MAX ALLAN COLLINS' QUARRY'S CLIMAX

Max Collins' first published novel was The Broker, the first of three Quarry novels published in 1976 (originally, Quarry was part of his thesis at the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop, showing three thriller series could be set in an Iowans small town. A fourth novel followed in 1977, another in 1987, and then the character lay dormant until Hard Case began publishing new Quarry novels and reprinting the originals with new titles. Quarry is a former Marine sniper scarred by his Vietnam experience: he is in some ways a sociopath for whom killing is no big thing, but outwardly he is a normal small-city Iowan guy. He and The Broker also develop a new angle on killing: selling him to targeted victims to kill the hired killers targeting them. It's an interesting conceit, and one that allows Collins a certain leeway in the situations Quarry encounters.

Quarry's Climax is the thirteenth Quarry novel, and the set up is the epitome of Collins' attitude to Quarry. He's been hired to prevent the murder of Max Climer, controversial publisher of Climax Magazine, and sex entrepreneur in Memphis, 1975. The Broker has turned down a contract on Climer, because he's laundered money through Climax magazine, and the magazine is a huge success: its raunchiness challenging Playboy and Penthouse. So Quarry gets the job of keeping this sleazy tycoon alive.

Turns out Quarry, though feigning ignorance about Climax to The Broker, is a Climax subscriber, and actually reads the articles. Go figure. What he stumbles into in Memphis is a snake pit of family intrigue, with Climer's ex-wife, his brother and his daughter all jockeying for position within the empire, and all, along with any number of outsiders, having reasons to want to Max dead.

Quarry's style is a casual narration that sometimes becomes overly so: Quarry is not a writer, after all, so his narration reflects his background and his writing lapses into easy cliche. It's both a strength and a weakness, a particular strength if you can recall the milieu in which Quarry operates. The specific background of this one obviously starts with Larry Flynt and Hustler, but borrows too from Christie Hefner, Hugh's daughter who became a key to the Playboy empire. And for Quarry, it's a world of great temptation that doesn't always have to be resisted, even if he is, in the end, all business.

What Collins does for Quarry is to bring everything together neatly for Quarry (and the reader) in a way that makes killing merely part of the game. This isn't the hardness and tight focus of Richard Stark's Parker (interestingly, Collins' homage to Parker, Nolan, is never quite as coldly cold-blooded) but a unique blend of world-view and historical crime, though I'm not sure 1975 is far enough back yet to qualify for that category in the awards. But anyone who's read Collins' Nate Heller novels know how effective his settings can be. Quarry, for a killer, is a lot of fun, and you can tell Collins has fun writing him.  Readers will have fun as well. And the cover, by Robert McGinnis, with its echoes of Gold Medal paperbacks, is perfect. If you're old enough to recall 'mens mags' fondly, or young enough to want to, you ought to meet Quarry now.

Quarry's Climax by Max Allan Collins
Hard Case Crime £7.99 ISBN 9781785651809

This review will also appear at Crime Time (www.crimetime.co.uk)

ED MC BAIN'S CUT ME IN

When a man's partner is killed, he's supposed to do something about it. It doesn't matter if he didn't like him, he's supposed to do something. That was the kind of thing Sam Spade said when Miles Archer got bumped off, and it's sort of what Josh Blake feels when his partner Del Gilbert is murdered in their office, leaving an open safe behind him, and a missing contract that could be the reason why there's a corpse.

Because Gilbert and Blake aren't detectives; they're literary agents specialising in selling bulk to the pulp magazine market. But the pulp market is drying up, replaced by the westerns that proliferate on TV. And the missing contract is with a top western novelist who'd catapult them into a whole different territory. But first, Blake has to figure out who bumped off his partner.

Cut Me In was originally published more than 60 years ago, with Ed McBain writing under a different alias, Hunt Collins. And at times it's very funny about the world of publishing, because like many of the last generation of crank-it-out pulpsters in New York, McBain himself worked at the Scott Meredith literary agency, who specialised in just the sort of stuff Josh Blake is peddling. The sort of stuff this novel is.

It's fast-paced and superficial, and it's hard to tell the dishy dames apart: there's the secretary who was having an affair with Gilbert; there's his new widow who seems to find Blake the answer to her problems; there's a woman who comes as a big surprise; and there's a woman Blake wakes up with and has no idea who she is. All very Hefner-esque, just about the time Hef was getting the idea for the Playboy philosophy. There's also a frustrated pulp writer who needs an agent, and a dogged cop who really does remind me of one of the 87 Precinct cops, as if McBain already had the prototypes in mind. It's all a lot of fun, even though you'll be sure you've spotted a few holes in the plot big enough to drag a corpse through.

There's also a bonus short story featuring the disgraced detective Matt Cordell, who has a lot in common with Lawrence Block's Matt Scudder (and Block was part of that Scott Meredith crowd)

. Although it's a slight story, and McBain's drawing character in with a broad brush, I was wishing that he'd given this more serious theme more time--it would play better today--and it reminded me that McBain got better the darker and deeper he got.

Cut Me In by Ed McBain
Hard Case Crime/Titan Books, £7.99 ISBN 9781783294459

BINARY: TWO BOOKS BY MICHAEL CRICHTON AS JOHN LANGE

Michael Crichton put himself through medical school writing paperback thrillers, under the pen name John Lange (a German pun on his 6-9 height). He wrote seven of them between 1966-70, but in 1969, the same year he received his MD, he published, under his own name, The Andromeda Strain, which was a best-seller and doomed his medical career. In that same year he published A Case Of Need, under another pen name, Jeffrey Hudson (a famous 17^th century dwarf) which won an Edgar award.

Before he died in 2008, Crichton had arranged for Hard Case Crime to bring the Lange books back into print, and had even done some revisions. It should be noted that there have been previous reissues of Lange books, from a number of publishers, but they are now out of print. Hard Case issued four of them in October, and another four this month. And that makes eight, because Crichton wrote one last Lange book, Binary, which was published in 1972 (along with The Terminal Man, under his own name), and which was crucial in providing him the opportunity to direct the film version—a surprisingly good made for TV movie called Pursuit, with Ben Gazzard, EG Marshall, and William Windom)

Perhaps because it was the last of the Lange books, Binary may be the best place to start, because it is a taut thriller that moves straightforwardly, and contains a confrontational puzzle at its center. It's anchored firmly in its time, as a right-wing millionaire plots to explode a canister of nerve gas over San Diego as the Republican party holds its convention there, and President Nixon arrives from the Western White House in nearby San Clemente. Interestingly, the convention in reality was moved to Miami Beach (not for reasons of terrorism) but in a brief note Lange explains he preferred to leave his book as it was).

The millionaire is John Wright, and John Graves is an agent for the State Department's Intelligence Division who has been tracking Wright and his extremist views, and is on alert because of the convention. Meanwhile, a shipment of nerve gas has been stolen from a train—the gas is transported in two canisters, each inert until they are mixed, hence the title of the book. What ensues is a cat and mouse battle between Wright and Graves, which Wright relishes, and in which Graves is always playing catch-up; it is a binary situation just as much as the deadly chemicals.

Crichton moves the pace along quickly, and handles the chess game between the two fairly, with Graves' more interesting battles coming with other government agencies. It's interesting, in light of the influences which are obvious in the earlier books, such as those detailed in Grave Descend, which is reviewed below, that Graves should be working for a man named Phelps—of course on Mission Impossible Peter Graves played Jim Phelps. Call it a hommage. It's also worth noting that Glen Orbik's cover is one of the best Hard Case covers, in the style of pulpy paperbacks, but the alluring femme fatale doesn't really appear in the story at all!

What makes Binary the most interesting of these releases is not so much Crichton's usual technical aplomb, but the way the story resonates with the present day. The use of nerve gas obviously prefigures modern WMD and terrorist worries, but in Wright Crichton creates a character right out of today's Ayn Rand reading Tea Partiers, the kinds of people who felt frustrated in the post-Goldwater Republican party, but who, in the years since Ronald Reagan have taken it over. The idea that they are the true terrorists wasn't completely ahead of its time, but it was in the James Bond category in those days, and here, in contrast to Grave Descend, Crichton saw through it to what it was.

Grave Descend was published in 1970, and nominated for an Edgar, which reflects the sure hand Crichton had developed writing the first six Lange thrillers. It;s very entertaining, but seems slight, and I wasn't quite sure why until I went back and looked at the other nominations and winners in the best paperback original category—Dan J Marlowe's Flashpoint, not one of his great ones, won the award that year (1971) but most books were still being reprinted from hardcover in those days; the pb original market was nowhere near as deep as it is today. I retrospect, it's far less slight than it seems by today's standards. Similarly, A Case Of Need won the Edgar for best novel, and it's odd looking back just how traditional in orientation that award was at the time.

James McGregor is a diver based in Jamaica who is hired to investigate the wreck of a luxury yacht, called Grave Descend, only he watches the ship blown up and sunk after he's hired to retrieve its cargo. Crichton's influences come through very clearly here: there's more than a little John D MacDonald here. I wrote on this blog when I linked to the obituary of Crichton that I wrote for the Guardian (follow the link here), that Crichton had obviously learned from MacDonald's bigger, mainstream novels, more than the Travis McGee ones. But here McGregor, like McGee, specialises in salvage,and also has McGee's attitudes toward women—a combination of 50s old fashioned morality and 60s sexual freedom, as well as the classic hard-boiled suspicion of affection offered. This is a major part of most of MacDonald's non-McGee hard-boiled thrillers. MacDonald was expert on getting just enough technology and detail into his books to make them seem realistic, and more importantly to make the plot grow from that reality; this was the way he constructed those later, major novels, which often seem very close to what Crichton was doing.

There's also a lot of Ian Fleming here—the island setting, and its enigmatic cop, and the master-villain sort of set-up in the isolated mansion and classy yacht. McGregor's local helper, Chingnachook to McGregor's Hawkeye, is there to provide the necessary deus ex machina, and it all comes to a rousing climax, with a surprisingly downbeat and nicely written anti-climax. It is a fine example of Crichton's innate story-telling ability—how he was able to distill the familiar tropes of the time, and give them freshness. He would find his own niche in medical and scientific thrillers, but never settle for just that, and these books are a good indication of why.

Grave Descend (ISBN 9781783291243) and Binary (ISBN 9781783291250)

are published at £7.99 by Titan/Hard Case Crime

NOTE: This essay will also appear at Crime Time (www.crimetime.co.uk)