Later (2021)

"Sometimes growing up means facing your demons."

Short and spoiler-free: Later has a great hook that engages you for most of its two-hundred-plus-pages. It unfortunately starts to wobble a bit in the last stretch and then the floor falls completely out in the last, baffling chapter. Mind your footing. 

Longer and spoiler-ier: 

Jamie Conklin lives with his mother. No father or siblings, just an uncle with Alzheimer's in a local home. His mom is a literary agent, and Jamie sees dead people. "It's not like the movie with Bruce Willis," he lets us know. He doesn't see every dead person, just some, and they always recognize him and wave or otherwise alert Jamie of their presence. The dead, always dressed in the clothes they died in (not counting things like ball-gags, which apparently do not translate to the great beyond) must answer truthfully any question put to them. It's unclear, really, how Jamie learns this - he seems to have an intuitive understanding of it at the novel's beginning; the novel is, by the by, told in first person flashback, so Jamie is looking back at his life from the vantage point of twenty two - or why this would be, but it's a cool enough little rule for the story to follow. 

Things get complicated (Uncle Harry's Alzheimers worsens, there's a not-Bernie-Madoff-hedge-fund story (why not just have it be Bernie Madoff?), Jamie's Mom Tia's star client dies) when Liz (Tia's cop girlfriend) asks Jamie to help in a case where a killer has died without revealing the details of his last plot. 

The dead killer does so - begrudgingly - but then he tells Jamie that Tia has cancer. Is this true? Jamie wonders if there's some asterisk to this particular spirit. Turns out there is; here's a dead guy who not only doesn't just tell the truth, he can stick around, out of spite for Jamie, some kind of outsider-spirit with anime beyond what Jamie's used to. Jamie can't turn to his mom or even Liz (with whom his mom has broken up over her crooked-cop drug-running and later drug-using ways) so he turns to his next-door neighbor, whose dead wife spoke to Jamie in the first chapter. The neighbor is one of those King characters that has spent a good deal of time in the occult section of the library (or the fiction-Author 'Ki - to Ko ' aisle) and knows certain things about how to get rid of troublesome spirits or vampires. He recommends the Ritual of Chüd, i.e. lock tongues with the enemy in astral battle and battle wits and wills.

Which he does and Jamie wins, rather easily, and commands that the spirit not only stop haunting him but come running whenever he beckons him. "Oh I'll whistle and you'll come to me, my lad." as a matter of fact. Which at least the author acknowledges is a completely bizarre thing for a young 21st century boy to say by attributing the wording to his professor friend. Even so, it's an awkward thing to read/ repeat a further dozen or two dozen times to come. 

After much agonizing over what might happen, Jamie finally does beckon the spirit at the end of the book to battle Liz - now in a destructive drug tailspin - kidnaps him and takes him to her distributor's house in the boonies. Hi-jinks ensue. Jamie wakes up with the cops and then in the next chapter, his uncle - the Alzheimer's patient - dies and his spirit tells him he's his father.

Needle scratch!

There follows a baffling few pages where Jamie first imagines how it could have gone and then says "no wait, that never happened." It's a confusing chapter on many levels, especially for that. Is King reversing himself? What? Here are paragraphs in question:

"Let me tell you, there are a lot of bullshit myths about babies born of incest, especially when it comes to father-daughter and sister-brother. Yes, there can be medical problems, and yes, the chances of those are a little higher when it comes to incest, but the idea that the majority of those babies are born with feeble minds, one eye, or club feet? Pure crap. I did find out that one of the most common defects in babies from incestuous relationships is fused fingers or toes. I have scars * on the insides of my second and third fingers on my left hand, from a surgical procedure to separate them when I was an infant. The first time I asked about those scars - I wouldn't have been more than four or five - Mom told me the docs had done it before she brought me home from the hospital. ' Easy-peasy.'"

* I'll break in to say this reveal happens on pg. 244. If you're a writer and leading up to a last chapter reveal about incest, maybe a hidden in plain sight mystery-scars-supporting-said-reveal might have been mentioned somewhere early on?

"And of course there's that other thing I was born with, which might have something to do with the fact * that once upon a time, while suffering from grief and alcohol, my parents got a little closer than a brother and sister should have done. Or maybe seeing dead people has nothing at all to do with that. Parents who can't carry a tune in a tin pal can probably produce a singing prodigy; illiterates can produce a great writer, Sometimes talent comes from nowhere, or so it seems.

Except hold it, wait one,

That whole story is fiction."

* I don't know who needs to hear this, but incestuous coupling does not actually produce supernatural offspring. Nor is it even reasonable to imagine hey, just a horny, grieving couple of siblings deciding - as adults - to bang, or for one of them to just up and rape the other, then carry on as business partners/ siblings/ caretakers. What in the goddamn world? 

Jamie goes on to say he is only speculating about all the above - or is he? - but the whole damn thing is confused, both the above and all after. (Also, Jamie seems to have forgot his catchphrase is "Check it out," not "hold it.") This last chapter is a succession of things that don't make sense on top of inconsistencies in the writing voice on top of failure to resolve the threads that are there. At least It, with its famous batshit gangbang in the sewers, did not end itself resolving an entirely different novel that no one had been reading up to that point.

(A comment over here cracked me up re: Later's parallels with It: "a weird-sex thing popping up (at the end of) an It spinoff is kind of appropriate." Can't argue with that.)

King always says his endings surprise him. (The pointed opposite of the book-a-year goldmine-author from the first part of the book, who has the ending in mind and works backward - more on him to come.) I don't think he's just being cute when he talks about his process; I think he literally does close his eyes and take dictation from his muse. Any writer has his or her process, and it's worked pretty well for King. The thing is, you're supposed to edit this, though. No one wants to read the unexpurgated narrative of anyone's muse, so when the day's communing with spirits ends with "Incest reveal, last chapter."  the writer needs to stop and say "Well, I'm sure this makes sense in the muse dimension, but have I been writing that book?" If the answer is no, then you go back and make sure that a re-read will reveal oh, how masterful, this was subtly hinted at and its dynamics emphasized to make sense as a reveal all throughout. 

It isn't, though, so it doesn't. It feels like the kind of twist you get at the end of 1408 or Identity or some other non-John-Cusack example. King sometimes does not resist (and sometimes flat-out insists upon) this kind of zigzag-and-crash-the-car strategy. ("Dedication" comes to mind.) 

Worse, the things he had been building are rendered nonsensical by the reveal. Here's one example - not the only one:

"All of this seemed normal to me. I don't think the world starts to come into focus until you're fifteen or sixteen; up until then you just kind of take what you've got and roll with it. Those two hungover women hunched over their coffee was just how I started my day on some mornings that eventually became a lot of mornings. I didn't even notice the smell of wine that began to permeate everything. Only part of me must have noticed, because years later, in college, when my roomie spilled a bottle of Zinfandel in the living room of our little apartment, it all came back and it was like getting hit in the face with a plank. Liz's snarly hair. My mother's hollow eyes. How I knew to close the cupboard where we kept the cereal slowly and quietly (...) I had to get away from that smell. Given a choice between seeing dead folks - yes, I still see them - and the memories brought on by the smell of spilled wine, I'd pick the dead folks.

Any day of the fucking week."

Keep in mind Jamie is making that observation looking back on his life post incest reveal, even if the reader doesn't know it yet. Would that not be a sensible place to maybe hint to the reader that these things, while real and relatable, don't make sense in lieu of subsequent events and reveals? Sorry: when you're bound to a demon-outsider from beyond and then you find out your uncle is your father and your entire familial set-up is a poorly-constructed lie, you're not going to be sitting there reflecting on that and not bringing up any of the aforementioned. It would tie together. At the very least it's a missed opportunity; at worst it's intentionally misleading the reader. 

It's too damn bad, because this could so easily have been a great book. It's got a good hook - I see dead people; the dead people tell me truths, etc. - and a good complication - uh-oh, this one dead guy might be lying to me - and even if you commit to the incest reveal as the novel's raison d'etre, it's got a sensible enough theme - the dead tell uncomfortable secrets. But that only works if that reveal isn't just thrown into things in the last chapter. Like I said, you know from page one that Jamie is writing this with everything that happens in his rearview; it's purposefully constructed that way. But at no point does King avail himself of any opportunity to help his own reveal. This isn't just stylistic choice; it's an engineering issue. You can't just throw that on top of the story we were getting and expect it to hold such weight; it's like one of those commercials where you see how strong Saran wrap is compared to others and the watermelon goes crashing through the wrap and the narrator says "Be reasonable." 

I'm running a bit longer than intended so let's switch to bullet points and call it a day.

- There are conspicuous "editor" paragraphs strewn throughout that feel like notes from first readers transcribed into Jamie's voice. i.e. "Later I learned that..." or "Oh, and I erased Liz's messages" etc. Things that escaped the author on first pass that must be accounted for.  

- Speaking of those "later"s I will never understand leaving these sort of writer-clearing-his-throat/ running-tics used to just get him going. They extend to the repetitive phrases here and there ("champ" etc.) but FFS, get rid of these things when editing. The first paragraph of the book, for example, is like reading King clear his throat. None of this sort of thing is - as we see from subsequent events - true, or necessary. 

- Jamie in no way resembles a child of the twenty-first century, and his mother's job in no way resembles a literary agent's in New York City in the twenty-first century. This really took me out of the book in places. Had he set the book twenty years earlier, that'd have fixed it.

- I guess I haven't spent much time on the It connections. King fans are as used to kinda-sorta-related allusions as they are to bona-fide "this is directly from this other book" things. Both are wrapped up in all this stuff here. They're there but not there. Sort of like "Fair Extension." Or even the Turtle in It vs. the Turtle in the Dark Tower books proper. There's no real "answer" anywhere. I'm fine with the broad genre strokes of it all ("have a question about how to fight the demons and undead? Find the right library.") and have no real issue with the deadlights or Chud-ritual coming up. They certainly don't resolve or tie anything together and I don't think King is working off some kind of unified-multiversity playbook, he's just having fun. 

- Considerable time is spent developing what's-gonna-happen tension regarding whether or not to call back Thierrault. He even gets the proverbial warning from the dead (his friend the professor) about doing so and how it's a bad idea. Then it happens and it's not a big deal at all. "Go," says Jamie, and off he goes. A lot of air goes out of the balloon at this point. There was a better way to wrap this up; Liz's death and post-death scene, as well.

- Along the same lines, Chekov's gun, etc. should cancer be teased for Tia and then not return? Some good drama was made of this angle in The Outsider, could've worked here as well. 

- I haven't mentioned much about the fake-historical-fiction author and the Roanoke stuff, too. I wasn't too impressed with this, to be honest; none of it felt real to me. I liked the scene at the dead author's house and how it set the stage for the Liz/ Thierrault-terrorist scene to follow. But if there was some Misery-level novel-mirroring going on, it eluded me. Plus I just didn't buy this author as some huge multi-million-selling draw in the 21st century. Again, set the book in the recent past, and no problem. 

- Well FFS, the incest reveal again. That it happened in the first place, that we're to believe she just had the baby and built a business with Uncle Henry, that it's suggested without remarking on the True Detective hillbilly voodoo logic it represents that such a coupling produces magical offspring, all of it. It's possible questions were meant to linger to be explored in future volumes, but it hasn't been marketed as the first of an ongoing series, nor has anyone mentioned it post-release, that I've seen anyway. 

Either way, I don't have much interest in more. Whistle all you want, champ, my lad - I think I'll stay put. 

~

As mentioned last time, this will be the last post in the Hard Case Crime Chronicles series. Thanks for reading!

The Colorado Kid (2005)

“A man doesn’t get to the age I was even then without getting his ass kicked a number of times by fools with a little authority.”

I didn't have much to say about this book when I reviewed it the first time, but my opinion had fallen a bit by the time I reviewed it again in 2019:

"It's tough to tell what the point of writing an unsolvable mystery is outside of a classroom exercise of some kind. King's at a point, both careerwise and talentwise, where he can write such a thing and get it published and even make it compelling. But why would he want to? And how could anyone tell if he succeeded or not? He famously derided Nicholson Baker's Vox as a meaningless fingernail paring, but what is this, then? I can only assume there's something here I'm missing."

Still fair, I feel, but as a result of this re-read, I’m going to bump this one up, from 63rd (of 65) to 46. I’ll get to why that is momentarily, but there it is up front. Lest we forget, though, this is not some King's Highway adjunct project, but another episode of:

Also, I’ll break from previous entries in the Hard Case Crime Chronicles and delve into
plot details and spoilers, below. 

2005
HCC-013-I

There'll definitely be at least one more of these (King's Later comes out in early 2021) but the Hard Case Crime Chronicles will be slowing down for the foreseeable future. Like From Novel to Film or Friday Night Film Noir or Twilight Zone Tuesday or any once-frequent-feature here at the Omnibus, the HCCC will join the Legion of Inactive Series. I don't really consider these series "closed" in that I exist in a permanent state of wanting to take up any old series and continue; hell, I'm still plotting storylines for fan-fic comics written with friends from the 80s, in some part of my brain. (True story.) So, same with Hard Case Crime Chronicles. I mean, I'm keeping the books. Which is actually part of how the project was a failure. 

I had two objectives: (1) to read the fifty-ish Hard Case Crime books on my shelf to (2) determine whether or not I was keeping them or donating them. I failed the first part by thirty-five books so was unable to determine the second part. On the other hand, I enjoyed myself, mostly. So hey. I'd not like to make a habit out of enjoying failure, but it's a victory of sorts (not the scoreboard - or electoral college - kind) when it happens. Because reading’s cool, Beavis.  

So let's jump in. First, the new cover. Great composition, but the girl needed some work. (The shoulders, the left leg: ugh.) This juxtaposition of idyllic seaside Maine with murder works well, and it’s the sort of thing that specifically holds anchor for King. As he mentions in the afterword, the islands off the coast of Maine like Monhegan or Cranberry fascinate him with their “contrasting yet oddly complimentary atmospheres of community and solitariness.” It’s a fascination that has minted mucho dinero for El Maestro Rey, and much readerly delight among his fans.

He’s also sketched out the Maine-r of the American species many times. He does here as lovingly as anywhere, although he burns off some of the good will he engenders by indulging a bit too much. He’s tried this sort of thing (two locals relaying a long quasi-mythological tale as interrupted and augmented by their folksy mannerisms, their unsurpassed empathy, and their wisdom) many times in other places, but I’d say the way he does it in The Colorado Kid is mostly a net-positive. Some of the broader strokes work better (“That in the winter the wind on the mainland side of the island was sometimes a terrible sound, almost the cry of a bereft woman, was a thing she did not know, and there was no reason to tell her” than others “Then they were all laughing. Stephanie * thought she loved those two old buzzards. She really did.”)

* Stephanie/ Stephen. Draw your own conclusions. At one point, the other two characters kid Steffi – “That’s pretty good. You should be a writer.” I do not suggest Steffi is a one-to-one avatar for the author (what Grant Morrison has called the “two-dimensional diving suit”) any more than Vince or (the other guy) is. But are the author’s characters / inner monologues cracking on him? i.e. is that what his characters are telling King, the faithful transcriber/ excavator of the characters in his stories? Yes. In other places in the book as well. 

A parable is delivered in the first chapter re: the monetary ecology of a closed island community and perceptions vs. reality that probably doubles as King’s statement on the Schrödinger’s Mystery aspect of The Colorado Kid itself. Vince answer’s Steffi’s question (“will (the waitress) know who put the money in her purse?”) “If she didn’t know, would that make it illegal tender?” They might as well have put a picture in after that chapter of everyone looking directly at the reader.

Speaking of the pictures, there are plenty new ones in the second printing. I didn't include them all below and can't provide specific credits since neither the publisher (Charles Ardai, in his intro) nor the author in his Afterword, nor anyone at the respective sites for the book (for shame!) or wiki, did, except to state that one or two of them are by Kate Kelton, the actress who played Jordan on Haven (allegedly based on TCK) and others are by Mark Edward Geyer, Paul Mann, and Mark Summers.

Paul Devane in foreground, whose father-in-law's cigarette habit provides an important clue. 

This looks more like a photo that was traced over, to me. (A problem with having more than one artist do the pictures is lack of consistency for character models. Steffi, Vince, and "Dave Bowie" (ugh) look differently each time they appear.

I assume this is the Colorado Kid's widow? Kinda vampy, eh?

I also don't recall Steffi wearing a mini-skirt and pumps. Then again, I don't recall her looking as shown on the original cover. I'm the kind of dumb animal who says "hey wow, legs!" either stupid way.

I like this one. Don't mind Herman up there, my desk gargoyle; he was helping hold the book open for me.

The Russian coin that does not exist in our world. (Is that President Chadbourne on the $5 bill? Does that look like Lincoln to you?) 

This is from the bit from the Joyland excerpt at the end. Who's this lady supposed to be? I suppose it's the Mom before her thank you tryst with our young hero. This picture makes it looks like she's some boardwalk floosie waiting for a thirteen year old boy, FWIW.

This reminds me of that scene near the beginning of Blue Velvet: "Yep. That's an ear all right."  

Let's chat about the mystery, shall we? I took note of a few things while reading:

- "Tea for the Tillerman" comes up more than once, in one of those flashes of inspiration from Steffi that seem rather conspicuously placed. She at first thinks it's Al Stewart, then remembers it's Cat Stevens. It's Cat Stevens in our world, but as other things suggest, this whole takes place in another.  The lyrics suggest tea for the tillerman and "steak for the son." Our mystery dead man does have a piece of improbable steak lodged in his throat. How or why, who knows? This is a tantalizing line of inquiry, but I can make nothing of it. 

-      "This has been a long time coming" or "Lidle's got it coming" are what the (unreliable drunk) tillerman hears from our possible-mystery-dead man as he crosses the sound. What does this mean? Zero clue. Who is Lidle? 

- The time difference between CO and ME is two hours, and the final sightings of Mystery Dead Man (Cogan) are 10:30 am CO time and 5:30 pm ME time. 

- The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is referenced. Is this a clue? Is there anything in the plot which speaks to TCK? 

- The pack of cigarettes has only one missing. Twenty cigarettes come in a pack. Twenty minus one is FFS obviously the dude went Todash.

- No Starbucks in 1980, nor Blockbuster, yet both are mentioned. And there apparently is no such Russian coin as the one Cogan has, the Chervonetz. These are deliberate clues, so we must accept the idea that this is an alternate timeline/ dimension than the one we inhabit. Steffi and Vince make no mention of the incongruity of Starbucks/ Blockbuster, so they too inhabit one we do not. These are not minor things, I'd say. (Would it make the story/ mystery more compelling if they had? That is to say, if they were of our timeline, where these things are incongruities? I think so. Instead we're left with another mystery. Unless: the Colorado Kid is actually from our own future-present and somehow warped into the 1980-Maine of the titular story. That's what I lean to.) 

That brings me to my only real problem of TCK. Which isn't so much a problem with the book itself but with King's remarks about it. He originally suggested that there is a solution. Then he started saying, well, there only might be; "my solution," (he says) "is supernatural." This annoys me. Is King's solution only one of many solutions? It's one thing to say "hey some of my fans might not like my not solving this one" and another to be all "maybe there is one; maybe there isn't." You either included the clues needed to solve the mystery, or you didn't. 

And "supernatural" covers so much ground that it muddies the point of the perfectly readable but to-what-purpose what-ifs in which the novel engages. What's the point of eliminating the impossible to arrive at the improbable if "gone Todash" is ultimately the answer even though you need to go beyond the book to even get the clue? Does it undermine the whole point of living our lives in cogent defiance of the nightmare-fuel-of-unknowns that existentially envelop us all? To borrow from King's allusion at the beginning, it decreases the purchasing power of the legal tender in circulation. 

I said this is a story about telling stories, but really the plot is even simpler: it’s simply a story about the day Steffi joined the staff ("crossed over the river") of The Weekly Islander. Tea for the tillerman. All the relevant details to tell that story, to achieve that goal, are present in The Colorado Kid. As Vince says, life is 99% mystery and 1% conceptual re-framing to stay sane. Then again, this is drama, folks. I can’t see why it can’t be both a meditation on the stories we tell ourselves and how we use them to accept/ exclude and a puzzle box with a more traditionally satisfying conclusion: The Mystery of the Riddle’s Enigma plus Steffi solving it, even if she (or the reader) is unaware she's done so. 

Actually, I guess such a book would probably look something like The Outsider. King's the one who gets us into this mess by the Starbucks/Blockbuster thing. I think when it comes to whatever mysteries remain in King's works, we likely have gotten all the answers we're going to get. It's frustrating, but that's life.

Perhaps there's a lesson there.

"And on the mound the little boy who had been pitching held his glove up to one of the bright circles which hung in the sky just below the clouds, as if to touch that mystery, and bring it close, and open its heart, and know its story."

Herman is happy to have helped. 

Killing Castro by Lawrence Block

“Now, he was going to Cuba to get this Castro. He didn’t know who Castro was, except that he was running Cuba and somebody didn’t want him to keep on with it. He didn’t care about this. He cared about twenty grand, which meant soft living for a long time. 

Twenty grand could get you into a lot of big-breasted girls. You could drink  a lot of premium beer, sleep in a lot of silk-sheeted beds.
So what the hell.” 

Let's jump back into the Hard Case Crime Chronicles with HCC-051:

From the back cover:

There were five of them, each prepared to kill, each with his own reasons for accepting what might well be a suicide mission. The pay? $20,000 apiece. The mission? Find a way into Cuba and kill Castro.

The breathtaking thriller, originally published the year before the Cuban Missile Crisis under a pen name Lawrence Block never used before or since is the rarest of Block’s books – and still a work of chilling relevance all these years later.

We’ll get to the author in a little bit, but this was originally published in 1961, a couple of years before both Cuba and political assassination took different turns of chilling political relevance.  

Before we jump in, just a reminder on what these Hard Case Crime Chronicles post are all about: (1) they're an ongoing project where I decide which of the HCCs I've accumulated over the years are worth keeping and which I'll donate to the free libraries around my neighborhood, and (2) intended as breezy, spoiler-free fare. The right analogy, I think, is we're like passengers on the bus and each morning you see me reading a new paperback and we've struck up a friendly conversation, not a deep dive.

Still here? Excellent. 

I loved this book. It’s so sleazy. It reminded me of two of my favorite films: Sorcerer and The Killing. The former was of course based on the classic French film The Wages of Fear (1953) which was based on the book Le Salaire de la Peur (1950) by Georges Arnaud.  The Killing came out in 1956 and was based on Clean Break (1955) by Lionel White, a prolific author of oft-adapted crime books. I don’t bring any of this up to suggest some kind of cross-pollination, only that some kind of existential state of anxiety was being worked out in all these works. Killing Castro (which first saw print as the below under a pseudonym) was a relative latecomer to a well-established mood.

I’d very much like to talk about the spoiler in this one – I will consider the comments section a free zone as always so if anyone who’s read the book wants to talk about the ending, I hope to see you there – except it’s definitely one to see for yourself. That all the characters are doomed in this one is a foregone conclusion, of course; likewise, that some of them are irredeemable bastards while others have a shabby nobility is all to be expected. But how it all plays out is definitely a big surprise. 

There are intermittent sections that simply relay the events that swept Castro to power and after. Those chapters are some of the most interesting, just because the events themselves were (and remain) so interesting. My favorite of the Blackford Oakes books was probably for the same reason; the Cuban revolution and its ascension to Cold War Immortality always intrigue me. It's written with relative sympathy for all sides though of course it would be considered "rapidly anti-Castro" these days. I wonder what the author would think about the next sixty years of Cuban history?

Actually is the author still alive? I've of course heard of Lawrence Block but never read him before. Or even looked him up before. Let me do so now.

Okay, I'm back. Just the wiki but holy moley this guy has written an awful lot. And yes, still with us, eighty-two years of age. I've got at least two more Blocks in queue for this project - I think possibly even three. I'll have to look up a few interviews with the guy for next time. 

Killing Castro is a great, quick read. Brutal in spots, the proverbial bumpy ride through a shady part of town.

The Hard Case Crime Chronicles will continue 

with Losers Live Longer by Russell Atwood,

appearing sooner or later.

Blood Sugar by Daniel Kraus

(2019)

From the dark imagination of bestselling novelist Daniel Kraus - co-author with Guillermo del Toro of The Shape of Water - comes a Halloween crime story that's like nothing you've ever read before.

In a ruined house at the end of Yellow Street, an angry outcast hatches a scheme to take revenge for all the wrongs he has suffered. With the help of three alienated kids, he plans to hide razor blades, poison, and broken glass in Halloween candy, maiming or killing dozens of innocent children. But as the clock ticks closer to sundown, will one of his helpers - an innocent himself, in his own streetwise way - carry out or defeat the plan?

Told from the child's POV, in a voice as unforgettable as A Clockwork Orange, Kraus' novel is at once frightening an emotional, thought-provoking and laugh-out-loud funny. It'll make you rethink your concepts of family, loyalty, and justice - and will leave you double-checking the wrappers on your Halloween candy for the rest of your days. 

So says the back cover.

I made it to pg. 53 and this paragraph:

"I find Midge over by the cherry cough drops and lecture her how Barack Obama used to be the chief mightyducker of the whole US of A not to mention the stone cold robocop that killed the dude that did the twin towers. Little sister gets confused cuz usually Im (sic) lecturing her about the Two Towers from Lord of the Rings and now she probably thinks Barack Obama killed Sauron. Politics are mad complex."

Folks, I can't read a whole book like this. Life is too short. I was sick of this by pg. 2. The back cover references A Clockwork Orange, but it just didn't hit me that way. I wish it did. The last time I read that (1992) I really loved it. But I've never been able to read any other Burgess, despite an enduring (still) interest in the man's work and perspectives. I don't know if there's a connection.

Take a look at these reviews on Goodreads. Holy moley do people love this book. And it sounds like there's some dark, disturbing stuff going on that I didn't get to. I'm all for unconventional structure and narrators and dark, disturbing stuff, but the veneer of this one, with the cutesy blackface (kinda) narration and the overstacked deck, and it just pushed me away.

Kudos, sir, you apparently landed - and hard - with everyone but me. 

This one was two hundred twenty pages, so I gave it a little more than twenty percent of its total before punting. I wish I enjoyed it more - I think the author skillfully switched between voices, it's just I didn't want to read any of them. The fake letters written by Jody strewn throughout were the best parts. (I kinda flipped and skimmed after pg. 53 and read long stretches.) 

"Believe, yo."

~

The Hard Case Crime Chronicles will continue 

with Killing Castro by Lawrence Block,

appearing sooner or later.

Seven Quarry Books by Max Allan Collins

 

We return to The Hard Case Crime Chronicles with seven Quarry books by Max Allan Collins. 

Collins ("Mac" to follow) can be a hard author to keep up with. Over the past year, not counting any of the below, I've read USS Powderkeg (great title, great plot, needed another draft) and Scarface and the Untouchable, pt. 1 (pt. 2 here) of a comprehensive biography of Elliot Ness that he co-authored with A. Brad Schwartz. Some of that Ness story was originally written in the 80s as four fiction books, recently collected into an e-book at the very agreeable price of $2.99.

I still plan to listen to this audiocassette of the first of them, acquired earlier this year (for more than the whole e-book collection. So it goes. As Frank London once klezmer-ed, in the marketplace, all is subterfuge.)

I mention all that because it seems no matter what other author or project has my attention, he's always in rotation along with whatever else I'm reading.  I haven't even mentiond the Nate Heller and Mike Hammer books and audiobooks I have in queue, or the additional ones as part of this Hard Case Crime Chronicles series (The Consummata and Two for the Money.) 

Anyway- the last batch of Hard Case Crime books I got off eBay had a bunch of Mac's Quarry books. I had two of them previously (reviewed here and reread for the below) but six were first time reads. These are NOT the complete Quarry novels; that list is here. Will there be another post with the rest of them, namely Quarry's List, The Last Quarry, The First Quarry, Quarry in the Middle, The Wrong Quarry, Quarry in the Black, and Killing Quarry? Probably, but it will likely be after this whole HCCC series finishes, so it could be years. I know how I am, though – if I start a series and like more than two of the books (which is the case here) it bothers me to leave the series unfinished.

That's how they get ya. 

Rather than rank them least-to-most favorite, the below are presented in publication order. A quick word on the publishing: Mac published four Quarry books in the 70s, a few more in the 80s, then all of them under the Hard Case Crime imprint, along with several new (and ongoing) entries. The below mixes all the eras of Quarry's publishing life. 

HCC-s02

Originally published as The Broker (1976). 

The assignment was simple: stake out the man’s home and kill him. Easy work for a professional like Quarry. But when things go horribly wrong, Quarry finds himself with a new mission: learn who hired him, and make the bastard pay.

The first and in some ways the best of the Quarry books. From the author’s afterword: “I wanted to take it up a notch – my ‘hero’ would be a hired killer. The books would be in first person. In the opening chapter, Quarry would do something terrible, giving readers an early chance to bail; late in the book he would again do something terrible, to confront readers with just what kind of person they’ve been easily identifying with. (…) A war-damaged Vietnam veteran. I had a good friend (now deceased) who was very much like Quarry – a sweet, smart, funny guy who learned to kill people for ‘Uncle Sugar.’” Also “I wanted to make a comment about Americans in general – that we had, through Vietnam, become numb to death. That we had grown used to watching body bags being loaded into planes as we ate our TV dinners taking in the nightly news.” 

A fine (and era-appropriate) American New Wave sensibility. And really that’s what should have happened – this shouldn’t be a book that came out in 1976, it should be a cinema classic in all its grainy-7os-footage glory. Would’ve been awesome. Still could. Well, sort of – you know what I mean. 

This is prototypical Quarry, and the author succeeded pretty well in his mission statement above: Quarry’s a dick, throughout, and every so often does or says something awful. This might make modern readers uncomfortable. He has a tendency to describe women by their tits and men by their ethnic stereotypes; he’s also just an asshole, in general, the type of person who's always one-upping the other person in a conversation. Is this not, though, the way it should be? Is he supposed to be a killer with a heart of gold? A passionate feminist? This is a first person POV from a guy who is not a sociopath but by virtue of body count a serial killer. 

I’m staying spoiler-free for these Hard Case Crime Chronicles and sometimes that handicaps my ability to review these things the way I want to. This is a very well-constructed book. The other characters particularly a fellow Vietnam vet working for the Broker, whom Quarry instantly browbeats, much like a short-timer would for a newly arrived soldier in a Vietnam movie, reflect theme and contrast Quarry in a way not always present in the other Quarry books. 

HCC-s04

Originally published as The Dealer (1976)

As part of his plan to target other hitmen, Quarry follows one from steamy Florida to the sober Midwest, But this killer isn't a man at all - she's a sloe-eyed beauty, as dangerous in bed as she is deadly on the job. Has Quarry met his match?

Spoiler alert; he has not.

This book is kind of terrible, sorry. The whole post-Broker set-up of the Quarry books, where Quarry has the Broker's list of who has targets out on them, travels to wherever one of them may be, susses out the scene (always with more arrogance than is fun to actually read or partake in), then offers his services to the "client," is very cumbersome. Watching him talk the client into, berate the client's staff, etc. I'd have rethought this. But as it's the set-up for several books, what can you do, the deed is done. 

Mostly, though, Quarry's POV is so relentlessly juvenile and silly throughout that it completely dismantles anything else going on. Here's a mash-up poem of some of the more over-the-top inner musings of our protagonist:

I was watching that Oriental-eyed woman with the big breasts.

The smile was phony, but she was good at it. 
And the bustline was real, so who cared?

If she was here, she'd be easy enough to spot:
the Oriental eyes, the awesome breasts, how could you miss her? 
Even if the room were full of  women.

"I'll get right on it," Lucille said. But those Oriental eyes said Go fuck yourself.

Dark pubic hair against the whiteness of her loins. 
She was an architectural wonder, this girl. 
One day, if she lived long enough, those massive breasts would have to droop. 

Gravity, like death, is inevitable. 

But right now she and her high, huge breasts were alive and well in Des Moines,  Iowa.

She sure wasn't the dragon lady, not in the sack anyway.

The promise of the Oriental eyes was not delivered.

The jacket came off to reveal a yellow-and-tan-striped halter top that caressed her large breasts, cradled them like a child sleeping in a hammock.

She was on her stomach but turned to one side, hugging a pillow, against which rested one generous breast, cuddled there, not squashed, its large dark nipple soft and smooth and delicate, a flower with its petals unfolded.

Legs sprawled but gracefully so.

I wondered how decorum would feel about those two big naked boobs.

Her back-up man had almost as big tits as she did.

We humped like a couple of teenagers in the back of a car,
 with a desperate, innocent horniness.

Amen. I don't do this to berate the author, by the way. The only thing that matters is whether or not it makes sense for the character to think/ say these things. Does it? His breast descriptions are right out of Richard Blade. Is he sitting in the chair cooly appraising the swell of areolas? Who thinks like that? Would a hardened assassin whose soul was scrubbed to the raw in Vietnam really wander through life like this? I don't now. Perhaps so. I think not, though. It works against whatever else is going on, to say the least. None of this is over the top for 70s genre fiction, really; check out any blog dedicated to paperback novels of the 1960s and 1970s and you'll quickly see the Quarry books are middle-of-the-pack offensive to modern readers, even with all the drooling over the sloe-eyed bra-busters up there.

All of which is to say: it's a combination of a writer applying too much force to a set-up that couldn't quite accommodate it. I'm a 70s-movie guy in a lot of ways; I can watch a dickhead go through the motions of a script or setting if the style is right or other factors are in play, if the mood is right. That is the case in most of these Quarry books, in fact, but it's not the case here in Quarry's Deal. 

"He'd been watching Ruthy throughout, hanging on her every word, savoring everything about her with that special fatherly sort of lust that gives incest a bad name."

HCC-s05

Originally published as The Slasher (1977). 

It's normal to see bodies on the set of an adult film. But when they're dead bodies - and the cast and crew discover they're trapped in a house with a serial killer - Quarry's got his work cut out for him.

I liked this one, though it falls apart a bit at the end. The reveal of the killer and everything after. Up to that point, though, it cruises along pretty nicely. Somewhere between Inherent Vice and Boogie Nights is a great Paul Thomas Anderson adaptation of this one; wish I could peek into that alternate timeline and watch it. 

Quarry is at his most Mike Hammer-esque here, though. (Seems to me he should be at his most Mike Hammer-esque in the next one on our list, not here.) This one is dripping with 70s-isms, which were not 70s-isms at the time it was written, just nowdays-isms. I like that aspect of just about anything, but here in particular. It's appropriately sleazy.

"In my line of work, it pays to be skeptical, even paranoid, especially in the face of anything even vaguely coincidental. Otherwise, you may find yourself dead. And death is nature's way of telling you you fucked up."

HCC-s06

Originally published as Primary Target (1987)

Now retired and happily married, Quarry turns down a million-dollar contract to assassinate a political candidate. It's not the sort of assignment you can just walk away from without consequences - but coming after Quarry has consequences, too.

As mentioned above this one should be the most Mike-Hammer-esque of the series. But Quarry's grief/ vengeance is actually rather underplayed. He takes a little revenge against one of the people who killed his pregnant wife by letting him believe he (Quarry) is going to murder his wife and family before shooting him. ("There's no reason to believe there's anything after this life but darkness, but I wanted to make sure the son of a bitch spent a few minutes in Hell.") But outside of that the wife is pretty much a forgettable character, and her death/ the whole loss of Quarry's A-frame house on Paradise Lake is kind of shuffled into the background. There's an episode of Hawaii Five-O where we meet Dan-o's fiancee (Anne Archer) in the same episode she's killed (halfway through) and then he's over it by the end. This is a bit more in-depth than that, but Anne Archer had more of an impact than... I literally already forgot her name, had to look it up. (Linda.)

Maybe this has more to do with Anne Archer. Could be an imperfect example. This is not a bad book, but the sameness of the set-up (Quarry bullies his way into his target's graces, becomes head of security, bullies the staff, bullies the target, oversells everything, sees someone he recognizes but must hide it) is a little grating. But there's an expectation of repetition in any serial genre fiction; I mean, how many times does James Bond allow himself to be captured, etc. So not a dealbreaker.

The political side of it stops short of being explicitly all-Republicans-are-hypocritical-asshole-fascists, etc. Which is appreciated, even if it's somewhat insincere. Still: better than anything one could hope for nowadays.

"Pros these boys had not been. Even driving a brand-new car they had managed to leave a trail of stupidity all the way back home. They were lucky they were already dead, or I'd be killing them again."

HCC-102
(2011)

Even the enigmatic hit man called Quarry had to start somewhere. And for him, that was the day he returned stateside from 'Nam to find his young wife cheating. He'd killed plenty overseas, so killing her lover was no big deal. And when he was recruited to use his skills as a contract killer. that transition was easy, too. 

He survived in this jungle as he had in that other one - by expecting trouble. 

What he didn't expect was ever running into her again...

The back cover copy - what I'm using for all the plot summaries - is a bit longer than usual, yet it reveals less. I mean, you basically get the character's origin story, and a restatement of the title. The actual plot has more to do with moviemaking and reflects the author's real-life experience as an indie filmmaker. That part of it is not as intrusive as it could be, mainly because the reader is right there with the protagonist learning things from the ground-up in an organic way. 

A few curveballs in this one to the usual set-up with Quarry pretending to be gay as part of his cover, which leads to some unexpected plot resolutions, not to mention his ex-wife and real-world past. As in Quarry's Cut it deals with a film set where Quarry shows up and pretends he's from a magazine. Stick with what you know, I guess. The time frame (1980) works in both Quarry's and Mac's favor here. (You know, I don't know if there is a Quarry set post-Y2k, with the internet and ubiquitous surveillance and cell phones, etc. He might even get killed in another book for all I know; I've avoided finding out so far.)

As in Quarry, which featured "pert Peg Baker", this one features a fictitious Playmate, Tiffany Goodwin, who is revealed to have been Playmate of the year "half a decade ago." I kept wondering who she was supposed to be a stand-in for. (Marilyn Lange, maybe? While we're here, my guess for Peg Baker was Jan Roberts. Quarry references Playboy a lot - it's fair to try to figure out who he's talking about.). Eric Conrad - the gay male lead who comes on to Quarry - starred on a popular show about cops on a beach with lots of slow-motion running. That's not a precise fit for any 70s show I know (although this was written in 2011 so it could be a post-Pacific Blue/ Baywatch projection back in time) but I'd like to know which one he meant.

"A couple of framed desert landscapes is all that separated this from a Ramada Inn 

in Who Farted, West Virginia."

HCC-118
(2015)

Quarry is a pro in the murder business. When the man he works for becomes a targethimself, Quarry is sent South to remove a traitor in the ranks. But in this wide-open city - with sin everywhere and betrayal around every corner - Quarry must make the most dangerous choice of his deadly career: who to kill?

The moral dilemma described there and in the title wasn't as weighing as it might sound. Basically once the novel gets to that point, it's fairly obvious which character he's not going to kill. I thought back to the original character description, i.e. "late in the book he would again do something terrible, to confront readers with just what kind of person they’ve been easily identifying with." But I felt in no danger of that actually happening. Except: the whole relationship with the young girl is kind of gross altogether. So, mission accomplished.

This one is set in 1972. I'm not overly familiar with the Quarry chronology, as I've mentioned - this endeavor will remain a whatever-I-grab-off-the-shelf-in-whatever-order affair to keep it flowing at the necessary pace - but that puts it a year or so before the events described in the first Quarry aka The Broker (1976). The 70s touches (the early videotapes and TV schedule) are all appreciated. That goes for the next one as well.

"'Who was it said 'whatever one sows, so shall he reap?' 

'God or some shit,' the sheriff said with a shrug.'"

HCC-130
(2017)

Memphis, 1975. 'Raunchy' doesn't begin to describe Max Climer's magazine, Climax, or his all-hour strip club, or his planned video empire. And evangelists, feminists, and local watchdog groups all want him out of business. But someone wants more than that and has hired a killer to end Max's career permanently. Only another hit man - the ruthless professional known as Quarry - can keep Climer from becoming a casualty in the Sexual Revolution.

I loved it when I read it the first time, and I still enjoyed it on a reread, but there's that sense of repetition again. I mean, this is just a slight variation on any of the ones above with some of the same details, characters, settings, etc. You expect some repetition with these sorts of things, sure, but maybe a bit too much of a hodge-podge grab of previous books, here. The later-John-Gardner's-Bond effect, maybe. 

I think Climer comes across as a cross between Al Goldstein and Larry Flynt, but the author alludes to some interesting reading on historic Memphis in his Afterword. It's worth mentioning that the short-lived Cinemax series with Logan Marshall-Green as Quarry (with author, below) was set in 1970s Memphis. I prefer the character to be a Midwestern one, but the show had its moments.

I reviewed one of the episodes at the end of this post.

Logan's a good fit for the character. Certainly looks more like how I picture him in the books than this Jack Kirby lookalike they gave him for the Hard Case Crime covers:

"His leisure jacket was a plaid number 

from the Who-Shot-the-Couch? collection."

~

The Hard Case Crime Chronicles will continue with:

Blood Sugar by Daniel Kraus,
sooner or later.