmed as The Disappearance starring Donald Sutherland. Marlowe's 1972 novel Do You Remember England? is a semi-autobiographical work. To research his 1975 supernatural novel Nightshade, Marlowe and his