The Wrong Quarry is the
latest of Hard Case Crime's revival of Max Allan Collins' novels
featuring the hired killer Quarry, who now has become a hitman with a
difference: Quarry tracks other hitmen, identifies their targets, and
then gets himself hired to kill the killers, before they kill the
victim. And for a extra fee, he can eliminate the person who hired
the hit in the first place.
This time he is
stalking a killer named Ronald Mateski into a small town in Iowa,
where a popular high school beauty queen has disappeared, and where
someone appears to have hired Mateski to take out the police's top
suspect. So Quarry, posing as a journalist, starts investigating the
disappearance, and decides the killer's target is someone worth
saving. For a price.
When the Quarry books
first appeared in the 1970s, they were Collins' second attempt at
criminal protagonists with single names, following the Nolan novels,
about a professional thief clearly influenced by Donald Westlake
(Richard Stark) and his Parker. What made Quarry different was the
fact that he wasn't a thief who would kill when he had to, but a
killer, who killed for a living. This is a step further along the
road anti-heroes walk, and Collins upped the ante by doing the books
in the first person, the classic private eye narration he would later
use to such good effect with his Nate Heller novels.
The problem, obviously,
is that the reader inevitably is drawn into identifying with the
protagonist, seeing the world from his point of view, and the
viewpoint of a psychopathic killer is a difficult one with which to
engender empathy. So Quarry, in some ways is a kinder, gentler sort
of killer—his current twist on the hitman business indicates
that—and occasionally his tastes and world view seem very mundane
for such a hard man. With Nate Heller, we know we aren't dealing with
someone detached from the reality of the mundane world. But we don't
imagine Parker browsing the wire racks of stores for western
paperbacks, much less sharing the authors' names with us, as Quarry
does. But Collins does a slick job of never letting us forget what
Quarry really is all about—and the conflict between what he is and
what we might want him to be is the key to the tension which animates
the novel.
The second strong point
is the period setting, in the mid 1970s, and the style, which is
drawn from the Gold Medal and other paperback originals whose heyday
was ending in those times. Collins is excellent in establishing not
just the milieux, but also the world-view of the era—so when Quarry
gets seduced by a sweet high-schooler it comes in a sort of garish
overkill of wanton lust that surprises and even shocks a modern
reader, as if that reader were back in the more modest world of those
lurid paperbacks. There are a number of twists to the tale, and the
eventual resolution actually reveals a character who's very much a
modern-style villain, a serial killer who in effect hides in plain
sight, behind the camouflage of the era's attitudes toward sex. It
may be set in the 70s, but Collins is writing with the real flavour
of pure 50s and 60s pulp, and The Wrong Quarry works brilliantly on
those terms.
The Wrong Quarry by Max
Allan Collins
Titan Books/Hard Case
Crime, £7.99, ISBN 9781781162668
NOTE: This review will
also appear at Crime Time (www.crimetime.co.uk)
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