Quarry's Ex by Max Allan Collins (Hard Case Crime)

Her upper lip curled at little. "You know what your problem is, Jack? You don't know whether you want to fuck me or kill me."

"Is there an all-of-the-above?" I asked her.

Before he was a hired killer, the man later known as Quarry — back then, he was Jack — was killing for the Marines in Vietnam. On arriving home a day earlier than expected, he found his wife with another man. Later, he went looking for the guy and killed him, but the District Attorney recognized Jack's war record, and the possibly accidental nature of the death, and decided not to prosecute.

That still left Jack on his own, with no marketable skills except one. Enter the Broker, who saw emerging talent in "Quarry" and hired him for contract killings for years (see The First Quarry), until he betrayed Quarry and had to be gotten rid of. But not before Quarry found the Broker's list and decided to go into business for himself (see Quarry in the Middle).

Now he uses the list to locate the Broker's former employers, follow them around to identify their targets, then offer his own services to the target to eliminate the threat. It's entrepreneurship at its finest: find a need and fill it.

This time, the killer is Nick Varnos, a specialist in "accidental" death, and the intended victim is film director Arthur Stockwell, shooting the sequel to his surprise hit (in the burgeoning home-video market) Hard Wheels. A pretty straightforward job, it seems, until Quarry meets Mrs. Stockwell, who just happens to be the former Mrs. Quarry....

Quarry's Ex feels as if it were written in 2 or 3 fevered sessions. That's how fast it moves. Author Max Allan Collins seems to save his tightest prose for this series, and this is no exception. The character also allows Collins to let loose with some of his darkest, crudest, and funniest one-liners.

And this time, Collins also gets to use his experience writing and directing independent films like Eliot Ness: An Untouchable Life to give the novel detailed atmosphere. Posing as Jack Reynolds, unit publicist, Quarry gets unfettered access to the film set, cast, and crew — including full access to some.

Collins sets up the time period with flair, peppering references to the Reagan/Carter election and the growing video industry, as well as dropping the names of current films like The Empire Strikes Back and The Shining. But mostly readers will be glad to see Quarry once again up to his old tricks — this time with an emotional twist — in Quarry's Ex.

As an aside, I want to mention that I noticed something in particular about Quarry for the first time. He takes in a showing of The Long Riders. He spends some time in the john with Elmore Leonard's Valdez Is Coming. And he is just about to watch a Randolph Scott film when he is interrupted. Who knew Quarry liked Westerns?

The Last Lullaby directed by Jeffrey Goodman (starring Tom Sizemore and Sasha Alexander)

The Last Lullaby (2009). Screenplay by Max Allan Collins and Peter Biegen, expanding on Collins's Quarry short story "A Matter of Principal."

Fans of Max Allan Collins's Quarry character have been waiting for a movie starring their favorite hired killer since he debuted in the 1970s. It took thirty years, but it's worth it. The Last Lullaby is here, and it's definitely a Quarry film, though the lead character isn't named "Quarry" (Collins wants to retain the rights to the name, so filmmakers can't make "sequels" without his input).

Retired killer Price (Tom Sizemore), on one of a string of sleepless nights, drives to a nearby convenience store and follows two suspicious characters to a kidnapping site, where he rescues the victim ... sort of. Six months later, he's offered $1 million for one last job: kill a librarian with ex-boyfriend troubles. But he gets emotionally involved, which puts them both in danger.

Collins's Quarry short story "A Matter of Principal" (upon which the first part of The Last Lullaby is based) was made into a short film by director Jeffrey Goodman. (This short film is available on the DVD Shades of Noir, available in the Max Allan Collins's Black Box DVD set.) Collins liked the short so much, he allowed Goodman to expand it into a feature, provided Collins was involved in the scripting.

An early draft of Collins's initial script was novelized by the author and published as part of the Hard Case Crime line as The Last Quarry. Readers of that novel will find a similar tone and characters but some significant differences made in turning the story into a mainstream (if independent) film. For example, co-screenwriter Peter Biegen was evidently brought in to punch up the love story. (Collins's novelized version is much tougher.)

What really makes The Last Lullaby work, however, are the lead performances by Sizemore and Sasha Alexander, who plays the librarian. Tom Sizemore's stony countenance betrays selective emotions, letting his eyes do the acting. And Sasha Alexander (Rizzoli & Isles) is an intelligent beauty with her own secrets.

A veteran of mostly television work, Alexander holds her own opposite Sizemore, and one hopes that The Last Lullaby allows her to possibly break out from the small screen. Goodman understands human drama and the complexities of male-female relationships and lets this carry the viewer along as events conspire against the couple.

Sizemore gets to show his tender side as one half of a potential couple of loners who aren't young anymore and really want to impress each other. Both actors bring incredible sexual magnetism. At the same time, it's incredibly sweet to see a romance between two such people treated with realism and delicacy, making The Last Lullaby a surprisingly good option for a date movie, even given its unremittingly dark storyline.

Quarry in the Middle by Max Allan Collins (Hard Case Crime)

A new Max Allan Collins novel is always a source of excitement at my house. I would have read Quarry in the Middle as soon as it came in the mail — but my wife grabbed it first, while I satisfied myself watching Caveman, Collins's fascinating documentary on Alley Oop.

There are quotes in the front of Quarry in the Middle from Dashiell Hammett, Akira Kurosawa, and Sergio Leone. What do these men have in common? All three have written or directed a version of the same story: a loner playing both parties of a situation for his own profit. It's a very old story, at least as old as Carlo Goldoni's 18th-century commedia dell'arte Servant of Two Masters, but Hammett brought it to 20th-century readers in his "Continental Op" novel Red Harvest.

Red Harvest is considered to be a direct influence on Kurosawa's samurai film Yojimbo (though Kurosawa himself cited The Glass Key). Leone later remade Yojimbo into A Fistful of Dollars. (Leone was sued by Kurosawa for neglecting to purchase remake rights; Kurosawa stated he made more money off Leone's film than his own).

Interestingly enough, all three protagonists are "men with no name": Hammett's hero is known only as "the Continental Op," Kurosawa's samurai names himself after a plant he sees nearby, and Leone's character has popularized the phrase to the extent that he personifies it. But enough with the history lesson; a good portion of readers probably know all that stuff, anyway.

Where The Last Quarry showed the end of his career and The First Quarry showed the beginning, Quarry in the Middle understandably fills in some blanks. It's set in the mid-1980s. (I'm guessing late 1986; Collins doesn't say outright, but he gives various historical clues.) No longer working for The Broker, Quarry has begun a new kind of business. Using The Broker's files, he gets hired killers' targets to hire him to kill the killers. How very meta!

Following his latest ... uh, quarry ("a guy named Monahan"), Quarry finds himself in a town with the unlikely name of Haydee's Port, Illinois — home of the Paddlewheel ("a mini–Las Vegas under one roof") and its official digs, the Wheelhouse Motel — and a hell of a place to be unless you can think on your feet. Luckily, our hired-killer-with-no-name (at least not one he's telling us) has shown himself to be quite adept at thinking ... on his feet, on his back, etc.

Quarry finds out Monahan is gunning for Richard Cornell, owner of the Paddlewheel, and that he's been hired by Jerry G, son of mob-connected Gigi Giovanni, owner of Cornell's main competition, the less-classy Lucky Devil. A man who knows how to turn every situation to his best advantage, Quarry takes an assignment to knock off the Giovannis.

The Quarry series contains Collins's leanest and tightest writing, and Quarry in the Middle is no exception. Collins blends past and present seamlessly, alternating between telling Quarry's back story and the current one with unmatched skill.

I finished Quarry in the Middle in two sittings, or about an hour and a half. It's a very quick read and one you may want to start right over again from the beginning. Collins's take on Yojimbo is fresh yet familiar, and it's always fun to watch Quarry do his thing. Here's hoping the series continues, filling in even more blank spots in the timeline along the way.

Nitpicker's Note: At one point Quarry mentions watching Turner Classic Movies. But, since the channel debuted in 1994 and Quarry in the Middle is set in the mid-'80s, Quarry must have actually been watching American Movie Classics in its heyday (perhaps with the great Bob Dorian as host).

The Last Quarry by Max Allan Collins (Hard Case Crime)

Since September 2009 marks the fifth anniversary of Hard Case Crime, I will be reprinting my reviews of the first 40 books from my old (and now mostly defunct) Craig's Book Club site — 2 for the first 10 days, and 1 a day for the next 20. I hope you enjoy this refresher course in the variety of crime fiction that this fascinating publisher has to offer.

Thirty years ago, author Max Allan Collins created the first hired-assassin series character in Quarry, the protagonist of his novel, The Broker (later republished simply as Quarry). Quarry appeared in four more novels, ending with 1986's Primary Target, and then didn't show his face (except for a few short stories, eventually collected along with the novel in Quarry's Greatest Hits) for almost two decades, until a young filmmaker named Jeffrey Goodman politely badgered the author to let him make a short film of one of the short stories, "A Matter of Principal."

Impressed by Goodman's tenacity, Collins eventually gave in with the provision that Collins himself would write the screenplay. (His own bad experiences in Hollywood during the making of The Expert had made Collins wary of others directing his material, and Collins has at this writing helmed six features himself, several of which are available, including Goodman's short film, in the DVD box set Max Allan Collins' Black Box Collection.)

The short film was a hit on the festival circuit and won a number of awards. This led to Goodman's idea for making "A Matter of Principal" into a feature, which would of course require another screenplay from Collins. Coincidentally, Charles Ardai had also asked Collins for a new Quarry novel to publish for his Hard Case Crime line, and it only made sense to combine the requests. The Last Quarry is therefore an original Quarry novel and also an unofficial novelization of the feature film, eventually titled The Last Lullaby. (Collins has vast experience with novelizations, including novelizing the screenplay — not written by him — of his own graphic novel, Road to Perdition.)

The Last Quarry is some of the best and tightest fiction Max Allan Collins has ever written (and it's dedicated to the director "who brought my killer to life"). Anyone who has read "A Matter of Principal" is going to feel a strong sense of déjà vu for the first three chapters, but that's just the lead-in to the real story as a millionaire hires Quarry to kill a meek librarian, whom Quarry then proceeds to fall for, making the all-too-familiar mistake of mixing emotions with business.

As in its Primary Target, previously unforeseen connections appear between characters, making for some interesting surprises in this concise suspenser. Collins doles out the words in The Last Quarry only as needed, in keeping with Quarry's laconic personality — he doesn't waste time, words, or bullets — and fills barely 200 pages with the same amount of story that a less careful author would stretch to twice that length. And this killer shows a distinct sense of humor, peppering his narrative with occasional asides that raise a chuckle or sometimes even a full laugh.

It is obvious that Collins likes Quarry (and he seems to contain a good amount of Collins himself, based on what I've seen from interviews on his DVDs) and is having a lot of fun with this "last" outing (at least chronologically speaking, according to the Afterword — others eventually followed). Simply put, it is a perfect example of Collins' combined talent and skill. Two for the Money was my introduction to his work, and if there's any justice in the world, The Last Quarry will garner scores of new fans to this and Collins' other series characters (like private investigator Nathan Heller).

The First Quarry by Max Allan Collins (Hard Case Crime)

In the Afterword of 2006's The Last Quarry, author Max Allan Collins implied that, though that book told the final Quarry story chronologically speaking, he was not averse to going back and exploring previous events in Quarry's career. For fans, the only question was, how far back would he go?

Would you believe, all the way back to the last week of 1970?

The First Quarry, just as its title implies, takes us through the events surrounding Quarry's inaugural murder for hire (technically, he killed professionally before as a sniper in Vietnam, but this is freelance), in service to the well-dressed individual known to us as "The Broker": to assassinate college professor and best-selling author K.J. Byron and burn the manuscript of his new book.

Sounds straightforward enough, but Quarry (whose real name, he reminds us, is "none of your fucking business") quickly finds that it's not all that easy. The involvement of the Chicago mafia is only one of many complications that arise unexpectedly, with The Broker called in for advice and assistance with collateral damage on more than one occasion.

Maybe it's because death isn't all Quarry's got on his mind. His focus wanders when he envies how Byron's female students thank the professor for his mentoring — on their knees. So when opportunities arise with two other women, so does Quarry (so to speak). In fact, with all the action both Quarry and Byron get, The First Quarry may be the most sexed-up novel that Hard Case Crime has yet published.

Because there's a good deal of exposition, the first portion reads a little slower than may be expected. Luckily, at just about the time I was thinking things were getting too slow, Collins follows Raymond Chandler's often-quoted advice and brings in a man with a gun. From that point on, things get really interesting, and The First Quarry delivers a number of surprises. But, unlike a lot of authors, Collins doesn't call attention to these with exclamation points or other crutches: he just writes what happens and lets our brains to do the double-take all on their own.

Collins's usually lean prose is cut even closer to the bone for this series (all the Quarry books are around 200 pages — shorter even than Hard Case Crime average of 250), and the last four pages are as action-packed as anything he has written. All of which makes The First Quarry a terrific continuation of this popular series, and another fantastic read from one of pulp's few true heirs.