The First Quarry – Max Allan Collins

Rating : 5/5
Novel was read between April 2016 to April 2016

Edition Details:
Format: Paperback
Page Count : 204
Publisher : Hard Case Crime
Series : Quarry #8, Hard Case Crime #

First Sentence:

The night after the Christmas and all through the house, it was colder than fuck.

Quarry was going through a bad patch in his life. He returns from Nam and has had his life turned upside down. He had become a social pariah when The broker paid him a visit. He gave Quarry his new name and wanted him to work from him. Quarry’s job would be doing what he was good at, which was killing people. So Quarry joins The Broker and takes up his first assignment.
He doesn’t mind who he’s killing. He knows if he’ll not kill him then somebody else will.
But, killing someone in a city is entirely different than killing someone during a war. And Quarry is going to find that out.
He has to succeed in his first assignment if he wants to make a living. But will he?

The First Quarry is the eight novel in the series but it deals with Quarry’s first case. So if one is familiar with the character then it serves as a prequel but for people like me it would be the perfect point to start the series.

Quarry takes no nonsense from any one. He knows what he has to do and has no qualms about it. His perspective is off kilter and the best part is he knows that. This is what makes him such a bad ass. There were time when he was so cold that it was creepy and surprising because most of the times he comes across as a reasonable guy. 

I liked Quarry as a character and would definitely look into the other books in this series.

Now, as far as the novel is concerned. It’s definitely a hard case crime. It  has all the three b’s that make a good pulp fiction: Booze, Broads and Bullets. The story line is taut and the dialogues are crisp. I had a fun time reading it and i hope you’ll too. I strongly recommend this book if you are into crime fiction. And if you’re not into it then also, give it a go,may be this will mark your foray into this amazing genre. 

Some lines  from the book:

Before i had taken this job- not the job of taking out the prof, but the job itself, of killing people for money- I had done a certain amount of soul searching. I had learned to kill in the jungle of Vietnam and figured i could kill in the zoo of America as easily.  

That may have been when the gears shifted in my skull and made me view things from my own admittedly off-kilter perspective. Society sanctioned killing strangers in war, but didn’t like it when you took out some bastard you knew who richly deserved it. To me that’s hypocritical, but what the hell, that’s just my take on it.

You can get this awesome novel from the following link:

Amazon