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Max Allan Collins is one of my favourite classic crime writers, his hard-edged Quarry and Nolan novels are up there  with the best. He's also an unimaginably prolific writer, so while I was interested in seeing what he would make of Eliot Ness - a series of books based on the famed real-life Prohibition agent that would certainly not be lacking in opportunities to write about crime and corruption - there was a little concern that Ness might lack the morally ambiguous character that makes the Nolan and Quarry books so daring. Ness's "cops and robbers" background and his clean-cut anti-corruption image might not make him as adventurous a figure as Collins's deadly killers, but he is certainly as driven, perhaps even more so. You might think that working with a real-life figure and keeping close to actual historical might constrain Collins, and there is an aspect of formality to how events play out, there is no shortage of challenges and thrilling action in the fir...

Having got out of the business of being a professional hitman in the first thriller Quarry and clearing up some loose ends in Quarry's List (that's two novels worth of plotting, killing and screwing summed up in a few words), Quarry has a few ideas for a new career in Quarry's Deal . Unsurprisingly, it involves more killing and screwing. A lot more. Admittedly, there aren't too many career path options for a Vietnam veteran and professional killer. You can put a lot of distance and money between your past and future, but if you have the list of contacts - as Quarry does - you can take over as the new Broker and run the business. Quarry however has found another interesting new angle to pursue. He's planning to use the list to find out who the hitmen are, find out who they are going to hit, and get the potential targets to pay him to protect them from the killers who are now working for new brokers. His first job takes him to a Florida beach resort filled with weal...

Quarry's List was originally published in 1976 as The Broker's Wife, as a follow up to Quarry . It was never intended to be a series, but at least Max Allan Collins didn't kill him off like Nolan ( Two for the Money ) and then have to rewrite the ending to continue the series. He still had a problem though, as Quarry had more or less retired as a professional hit man in the first standalone book, or to be more accurate, he has "retired" his agent the Broker. When asked by his publisher to follow up, Collins was faced with the question of what is Quarry going to do next? Quarry, as we know for being introduced to him in first book, can be ruthless in his methods, in killing as much as in taking care of his own security. Despite the arrangement with his Broker as a killer for hire coming to an unfortunate end, and despite taking every precaution to leave the professional hitman business behind him, he know he needs to still be careful. He expects that eventually so...

Hard Case Crime collect Max Allan Collins's first two Nolan crime thriller series here as a well-named Two for the Money . In fact this was never meant to be a series, but, as you can tell from the first book Bait Money , the character and the situations were too good to leave at that point. Collins even killed Nolan off at the end of the first book, but was encouraged to rewrite the ending. It was a good move, as the second book Blood Money is just as tense, thrilling and visceral as the first. Considering the time it was written in the early 70s, it has to be said that the attitudes can appear to be incredibly sexist and misogynist by today's standards, but this was a book pushing the boundaries of what was acceptable, even then in the genre of pulp crime fiction. Nolan, for example, is not a good guy, or if he appears to be, it's only in relation to how ruthless and unprincipled the others are that he comes into contact with in his line of work. That work is putting tog...

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 hi...