Review: Quarry

Quarry by Max Allan Collins
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I love the concept of the Hard Case Crime Series. In older, rediscovered pulp classics like Lawrence Block’s Grifter’s Game, or in neo-noir like Ken Bruen and Jason Starr’s Bust, they go after the aesthetic of the hardboiled tough guy as American philosopher-angel. When it works, it’s a little bit like watching Mitchum pull out a cell phone, a little incongruous but something you can get used to anyway.

This one, I’m afraid, doesn’t really work.

I’m a fan of Collins going way back. I enjoy his Heller novels very much; he used some of them to write about my gangster relatives and when I had the chance to meet him quickly he was generous and interested in what I had to say. I also like what he did with Dick Tracy (which I wrote part of my dissertation on), and I admire Road to Perdition even if – I realize now with a start – I never did read the whole thing.

So I’m disappointed not to be able to give this Hard Case/Collins a better recommendation. Still, if Heller felt like lighter weight E.L. Doctorow, this feels like Mickey Spillane retread. I have no problem if you try to write like Hammett and fall short; when your model is as unimpressive as Spillane, well, hit or miss you still fall short.

As I understand it, the twist in this series was that Collins made an amoral hit-man his protagonist. That’s not a bad idea, and maybe he was the first to do it, but it’s been done since and done better (by Lawrence Block among others). After that, this is a series of clichés and clumsy plot devices.

Any time Quarry needs a clue, there’s a character who conveniently tells it to him. Any time he has to be one step ahead of someone, he is, effortlessly and with a Mike Hammer like arrogance that gets tiresome quickly.

There’s also an uncomfortable take on homosexuality. To Quarry/Collins’s credit, there’s an explicit credo of live-and-let-love to the question, but there’s also an implicit sense that “those people” are simply too different. [SPOILER] Quarry’s gay partner brings disaster to their ‘job’ when he falls for a sadistic predator, and Quarry is willing to tolerate such difference so long as it doesn’t get in his way. In other words, it could be worse – and it may have been progressive for the early 1970s – but it isn’t anything we really need to revive.

Anyway, I’ll try to get to Road to Perdition one of these days, and I might go back to one of the early Hellers – True Detective actually features a photo of my great-uncle as the heavy who walks into a bar on page one – but I’m certainly done with the Quarrys. Collins went on to do some solid work, but as far as I’m concerned it isn’t happening here.


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