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.

From the Dog Star Omnibus Vault

I've been going a little cross-eyed at the number of posts I have in draft mode, some begun as long ago as 2014, some begun much more recently than that but equally far from the finish line. If I was a tad less OCD - i.e. if I could just leave them there in a state of incompletion until the spirit moved me to finish them - that'd be fine. Alas, I'm not, and each day a post sits there unfinished drags at me like one of those flotation barrels from Jaws. 

Maybe not so dramatic as that, but I've been wanting to dive back into the Springsteen blogs Bryant Burnette and I have been doing and figured I'd move a little faster if I clear the decks. They're all worthy of more love and attention or analysis than I can presently bring to the table.

Here's a glimpse of the Blogs That Might Have Been. Fire up the Ur-Kindle and search appropriately, friends and neighbors!

COMICS

First up: the last two John Romita Jr. in the dot-dot-dot posts I had planned: his work in the 2010s and his work on Spider-Man. 

I was enjoying the JRJR-through-the-decades project, but all I have (digitally) of the man's work from the present decade is Kick-Ass. Certainly a series worth looking at, but I don't have any of his Superman or - the above screencaps notwithstanding - his Batman to go with it. Seemed like a lot to skip and still call an "...in the 2010s" post. As for his Spider-Man stuff, I honestly hadn't realized there was quite so much of it: 90-plus issues across three different series (not including the 80s stuff already blogged up). A better blogger than me will have to take that one on; I suspect there's a lot of gold in them hills.

The last Let's Rap About Cap post I put up here was in February 2017. I had planned to do two more (one for the DeMatteis /Zeck run, and one for Mark Gruenwald's Commission saga), but regrettably, the trail went cold. It was fun while it lasted. Let this not be a metaphor for America itself.

I've had a couple of posts on Walt Simonson's Thor in queue for a couple of years now, and while it's clear I'm not going to finish them anytime soon, I'm sure I'll still get to them, as I usually read Simonson's Thor run once a decade or so and I'm due. I had a notion of starting a series of posts on Kirby's Fourth World with an overview of Simonson's Orion, though, and that's looking like it's not going to happen. Too bad because it's probably the best - and apologies to all Kirby purists - of all the takes on the New Gods.

Impossible for me to make my case in the space allotted, hence the initial desire to do so in a series of blogs about it.

Don't take my word for it, of course - line 'em all up an read them yourselves. There's a lot of great Fourth World stuff out there.

And while it's taking me forever to get back to Twilight Zone Tuesday and continue my year-by-year exploration of the Gold Key comics, I still very much intend to.

FRIDAY NIGHT FILM NOIR

This whole series of posts grew out of the groceries routine I had during the first year of my eldest child's life. I thought it would be amusing to qualify that with some details, but after I typed it all out, guess what? It wasn't! So, we'll just leave it there. I still plan on putting up the occasional FNFN, but I've been stuck on this one forever and it's time to move on. Film in question:

Worth seeing? You bet, it's a stone-cold classic. And really, maybe that's the part that trips me up. What can I add to the discussion, really? Just screencaps and the occasional personal ancedote. Which is more than fine by me - that might even be on my gravestone - but I hadn't watched it that way originally. A Friday Night Film Noir is a whole different approach than a Scenic Route post. I'd have to go back in and re-do it - not just re-watch it but re-do it, i.e. shitcan what I already did, since it was notes for a FNFN post, and spend about twice the duration of the film pausing every so often to get and crop my screencaps. Oh, to have a bullpen of interns or ghost writers! Or the proverbial robot body. Or clones. Maybe someday someone will re-do the movie Multiplicity but make it about a guy who just wants to get to all the blogs he wants to do.

And speaking of!

FROM NOVEL TO FILM

There are some novel/film combos I've had on this list that I keep meaning to get to, and I fully plan to. But I've been tinkering with these two - 

 

- for months and months and just cannot seem to crack the code, as it were. Instead I've added more and more to them and now have way too much but still not enough. I mean take a look at this Island in the Sun folder:

Each of those folders has sub-folders in it, and each individual folder represents two-to-five-paragraphs apiece. Who do I think I'm fooling over here? That ain't a blog, it's a damn semester. Is this some kind of fake online university? It sure the crap is not. 

On a short list of End-of-Empire reads for me, and the movie's pretty great, as well.

The film adds the nice touch of beginning and ending on the image of Harry Bellafonte's character walking on his own into the unknown future.

As for The Long Goodbye, the novel and the film are very different animals. Equally fascinating in their own ways, but very different animals. Hardcore fans of the book seem to dislike Altman's American New Wave update on it, and non-Chandler fans seem to prefer the film. I love both, but I will say, I've never understood why Altman didn't just call his film something else altogether. It's different enough to just be a homage/ update of the novel without it explicitly being called it. If that were the case, though, we might not have gotten the theme song, which plays throughout the movie but scored differently each time. (A rarity in cinema, if not unique to The Long Goodbye.)

"She opened a mouth like a firebucket and laughed. That terminated my interest in her. I couldn't hear the laugh but the hole in her face when she unzippered her teeth was all I needed." 

"The name's Chick Agostino. I guess you'll know me."

"Like a dirty newspaper. Remind me not to step on your face."

MOVIES

Have you noticed how many blogs out there start as one thing and then slowly morph into random film reviews? Mine will likely suffer the same fate. (Better that than political rants, I guess.) Before we get there, here are two that got away from me. First up:

ATTACK OF THE 50 Ft

 

I've always had a soft spot for anything that uses the trappings of "trash" culture to make a serious academic point, or - even more - when I suspect it happens accidentally. This is probably the case with Attack of the 50 Ft. Woman. I don't suspect its creators purposefully set out to create such a fruitful object of meditation for subsequent generations of film connoisseurs and scholars. I've read such varied interpretations of it over the years, most of them under a feminist-theory umbrella, which makes the most sense, but also more than a few Marxist deconstructionist stuff. I was trying to find one of the latter - about how the film is an examination of what happens to "appetite" in a capitalist system - that I read years ago, but no luck.

There's definitely something more than meets the eye going on here.

Almost David Lynchian in some scenes.

A cuckolded woman driven mad by the knowledge of her husband's infidelity.

The authorities are no help - hell, they're protecting the philandering sonuvabitch.

Attempts to dialogue result in nothing.

"I'll help you get undressed and take your pill."

Let me step out of the way (mostly) and let the screencaps tell you the rest.

WTF.

 

Literally holding a baby doll meant to be her husband in this scene. Cheesy fx shortcut for a pause-button-less generation, or cheeky Freudian reference, take your pick they both work.

Reconciled... in death.

All of the above plus about a hundred other redundant screencaps were meant to be corralled into something resembling a sensible overview, but again I felt like I was recreating the wheel. Plus it's all probably perfectly self-evident upon viewing. Still - what a fun flick. Right up there with other meta-narrative gold of its era like Invasion of the Body Snatchers or Creature from the Black Lagoon or  Star Trek's "The Man Trap". 

And I screencapped Bulworth a while back but haven't found anything to do with it.

"The populace is unaroused."

Subtle placement of janitorial station.

It's filled with caustic swipes, such as when the insurance man leaves out one door and the Senator's paid assassin comes in the other.

Good movie, though. A little awkward in spots but maybe even Beatty's best work. Call me crazy.

MUSIC

"One of the more curious after-effects of Prince's death is that I finally got into ZZ Top. Let me unpack that a little..." So began a blog from 2016 about:

The Prince/ZZ Top segue was on account of an interview Billy Gibbons gave after Prince died where he relayed some of his conversations with the Purple One about guitar tone and technique. They were mutual fans of one another and shared one other thing in common: mad respect from all their professional contemporaries and critics for how they play their instrument but not always popularly recognized as the brilliant guitar players they are. Or in Prince's case, were, I guess. RIP, you purple SOB. 

But, I didn't get to it fast enough, and my musical "buzz" moved elsewhere. (To Sade and Robert Cray blogs, specifically.) ZZ Top still very much rocks. There was a stretch last year where this outro to "Backdoor Love Affair" was in my head all the time, and I just found myself randomly nod-and-squinting along to it on the bus or elsewhere. Great soundtrack music for walking around. As is "Sharp Dressed Man," which is one of those things that is used in so many things from commercials to punchlines in Reality TV or elsewhere to perhaps fool you into forgetting how utterly, perfectly cool it is.

You could say the same thing for Robert Palmer, specifically his work with The Power Station (1985) through the same year's Riptide and Heavy Nova (1988). I've been listening to a whole hell of a lot of this the past few months. That whole Power Station album (best known for "Some Like It Hot") is a hot air balloon rising and falling through a neon landscape of cocaine and Miami Vice, while Riptide is just so cool: whether it's the dreamy disorientation of the title track or "Get It Through Your Heart," the every-montage-you-ever-saw-awesomeness of "Hyperactive",  the ultimate revenge/ expression of the Seinfeld bass-line approach to life on songs like "Trick Bag" or "Discipline of Love," the unexpectedly-metal swagger of "Flesh Wound," or the album's big hits - and 80s classics in general - "Addicted to Love" and "I Didn't Mean To Turn You On."

The video for "Addicted to Love," featuring Robert and stoic Nagel-esque girls lip-synching in front of a fake backdrop, was instantly iconic.

The motif re-appeared in the video for "I Didn't Mean To Turn You On."

The success of Riptide and especially the music videos meant a repeat of it all for the lead-off single for Heavy Nova. It's a bigger production - twice the girls, twice the dancing - but a much crasser effort. While Robert is clearly taking the piss out of the persona in the above videos, "Simply Irresistible" drops the irony altogether and synchronizes bumping and grinding intercut with close-ups of the girls pantomiming sex. Rather tame compared to these days - or even those days really - but I declined to screencap it. It's basically a Viagra commercial. I have a soft spot (no pun intended) for the Pepsi commercial, though.

Heavy Nova is, like Riptide, remembered for these videos than as an album. Which is too bad, since (again like Riptide) it's an eclectic and spirited collection of tunes. RIP, Mr. Palmer. Noblemania has a three-part interview with the girls of some of the above videos here.

NOVELS

"'Yeep!' A small brightly colored shape darted out from behind Lord Leighton's desk. It was Cheeky, the "feathered one" from the Dimension of the Crimson River. He was about the size and the shape of a monkey but covered head-to-foot with bright blue and green feathers instead of fur.

"He was also telepathic."

Ah, Richard Blade and his bangtastic adventures in Dimension X. I had aspirations at one point to do a three-part series on Blade's adventures, all to fulfill a joke with a dead man that he never even heard. I still love the idea (described here) but the actual reading is a bit of a slog. Not quite rinse-wash-repeat, more like rinse- become-palace-sex-slave-to-overthrow-kingdom-cuff-the-underling-then-bang-high-priestess-and-whomever-else- repeat. In theory, entertaining; in the reading, not so much. 

This is very much not the case with:

One of the most entertaining books I've ever read. (The cover notwithstanding.) Judging solely on the reactions from people when I say things like this, I'd have to list Garrison Keillor way up there on my list of guilty pleasures, right up there with Jimmy Buffett's Don't Stop the Carnival. (What? It's freakin' great, ya jerks, leave me alone.)

"It was a good place to grow up, Lake Wobegon. Kids migrated around town as free as birds and did their stuff (...) You were free, but you knew how to behave. You didn't smart off to your elders, and if a lady you didn't know came by and told you to blow your nose, you blew it. (...) Your parents did not read books about parenting, and when they gathered with other adults, they didn't talk about schools or about prevailing theories of child development. They did not weave their lives around you. They had their own lives which were mysterious to you."

"Life is complicated, so think small. You can't live life in raging torrents, you have to take it one day at a time, and if you need drama, read Dickens. (...) The urge to be top dog is a bad urge. Inevitable tragedy. A sensible person seeks to be at peace, to read books, know the neighbors, take walks, enjoy his portion, live to be eighty, and wind up fat and happy. (...) Nobody is meant to be a star. Charisma is pure fiction, and so is brilliance. It's dummies who sit on the dais, and it's the smart people who sit in the dark near the exits. That is the Lake Wobegon way of life."

This excerpt kind of makes it sound like an extension of Keillor's "News from Lake Wobegon" segments, late of Prairie Home Companion. But it's actually an insightful take-down of the ascendancy (and blind spots) of politically correct culture in public radio and higher education. So insightful, in fact, that I think he spent the next twenty years apologizing for it in the circles Keillor ran. For that alone, it deserves a Pultizer. But beyond that, it's just a very well-written, poignant, and accessible story.

Unfortunately, it seems beyond my ability to corral into a post. I had dog-eared something like 50 pages on my last read; that's what is called "dog-earing yourself into a corner," kimosabe. Ain't no way I can sit here and transcribe all the quotes I want to. Too bad - go to Goodreads or search "Wobegon Boy quotes" and you get maybe 5% of the quotable material. This blog could've done a public service! Maybe it still will. First order of business when I get the robot body/ support-staff. (Well, first-ish.)

And finally:

TV

"Can you hold him?"

"Ain't much left to hold, he's deader than armadillo shit."

I mentioned wanting to watch some of Quarry, the recently-cancelled Cinemax series starring Logan Marshall-Green based on the Max Allan Collins series in my recent remarks on Quarry's Climax. I decided to watch the episode Collins himself wrote:

s1, e6

I do want to go back and watch the episodes in the proper order, but I felt the author's take on his own material would be an interesting entry-point. Whether or not it turns out to be I guess I'll find out, but as for the episode itself, it's terrific. Quarry - in the midst of his particular domestic problems with a dynamite supporting cast - takes a contract from the Broker on Eugene Linwood. Linwood was arrested in a previous episode for taking a black student off a bus on its way to a desegregated school and beating him to death. While Linwood travels around town with ease, glad-handing the locals at bars and diners, the black part of town is put on lockdown.

Quarry tracks Linwood to a schoolbus yard, where he intends to place a bomb on one of the buses, beats him to death, then blows up the bomb himself.

When he reports in to the Broker, we learn it was the Broker himself who ordered the hit.

As is the fashion of these days, Quarry is long-form storytelling, so there's way more to the above going on in "His Deeds Were Scattered." But as I can't speak to it credibly, I didn't feel comfortable reviewing that part of it. Hence its appearance here instead of in a post of its own.

Whence the episode title.

A great-looking series.

~