“Anybody I ever hit was set to go anyway. I saw to it that it happened fast and clean. It was something like working in a butcher shop, only my job pays better, the hours are shorter and there isn’t the mess.”

Ladies and gentlemen, introducing… Quarrry! And the Broker, and Boyd. Quarry is a hitman, and his thoughts on his job are thus: “This business of killing, for one thing; this making a life out of death.”

I liked this story, and if you only read one Quarry book, this one sits on its own pretty dang well! As for me, well, I'm going to read more of his adventures, if'n you don't mind!

“…and I was leaving a lot of things behind at the stone quarry river road.” - Quarry, get it? ( )

Quarry (1976) (Quarry #1) by Max Allan Collins. Hard Case Crime publishers have been producing new copies of older works of the crime/noir genre. They have tapped the biggest names in the field, asking them for early examples of their work. Max Allan Collins came up with the Quarry series he wrote while still a young writer. Quarry is the first in a series revolving about the same character.
The book was originally titled TheBroker after the man Quarry works for. The new title character is sort of a lot soul. He came home from Vietnam to no job and no prospect of one. And he finds his wife cheating. No fight, no argument, he merely deals with the situation.
Which gets him noticed below the radar by The Broker, a wealthy man who facilitates arranging for the right people to meet and one of them to end up dead.
In short, Quarry becomes a hit man for hire.
This book tells something of the back story later into it, but it starts with Quarry arriving in a small midwestern town. His partner for this job has been there for a while scoping out the target and the town. The target is Albert Leroy who is as threatening as Casper Milktoast. Quarry wonders why Albert has to be hit, but does the job. Things are going fine until he goes back to meet the partner in the apartment used as a stakeout point. The partner is dead, the money for the hit is gone, and Quarry wants answers.
The one place he can turn is the Broker but he gets no joy from that quarter.
From there out Quarry rams through the rest of the story. I find it difficult to root for a killer but root I did. Quarry is the first novel to feature a hitman as the main character and Mr. Collins has done a wonderful life bringing three dimensions to what could easily have been a stock Hollywood noir character. As the first in the long running series, it leaves me wanting more and more. ( )

'Quarry' is the story of an amoral, emotionally distant man who became acquainted with killing in Vietnam and carried on the habit when he returned home and found his wife had taken a lover. After he kicks away the jacks holding up the car his wife's lover is working under, he discovers two things: that he lost no sleep over it and that he got away with it. So he lets himself be recruited by The Broker as an assassin for hire.

We first meet Quarry five years later, killing a man in the airport of a small town on the Mississippi. He does this with dispassionate efficiency and then returns on foot to his airport hotel and takes a swim. A woman approaches him and we learn that she's been sleeping off an early session of sex with Quarry and is now wants to fit in a second session before her husband returns. Quarry obliges, as much to consolidate his alibi as for the sex itself.

Quarry makes Reacher look like a sensitive guy with a White Knight complex. Quarry is just as deadly as Reacher but he doesn't believe in rescuing anyone but himself. He's a man who knows that he's hollow inside. He kills because it pays well and he's good at it. He swims because when he swims he doesn't have to think. He has sex with women who he sees primarily as what he describes as accessories for his own self-abuse.

Then things go wrong for Quarry. He loses faith in The Broker. He has doubts about his partner that he's been working with for five years. His latest killing goes bad and he goes looking for... well he's not entirely sure. Answers? Revenge? Money? A way out of his present life?

Watching Quarry unravel his life and deal with the people he feels have let him down is like watching a shark tear through prey.

The plot is linear but compelling, with bits clicking into place for Quarry as if he were reassembling a gun in the dark. The writing is muscular, direct and cliché-free and yet delivers a strong sense of place and time. What I admired most about the book was the way Collins uses Quarry's direct to camera thoughts to draw a clearer and more complex picture of him for the reader than Quarry is capable of seeing for himself.

Quarry's relationship with the ex-bunny-girl owner of a bar and club shows him at his most human. This is a woman who says that, for her, a long-term relationship is one that lasts a week and who is attracted to Quarry because she felt that when he looked at her he saw a woman and not a piece of meat. Quarry seems to feel protective towards her. He even fantasises about making a life with her. At the same time, he uses her to get what he wants and is willing to walk away from her if it becomes necessary.

For me, what makes 'Quarry' is much more than an entertaining piece of pulp fiction is its honesty about how people behave How they deceive themselves. What they are willing to do to hold on to what they have. How they let their subconscious make their decisions and spend time later rationalising them.

I think that I can only take Quarry in small doses - being in his company is like constantly having an itch - but I'm also sure I'll be back for more.

I picked up 'Quarry' after watching the TV series from Cinemax. I can see that the series draws upon multiple books about Quarry and that it has gone onto a path of its own. much as the Trueblood series diverged from the Sookie Stackhouse books. I've never understood the point of that. Why buy the rights to something and then make it into something else?

Even so, the TV series was fun - dark, violent and depressing - but fun. ( )

I enjoyed the first few Hard Case Crime books I tried, but I've been having bad luck more recently. The writing in this one is terrible, the story is uninteresting, and the main character and narrator is an empty bore. Almost did not finish. ( )

This is solid, unpretentious, genre fiction, the kind of book that, as you're reading it, you sometimes think I should be reading something else but that you keep reading for the oldest reason to read that there is: to find out what happens next. Fans of the Parker novels will enjoy this, although Quarry is a killer and Parker a thief. I'll read the next one someday. ( )