4 out of 5

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The idea seems quaint, especially however many decades after the fact you’re (potentially) reading this, but Max Allan Collins’ pitch for his Quarry books, to use his small-town pulp setting to add a straight up bad guy to his list of lead characters, still hits hard: our titular killer-for-hire is exactly that: not heartless by any means, and not without his own moral code, but definitely a killer for hire, and one whose heart is in a place markedly different from ours, and whose moral code is a very squishy one. It’s something that sometimes feels forced in the later books – making sure to swerve any given situation such that Quarry always takes the less heroic-seeming direction – but in this first novel, man, it lands. Each swerve hurts, and doesn’t leave you feeling like this is some unstoppable badass cool guy, rather just someone who’s circumstances have allowed them to walk this line, and who will now continue walking it, for however long.

We meet Quarry – not his real name, just how we know him – at the start of the end of his relationship with Broker, his taskmaster, when the business on which he’s contracted turns into a much different deal. This is the book equivalent of a cold open: there’s no lead-in to our narrator – we’re told he’s a killer in sentence one – and by the end of the first chapter, we understand that this man is a bastard. Not necessarily a cruel one, which is his saving grace and is his “code” in the sense that he’ll do the job as agreed on the logic that if not-him-than-someone-else; but nonetheless, step outside of the parameters of the job and it’s a betrayal. Broker steps outside of those parameters.

So Quarry goes into the next job with a bit of a chip on his shoulder, and this gets blended with peculiarities of the particular job raising some alarms; we learn, in drips and drabs, about Quarry’s Vietnam background having led him to his vocation, and how he can / has learned to trust in his instincts – and his willingness to kill as needed – and slowly, the peculiarities start to connect. And because this is the opening salvo, Collins makes sure to do the task fully, and pretty much close the book (literally, I suppose) on Quarry ever getting a towline back towards humanity. There’s a dame; there’s a doublecross; all your standards; but by propping this up against a guy with Quarry’s particular disposition, it’s hard to know how those standards are going to play out.

With these positives, though, the book does take a big momentum dip in the middle, as those aforementioned peculiarities are sorted out. Collins clearly knows he wants to use the central mystery to indirectly fuel Quarry’s evolving relationship with Broker, and that inevitably makes that mystery feel like it’s always the background, even though, page-wise, it’s very much not. There are some great characters and relationships mixed in, proof of how compactly effective of a writer Collins can be, just the mystery itself (of who contracted a kill and why) feels a bit loosey-goosey, and like the pieces are all kind of easily available, just presented in a jumble that needs someone to exposit them into place. Had this book appeared later in Collins career or in a later decade in general, that’d be more of a hit, but I really can’t underline how unique of a character Quarry comes across as even now, having read future Quarry books, making this is a truly noteworthy novel, where its positives far outweigh its middling elements.

As always with things written in another decade, there’s some dated language and ideas here with gay characters, though there’s a very 70s push for “what you do on your own time is fine by me” type of progressiveness, and arguably – setting aside how Collins may have felt at the time – the tone, as presented, fits well with our lead character, for better or worse.