The First Quarry (Max Allan Collins, 2008)

Max Allan Collins takes us back to the early 70s on a ride with his anti-hero's debut assignment. Quarry is dispatched to some small college town in Iowa, where he's supposed to "take out" some asshole professor/writer working on a "non-fiction" book on Chicago's mobster. Two women are involved, and a gang war over the drug turf is taking place, so we know there will be plenty of sex and violence.

And since we are reading the Quarry book, we know it will be fun.

It moves forward rapidly, at times even too fast, as characters don't have time to fully evolve and breathe. Collins either drops them altogether (cute blonde at the very beginning) or Quarry simply kills them. There's this likeable private detective, Charlie, who brings few possibilities of mystery entanglement, but he too almost immediately ends up with an additional hole in his head, and storytelling goes back to linear mode. Which is cool, Quarry's novels are by their definition character driven, sometimes (like in this one) it's just too bad that the only character that drives them is Quarry and others are somehow neglected.

But, again, it's fun, especially after reading the initial few chapters and getting into the mood and into our protagonist's sense of humour. He's simply a cool guy and I'll give his first adventure an extra half point on account of how effectively he managed to finish this whole affair without "leaving any loose ends". Nice work indeed.

3.5/5

Facts:

Hero:
Quarry

Location:
Iowa City

Body count:

8

Dames: 
Dorothy "Dorrie" Byron, an asshole professor's abandoned wife and Annette Girard, artistic and slightly confused daughter of the mobster Lou Girardelli. Quarry fucks them both. Twice.

Blackouts: 

/

Title: 
Quarry's first assignment.

Cover:
Excellent one, done by Ken Laager. Liked its dark and sexy feel, and it's also very accurate - it depicts a scene from page 118. One small remark though - Quarry seems to be a bit lost in thoughts and uninterested, but in the book, he's actually horny as hell.

Cool lines:  
"I'm nothing to you but your 'girl' - I'm not a serious writer doing serious work!"
I wondered if a serious writer would use the word 'serious' twice in the same sentence.

She said, "I'm not in love with Professor Byron or anything. We're just good friends."
I could use a good friend who looked like her who would blow me.

[Before killing a guy]  He'd gone to the store. He had to eat, didn't he? Well, actually, he didn't, but he didn't know that.

"Do I look like I was born the fuck yesterday?"
For all the gunk on his hair, he might have been born the fuck a few seconds ago.[The Coolest!]

Pop. 1280 (Jim Thompson, 1964)

Straightforward story about a local sheriff of some godforsaken Texas hillbilly county. A simple-minded dude with simple problems concerning women, trying hard to be re-elected since being a local law enforcer is about the only thing in the world he feels he knows how to handle. See "cool lines" below and you'll get the picture.

Of course, it's not as simple as that. Although incredibly entertaining and easy to read and follow, Pop. 1280 is anything but a simple read. The story is quite complex, involving numerous characters and events that ultimately lead to a significant decrease in the initial population by the end. Plotting is superb, and tension build-up, together with the final twist, are good enough alone for the highest grade this total masterpiece gets from me.

But the real story and detective challenge (for the reader) takes place inside Nick's head. Who the hell is this guy? At the beginning, he's just a simplistic, clueless and almost retarded asshole driven by the desire to be re-elected. As the first bodies start to emerge, we realise that he's not exactly harmless, but he's almost cute, and in a way, we still find ourselves sympathetic towards him. At least I was, maybe because of his hilariously cunning scheming, or his incredible (ab)use of grammar, or simply his questionable luck with women. But there's just so much that man can take, and it becomes more and more clear that our main man is not exactly right in his head.

And this, for me, is the novel's main appeal - was he crazy all along or did something finally push him over the edge? We will get the answer, and it will be a creepy one. Also, an unexpected one, I couldn't see it coming at all.

Pottsville definitely deserves a few words. Cesspool of humanity it is, without a single likeable character around. Liars, cheaters, wife beaters, misogynists, people fucking their relatives (kids not excluded), nymphomaniacs, mentally retarded, simply mean, greedy and ignorant hillbillies (I caught him reading a book!) and most of them total racists. Racism is one of the prevailing themes and Thompson uses it as a tool to emphasize storytelling, sometimes even its humorous parts - I giggled at the scene when Nick spreads around the rumor that his election competitor Sam has "raped a little two year old nigger baby" but stuff like "niggers shouldn't be counted as a regular population since they have no souls" just makes you speechless and leaves you sad. No wonder Nick went a bit crazy in such an environment.

Cool thing - and another touch of maestro - is that Pottsville doesn't really feel like some big ass metaphor for America's little towns. At least not at the beginning, that is. I had the impression that Thompson simply enjoyed inventing these oddballs and playing with them. However, as the story progresses and darkens, it becomes increasingly clear that the author is a pessimist, suggesting that the only way out of this state of decay (Pottsville) is to become as insane (or religious) as the people living there. To put it into Nick's words: "There can't be no personal hell because there ain't no personal sins. They are all public."

This is unforgettable stuff; it should be made mandatory reading in primary schools.

5/5

Facts:

Hero: 
Sheriff Nick Corey

Location:
Pottsville, 47th largest county of the state (of Texas, I assume)

Body count: 6

Dames: 
His mean, bitchy wife, Myra, plus mistresses Rose and Amy

Blackouts: 

/

Title: 
Pottsville has a population of 1280. But it could also be titled Pop. 1274...

Cover: 
The Orion edition's cover is hardly worth commenting on. I'm also including an older cover that I find interesting because it attempts to market this dark masterpiece as a light-hearted western comedy. Although when looking at the guy's facial expression long enough, you'll see a glimpse of psychotic tendencies in his eyes.

Cool lines:  
"Me?" I said. "I do my job all the time."
"You! You stupid silly spineless fool! You don't do anything!"
"Well, that's my job," I said. "Not doing nothing. I mean. That's why people elect me."

What I loved was myself, and I was willing to do anything I god-danged had to to go on lying and cheating and drinking whiskey and screwing women and going to church on Sunday with all the other respectable people.[The Coolest!]


"Can't very well run a town without one, right, Buck?"
"Right! Why if they wasn't any whores, the decent ladies wouldn't be safe on the streets."
"Kee-reck!"  Ken nodded. "Fellas would get all full of piss an' high spirits and take right off after 'em."

"The next time they even look like they're goin' to sass you, you just kick 'em in the balls as hard as you can."
"Huh?" I said. "But - but don't it hurt awful bad?"
"Pshaw, 'course it don't hurt. Not if you're wearin' a good pair o' boots without no holes in 'em."
"That's right," Buck said. "You just be sure you ain't got any toes stickin' out and it won't hurt you a-tall."

Lemons never Lie (Donald E. Westlake aka Richard Stark, 1971)

I'm not too keen on crime books in which heroes are ordinary people somehow sucked into the sinister underworld. True, occasionally this formula can function (can't remember a good example from the top of my head, though), but Lemons Never Lie is definitely not one of those instances.

Alan Grofield is a stage actor who runs summer theatre (whatever the hell that is?) in some rural godforsaken place. This requires money, and he finances this whole operation by occasional theft. Because, you see, he's also a professional thief.

Could a decent novel ever come out of such a moronic premise? I don't think so, not even when written by one of the genre's greatest craftsmen.

After initial setup, it turns into a cat-and-mouse kind of chase around the USA involving Grofield and some insane psychopathic asshole, Myers. It is written in a fast-paced and straightforward style, with a decent body count piling up, making it easy to read and follow. Quite fluent too, although on a few occasions the whole thing becomes simply laughable. I think I shall remember it by one of the most original torturing scenes - our main man Grofield strips down some poor schmuck and starts opening the front door. Since the outside is so cold, the guy gets terrified of catching pneumonia and immediately spills everything out to his ruthless torturer. I kid you not, read it yourself (page 193) if you don't believe me.

Not good, not bad. Something you take on a plane and forget about when you arrive at your destination and pick up the next book.

2.5/5

Facts:

Hero: 
A member of a increasingly disappearing breed of professionals, Alan Grofield was an actor who limited himself to live performances before live audiences.

Location: 
Las Vegas, Mead Grove, Indiana, St. Louis, Monequois, New York

Body count: 6

Dames: 
None really. There's his understanding and artistic (also an actress) wife, but she hardly qualifies for a dame.

Blackouts: 
Yes, two of them. And since our hero is hardly some bad ass criminal (although he is professional) we can forgive him for the both of them. None is described particularly vividly - In the first one, "Grofield turned around and faced the wall. He knew what was coming, and hunched his head down into his neck, trying to make his skull soft and resilient. It didn't do any good. The lights went out very painfully." In the second one, he was simply hit in the face by a two-by-four and was subsequently out for a mere 5 minutes.

Title: 
One of those intriguing and funny wtf titles, but it has a really simple explanation. Right at the beginning, Grofield scores a jackpot (three lemons) on the slot machine and gets a little annoyed about it because he feels that he has used all his luck.

Cover:
Pretty cool, although the girl should be more in front. But very accurate, it depicts the corpse #3 and the fact that Grofield burns down the house to destroy all the evidence (I think) since he's such a professional. Credited to a guy R.B. Farrell, but a Google search on him didn't come back with anything useful.

Cool lines:  
Tired and aging mixed-race jazz quintet tried to figure out how to make transition to rock. So far, all they were sure of was the volume level; you couldn't hear yourself think. Looking at the conversations going on up and down the bar, and in the booths behind him, Grofield decided the place must be full of lip readers.

He Died with His Eyes Open (Derek Raymond, 1984)

This one is really unusual, almost weird. Not too surprising, since I picked it up because I remembered that Derek Raymond's name was mentioned by Mark E. Smith in his hilarious autobiography, Renegade. So welcome to the wonderful and frightening world of modern British noir!

Begins as yet another police procedural with a badly beaten body found in a dark alley of the dodgy part of London. The inspector in charge of the case discovers the victim's letters and some recorded tapes (ah, good old days!) and starts searching for the bad guys using these recordings.

Kind of. Our nameless sergeant works alone, at his own pace, using some pretty unconventional methods. His sense of justice and punishment is also strange, so his character resembles more of a classical PI than a policeman. So much for the police procedural clichés - which is, btw, just fine with me.

Letters and recordings also prove not to be much evidence. In fact, they serve just as a vehicle for telling a parallel story about our unfortunate victim. Which is cool since his background is really interesting. In fact, it is so fascinating that even our nameless detective becomes more interested in the man's story than the actual crime and begins to form a mental connection with him. I think.

This continues for the better part of the novel, and then it gradually becomes increasingly bizarre. Our hero tracks down and immediately afterwards starts fucking the victim's wife. He even moves with her into her apartment because (I guess) at this point, he's already connected mentally with her dead ex, so this means he can connect to her physically. Not sure again, but they also fall in love. Or something. In any case, he seems to have figured the whole thing (crime and fucking/loving part) out, so not much of an investigation will follow. There will be a shocking and bizarre (not only metaphorically) ending, but it is not entirely unexpected or surprising. Simply because there's no way that this strange novel could finish in the classical whodunnit style.

So we have two or three stories entwined, but the whole thing is anything but a mess. Very concise, Derek Raymond knew exactly what he was trying to tell and how to convey all those stories. Great storytelling with effortless shifts from hard-boiled, violent content to more mellow, psychological drama. Bleak and depressing at times (Staniland's journey and fate), but masterfully written. Not trying to be clever with tough one-liners, but still with a fair amount of sharp black humour and slang. Not really character- or action-driven, but still tense and compelling. It loses some of its charge towards the end, but it is still immensely enjoyable.

Unique and memorable. It got under my skin a bit, and I will definitely check out other Raymond titles.

4/5

Facts:

Hero: 
Nameless sergeant. Working for the Unexplained Deaths department - A14 branch, "the most unpopular one"

Location:
London

Body count: 

2

Dames:
Barbara/Babsie - Frigid iceberg with gross psychic problems and the mind of a petty criminal.

Blackouts: 

/

Title: 
Probably refers to the poor Charles, but I honestly cannot remember whether his body was found with its eyes actually open. Doesn't really matter; it's a cool-sounding title anyway.

Cover: 
A nice and intriguing one with great artwork. Also relevant: our hero is Nameless (faceless), he smokes (see cool lines below), and the tape recorder plays a significant role in the novel.

Cool lines:  
I lit a Palace filter. It tasted revolting; I only smoke them because I hope they might help me give it up.

"Good evening to you,"  he boomed heartily. "My wife tells me you've come about my brother Charles. What has he been up to this time?"
"Well, he's gone and died," I replied.

Nice and gentle way to break the bad news, but it needs to be said, it's still not nearly as cool as Hoke did it in New Hope for the Dead.

"Well, what about him?"
"Well, he's dead."
"As if I fucking cared," he said. "Who are you, you cunt?"
"I'm a police officer," I said. "And watch your tongue. One more slip like that with it, and I'll tear it out of your head."[The Coolest!]


"Look," he said furiously, when the penny had dropped, "do you want me to come out an round an give you some manners right in the mush?"
"Yes, why not" I said. "If you've got a spare face at home."

"Well, the vehicle wasn't marked." [traffic warden]
"There's a silly reason for that," I said, taking the ticket. It's because a lot of these modern villains can read.