Quarry - Max Allan Collins

Created in 1976, Max Allan Collins's Quarry is a man and a product of the times, a character who would take the genre of crime fiction in a new and daringly amoral direction. A Vietnam vet, Quarry gets in some marital trouble when return home, has killed a man and got something of a taste for it. Finding he has a need to live a little more on the edge, he recognises that working for a living as a hitman is amoral, but in Nam he has learned to accept life and death as meaningless. He has however also learned the importance of survival.

Which means Quarry is not too impressed that his agent, Broker, has put him a risk when he sends him to kill a man who is carrying something valuable and it turns out to be heroin, so he puts a little of the product aside as future down-payment. Quarry's concerns about Broker's arrangements increase on his next assignment to take out an innocuous man in a small town in Iowa. Things don't seem right and sure enough after carrying out the hit, he finds his suspicions were right. Quarry isn't happy and you don't want a killer without a conscience getting unhappy. Against normal procedure for a hitman he sticks around after the job and does a little investigation of his own.

Quarry isn't one of the good guys, he isn't even one of the good bad guys. Filled with sex and violence, Collins's Quarry is nonetheless a product of his age, and I don't just mean a time of less political correctness. Quarry represents a post-Vietnam America, numb to violence and death, its moral compass lost. It's a bold work that pushed the genre into new places others feared to walk.

Mainly though it's just brilliant crime writing. The situations are thrilling, the plotting tight, the characterisation marvellous, Quarry filled with a wonderful array of small town characters (familiar to Collins from his own smalltown Iowa background), all with complicated troubled backgrounds that are laid out with no delicacy. Quarry himself is also a terrific creation, an unrepentant hitman, who does what he does for his own reasons, filled with contempt for the world and people he is involved with, occasionally sad, has his own ideas of justice (that involve a gun or a wrench), but gets the job done to his satisfaction and no one else's.

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