Quarry's Ex by Max Allan Collins

First off, this Hard Case Crime title from legendary hard boiled scribe Collins, released in September, is a great book.

Next off, this is a great book.

Did I say this was a great book?

This is far and away the best book in Collin's Hard Case-exclusive series of thrillers about Quarry, the badass and wiseass contract killer. I admit that I haven't read Quarry in the Middle, in spite of its salacious and tantalizing retro-toned cover promising three-way, guy/girl/girl action, but I have read The First Quarry and The Last Quarry and Quarry's Ex is far more entertaining than either of them.

In a previous post where I reviewed Collins' re-build of the unfinished Mickey Spillane book The Comsummata, I mentioned that Collins had an annoying and distracting habit of throwing anachronisms into his books. In Quarry's Ex, that stylistic tic is thankfully absent and the book is all the better for it. The book is set in 1980, with a second chapter which contains a flashback extending from the mid-Sixties through the Seventies that tells you all Quarry is willing to say about his early history. All the period references are dead on and you get a good feeling for time and place in the novel.

And a hell of a fine novel it is. We learn how Quarry ended up in the nasty business of killing people for a living. He was a Vietnam vet who came home to find his wife Joni screwing another man. He kills the interloper, and because he was a vet of an unpopular war, the local DA's office looks the other way and decides not to bother with a trial, speculating that the other man died in an "accident."

Quarry goes into hiding in a crappy apartment somewhere in the bowels of LA, where he is found by The Broker, a contractor with heavy underworld connections who talks him into going into business with him for some "jobs".

Quarry ends up killing The Broker for "betraying" him. He doesn't explain why, in much the same way he doesn't give his or the Broker's real names - much like Dan J. Marlowe's Pete Karma in Strongarm who deals exclusively in pseudonyms. Quarry gets a list of all the people who work for The Broker and goes into business airing them out for a steep price, as a special fee for hire service for the people the Broker's killers have targeted.

At the start of the book, Quarry is in some miserable, sun baked hell hole of a Nevada casino town, keeping an eye on one of the Broker's paid killers, a loser named Jerry who is gathering surveillance information on Stockwell, a bottom drawer B-movie director whose checkered career is on the fadeout and who is shooting a cheap action movie just outside of town. Quarry figures out that Jerry is the passive half, the information gatherer and fact checker side of a two-member hit squad. Who is the active half, the killer who will put the all time fade out and final credits on Stockwell's life?

Quarry needs to find this out and fast. He meets up with Stockwell to offer his services and along the way learns that Stockwell is married to...Joni!

Lots of fun and plot complications ensue, involving Joni of course, and a mob-connected executive producer. There's also a malodorous climax at a movie set diner with more bathroom humor than can be found in all the other Hard Case books combined. All in all, a funny and fun read with lots of action, intrigue and some fine erotic writing involving the beautiful but treacherous Joni.

Check out Quarry's Ex. It's worth it.