MostlyFiction Book Reviews » Max Allan Collins We Love to Read! Wed, 14 May 2014 13:06:32 +0000 en-US hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=4.3 QUARRY’S EX by Max Allan Collins /2010/quarrys-ex-by-max-allan-collins/ /2010/quarrys-ex-by-max-allan-collins/#comments Tue, 28 Sep 2010 15:28:19 +0000 /?p=12441 Book Quote:

“I don’t want to kill you.”

“That’s almost like…almost like hearing you say you still love me, Jack.”

Book Review:

Review by Daniel Luft  (SEP 28, 2010)

Another autumn descends and another Quarry novel is on the shelf. These are good times to be a reader. With four Quarry Novels in five years, Max Allan Collins can almost be forgiven for the 20-year gap in the series from the mid 80s to the mid 00s.

This time Quarry, a former hitman for the mob who has turned freelance, is on the set of a low budget biker movie in the late 70s. He’s trying to protect the director, Art Stockwell, from an inevitable assassination attempt. He is also trying to find out who put the contract out on Stockwell’s life. Among the suspects are a Chicago mob boss and Stockwell’s nearly-estranged wife who also happens to be Quarry’s fully-estranged ex-wife. This situation proves to be the first socially awkward moment in the hitman’s career.

Like all the books in this series, Quarry’s Ex is deceptively quiet. There are no 10-car pile-ups on the interstate, no helicopter police chases and no bridges that come crashing down at rush hour. What there is is paranoia, misanthropy and violence in close quarters. Quarry is truly detached from humanity and only looks out for his own interests. This can make for dark humor and understatement as Quarry tells his own story. He is inordinately composed when he discusses brutal subjects such as his methods of interrogation:

“Cutting off someone’s fingers or shooting them in the kneecap, trying to make them talk, it’s messy and it’s inefficient. And you have to keep them alive, in case the first thing they tell you isn’t true, requiring you to go back and cut off another finger or shoot another kneecap or something.

Torture is a whole different arena. Requires training that I never got. You never know when somebody is going to pass out or even die on you. And then where are you?”

With shop talk like this it is clear that Quarry is capable of killing anyone, a mob boss, his ex wife or even the man he’s working for if he has to. With an amoral main character any plot twist is possible.

Each of the recent Quarry books is billed as possibly the last before Collins puts the series to rest so each story feels like a little gift. And “little” is an important word. Quarry’s Ex is less than 200 pages and moves at the perfect pace for a single sitting. Quarry started off in a fast-moving pulp novel in the early 1970s and the author has retained that sensibility throughout the series.

The paperback era of hardboiled writing started after world war two and stretched into the late 70’s. In that time, mysteries, thrillers and noir usually came in very small, tightly wound packages that could explode in your hands and were finished at around 200 hundred pages. It was enough space to pull a reader in all the way and a small enough space to lack digression.

Then, in the early 80s, thrillers started to get thicker and subplots began to leak in. Private detectives picked up hobbies, bad guys developed endearing quirks and minor characters began to live their own story lines. This practice amounted to multiple distractions over much longer novels. The short, sweaty action novel morphed into something softer, often flabby and less structured.

But Collins is old enough to be part of the last wave of action writers who know how to tell a story fast and unsentimentally. For him, this kind of writing in neither nostalgic nor retro, it’s what he trained himself to do. He has been successful at writing longer, more circuitous books but for nine novels (over 35 years) he has managed to keep the Quarry series pure and untainted by the fashions of publishing trends.

Editor’s note:  Although Daniel Luft’s review starts off by saying this book is “on the shelf,” technically it will not be until fall of 2011.  The parent company of Hard Case Crime has decided not to print any more paperbacks and thus Hard Case Crime  has had to move to another publisher. This review will be reposted when the book is really on the shelf.

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-5-0from 11 readers
PUBLISHER: Hard Case Crime (September 20, 2011)
REVIEWER: Daniel Luft
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Max Allan Collins
EXTRAS: Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: Read our review of:

Bibliography:

Nathan Heller series:

Road to Perdition:

Quarry novels:

Mallory Mystery:

Historical Mysteries:

Eliot Ness Novels:

Ms. Tree Series:

Other:

writing as Patrick Culhane:

with Mickey Spillane:

with Matthew Clemens:

Movies from books:

]]> /2010/quarrys-ex-by-max-allan-collins/feed/ 1 QUARRY IN THE MIDDLE by Max Allan Collins /2009/quarry-in-the-middle-by-max-allan-collins/ /2009/quarry-in-the-middle-by-max-allan-collins/#comments Wed, 28 Oct 2009 03:45:32 +0000 /?p=5952 Book Quote:

“I had a body in the trunk of the car.

I hadn’t planned it that way, but then it wasn’t that kind of job. It wasn’t a job at all, really, rather a speculative venture, and now I’d made more of an investment than just my time and a little money.“

Special: Author Interview

Book Review:

Review by Daniel Luft (OCT 27, 2009)

Writers are always telling each other to steal, but cover your tracks. So it’s funny that Max Allan Collins, in his new novel Quarry in the Middle, has decided to blatantly admit his inspiration by way of three epigrams at the beginning of the book. The epigrams are quotes from Dashiell Hammett, Akira Kurosawa and Sergio Leone, one novelist and two film directors who each told stories about lawless men who played one gang of criminals against another in the hope of getting paid by each. Perhaps Collins thought his rip off was too blatant and it was better to display rather than hide his appropriations. This was unnecessary because Quarry in the Middle stands very well on it’s own and merely nods to the works of these other artists.

All of Collins’s Quarry novels, this is the eighth, concern a midwestern hitman who has cut his mob ties and has decided to go freelance. Most of these books were written in the 1970s and are only available in used editions. Then, a few years ago, Collins decided to bring Quarry back with a final book in the series The Last Quarry. But that hasn’t stopped Collins from writing books that take place earlier in the criminal’s career.

Quarry in the Middle is his third recent novel in the series. It takes place in the mid 1980s with Quarry dressed like Don Johnson, spying on another known hitman and simply following him to his next “job.” This takes him down the Mississippi to a town called Haydee’s Port, Illinois. And the “job” the other man has is to kill the owner of an enormous illegal riverfront casino. Of course the suspected employer of the hitman is the owner of another illegal casino on the other side of the river.

Quarry intervenes in the assassination and gets himself hired by the man who was supposed to be dead. He then infiltrates the other casino and tries to get hired by the other owner as well. Both of these owners are backed by warring wings of the Chicago mob and Quarry nearly manages to get himself killed in each casino. And of course he makes friends with a couple ladies along the way. The book is pure sex and violence in the classic tough-guy mode.

Throughout the book, the first-person narration runs sardonic as Quarry trips his way through the less elite members of Ronald Reagan’s America:

“The joint was encased in the cheapest paneling known to God or man or even you uncle Phil, beautified by black-marker graffiti that made dating and other suggestions. Right now the tables were about half full, and the bar about the same. The clientele appeared to be blue-collar or below, displaying lots of frayed faded jeans, a look courtesy of factory work, not factory fabrication. One corner had been taken over by bikers in well-worn leathers — the bikers were pretty well-worn themselves, in their thirties or forties. Marlon Brando in The Wild One had been a long fucking time ago.”

Quarry’s narration, like the author’s prose, is simple and direct. Collins doesn’t waste any pages, paragraphs or even sentences on digression. Like all of the Quarry novels, this one is only about 200 pages and like the best ones, it has a fast pace with one scene intruding into another. There is no end to the action and violence and no chance for the reader to put the book down for the night. And, as usual with Collins, the plot is air-tight with no coincidences, holes or loose ends.

Once, in an interview years ago, Collins said that he would love to revisit all his old recurring characters that he invented years ago. The problem, he said, was that he didn’t want to conform to modern publishing schedules to do it. Quarry in the Middle is the third Quarry novel to lurk into bookstores in four years — hardly a tight schedule. There is also another book in the works but with no solid publication date as yet planned. Hard Case Crime, the small publisher with big distribution, seems to have helped Collins solve his dilemma.

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-4-0from 11 readers
PUBLISHER: Hard Case Crime (October 27, 2009)
REVIEWER: Daniel Luft
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Max Allan Collins
EXTRAS:
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: Read our review of:

Bibliography:

Nathan Heller series:

Road to Perdition:

Quarry novels:

Mallory Mystery:

Historical Mysteries:

Eliot Ness Novels:

Ms. Tree Series:

Other:

writing as Patrick Culhane:

with Mickey Spillane:

with Matthew Clemens:

Movies from books:

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