MostlyFiction Book Reviews » hitman We Love to Read! Wed, 14 May 2014 13:06:32 +0000 en-US hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=4.3 CALLING MR. KING by Ronald De Feo /2011/calling-mr-king-by-ronald-de-feo/ /2011/calling-mr-king-by-ronald-de-feo/#comments Thu, 01 Sep 2011 13:06:22 +0000 /?p=20615 Book Quote:

“Odd thoughts were entering my head again. And like before I had no idea where they were coming from. Odd, crazy thoughts: another job just about done, after running stupidly about for weeks, all the tracking, waiting, time spent and wasted, and what do you get but another dead body, then on to the next hit, another city, another bastard to track, another doomed man, to be taken out by me or someone else, it really made no difference, dead is dead. The same story, the same routine. You pull the trigger, the man falls. But what if you didn’t pull the trigger? That would be different. That might even be exciting. That would change everything.”

Book Review:

Review by Bonnie Brody  SEP 1, 2011)

Calling Mr. King by Ronald De Feo is an exhilarating read. It is poignant, funny, serious and sad. It grabs the reader from the beginning and we go on a short but rich journey with Mr. King, a hit-man, an employee of The Firm, as he transforms himself from a killer to a would-be intellectual and lover of art and architecture.

Mr. King is one of The Firm’s best marksmen and, as the novel opens, he is in Paris to do a hit. Something about the job starts getting to him and he postpones his hit repeatedly. He puts off an easy mark day after day. When he finally does his hit, it is with a bit of trepidation, anger and regret, wishing that he had something better to do.

This “something better” begins to take shape in his life as an appreciation for art, especially the Georgian architecture of his adopted city, London. He gets excited, going from bookstore to bookstore and collecting books on architecture and works of art by John Constable, the artist. His employer, however, is not happy with him. They are upset about the amount of time it took for him to do his job in Paris and they decide to send him to New York on a vacation. Mr. King feels he is long due for a vacation so this is not the worst thing in the world for him.

In New York, he devours the bookstores and museums, daily increasing his knowledge and excitement about art and architecture, expanding his interests and horizons in this area. He becomes interested in Regency style and art nouveau. He goes to see the Constable show at the Frick Museum after a clerk at Rizzoli’s bookstore recommends this to him. He also becomes interested in John Turner and artists who paint the English countryside.

He was known as Peter Chilton in London and he uses this alias to its full advantage in New York, acting like a rich and well-appointed Englishman. It is hard to tell where Mr. King ends and Mr. Chilton begins. He dreams of living in a Georgian home of his own some day. He takes on an English accent and his identity becomes obscured. He is now Peter Chilton, the art aficionado on vacation from his manor in England. He decides to dress the part and purchases a $215 shirt. This is his entry into the world of fashion as well as art. The shirt represents the possibility of something more, of his presenting himself as the real Peter Chilton, a man to whom fashion is paramount.

One day while resting in his New York hotel, the phone rings and it’s a call for Mr. King. This is the code name for The Firm calling him when they want a hit to be done. He is quite put out about being disturbed on his vacation but he leaves the hotel to return the call from a pay phone which is The Firm’s way of doing things. He is going to have to do a hit in New York. He is sick of The Firm. He finds his bosses stupid, “onions,” not up to his caliber. He does his hit within four hours in the hope that he’ll be able to rest and continue his vacation. However, he is transferred to Barcelona.

Once in Barcelona, Mr. King becomes so immersed in the architecture of Gaudi and the city’s art nouveau décor that he is overwhelmed. He knows that he has an important hit to do but by this time his bag of books is much, much heavier than his clothing and accoutrements. He is a man possessed by learning and potential.

We learn a bit about his early life. His father was a rage-ridden gun-crazy man, teaching Mr. King how to shoot animals – not how to play games or sports. His mother paid more attention to cleaning the house and taking care of her flowers than she did to Mr. King. When Mr. King left his home in a small suburb of New York when he was about twenty, it was in a traumatic way, and he was never to return except for his father’s funeral.

Mr. King often wonders what his life would have been like had he been exposed to things besides guns and hunting. He is excellent at what he does but could he have been something else, something of the mind? The reader wonders this along with him because he is caught up in a life he can never leave alive. A life with The Firm is a life forever with The Firm. No matter how much art and architecture he sees or yearns for it can never be enough. And when will his time run out?

Mr. King goes through existential angst with nods to Camus and Sartre as he feels like a stranger and has an overwhelming sense of nausea about his identity and his place in the world. He is alone and a loner, someone who has never thought of himself as one with the world. Since childhood, he’s been an outcast and finally, through his intellectual endeavors he is finding himself. The irony of this is that the closer he comes to finding himself, the further he travels from his required path.

This is a first novel by Mr. De Feo and it is an excellent piece of writing, one that had me devouring this book quickly. Mr. King made me laugh and feel deeply saddened. I was with him on every step of his journey and loved every minute of it. I hope that Mr. De Feo continues with his writing as he has quite an understanding of human nature.

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-4-0from 17 readers
PUBLISHER: Other Press (August 30, 2011)
REVIEWER: Bonnie Brody
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Ronald De Feo
EXTRAS: Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: More hit men:

Bibliography:

]]> /2011/calling-mr-king-by-ronald-de-feo/feed/ 0 QUARRY’S EX by Max Allan Collins /2010/quarrys-ex-by-max-allan-collins/ /2010/quarrys-ex-by-max-allan-collins/#comments Tue, 28 Sep 2010 15:28:19 +0000 /?p=12441 Book Quote:

“I don’t want to kill you.”

“That’s almost like…almost like hearing you say you still love me, Jack.”

Book Review:

Review by Daniel Luft  (SEP 28, 2010)

Another autumn descends and another Quarry novel is on the shelf. These are good times to be a reader. With four Quarry Novels in five years, Max Allan Collins can almost be forgiven for the 20-year gap in the series from the mid 80s to the mid 00s.

This time Quarry, a former hitman for the mob who has turned freelance, is on the set of a low budget biker movie in the late 70s. He’s trying to protect the director, Art Stockwell, from an inevitable assassination attempt. He is also trying to find out who put the contract out on Stockwell’s life. Among the suspects are a Chicago mob boss and Stockwell’s nearly-estranged wife who also happens to be Quarry’s fully-estranged ex-wife. This situation proves to be the first socially awkward moment in the hitman’s career.

Like all the books in this series, Quarry’s Ex is deceptively quiet. There are no 10-car pile-ups on the interstate, no helicopter police chases and no bridges that come crashing down at rush hour. What there is is paranoia, misanthropy and violence in close quarters. Quarry is truly detached from humanity and only looks out for his own interests. This can make for dark humor and understatement as Quarry tells his own story. He is inordinately composed when he discusses brutal subjects such as his methods of interrogation:

“Cutting off someone’s fingers or shooting them in the kneecap, trying to make them talk, it’s messy and it’s inefficient. And you have to keep them alive, in case the first thing they tell you isn’t true, requiring you to go back and cut off another finger or shoot another kneecap or something.

Torture is a whole different arena. Requires training that I never got. You never know when somebody is going to pass out or even die on you. And then where are you?”

With shop talk like this it is clear that Quarry is capable of killing anyone, a mob boss, his ex wife or even the man he’s working for if he has to. With an amoral main character any plot twist is possible.

Each of the recent Quarry books is billed as possibly the last before Collins puts the series to rest so each story feels like a little gift. And “little” is an important word. Quarry’s Ex is less than 200 pages and moves at the perfect pace for a single sitting. Quarry started off in a fast-moving pulp novel in the early 1970s and the author has retained that sensibility throughout the series.

The paperback era of hardboiled writing started after world war two and stretched into the late 70’s. In that time, mysteries, thrillers and noir usually came in very small, tightly wound packages that could explode in your hands and were finished at around 200 hundred pages. It was enough space to pull a reader in all the way and a small enough space to lack digression.

Then, in the early 80s, thrillers started to get thicker and subplots began to leak in. Private detectives picked up hobbies, bad guys developed endearing quirks and minor characters began to live their own story lines. This practice amounted to multiple distractions over much longer novels. The short, sweaty action novel morphed into something softer, often flabby and less structured.

But Collins is old enough to be part of the last wave of action writers who know how to tell a story fast and unsentimentally. For him, this kind of writing in neither nostalgic nor retro, it’s what he trained himself to do. He has been successful at writing longer, more circuitous books but for nine novels (over 35 years) he has managed to keep the Quarry series pure and untainted by the fashions of publishing trends.

Editor’s note:  Although Daniel Luft’s review starts off by saying this book is “on the shelf,” technically it will not be until fall of 2011.  The parent company of Hard Case Crime has decided not to print any more paperbacks and thus Hard Case Crime  has had to move to another publisher. This review will be reposted when the book is really on the shelf.

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-5-0from 11 readers
PUBLISHER: Hard Case Crime (September 20, 2011)
REVIEWER: Daniel Luft
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Max Allan Collins
EXTRAS: Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: Read our review of:

Bibliography:

Nathan Heller series:

Road to Perdition:

Quarry novels:

Mallory Mystery:

Historical Mysteries:

Eliot Ness Novels:

Ms. Tree Series:

Other:

writing as Patrick Culhane:

with Mickey Spillane:

with Matthew Clemens:

Movies from books:

]]> /2010/quarrys-ex-by-max-allan-collins/feed/ 1 QUARRY IN THE MIDDLE by Max Allan Collins /2009/quarry-in-the-middle-by-max-allan-collins/ /2009/quarry-in-the-middle-by-max-allan-collins/#comments Wed, 28 Oct 2009 03:45:32 +0000 /?p=5952 Book Quote:

“I had a body in the trunk of the car.

I hadn’t planned it that way, but then it wasn’t that kind of job. It wasn’t a job at all, really, rather a speculative venture, and now I’d made more of an investment than just my time and a little money.“

Special: Author Interview

Book Review:

Review by Daniel Luft (OCT 27, 2009)

Writers are always telling each other to steal, but cover your tracks. So it’s funny that Max Allan Collins, in his new novel Quarry in the Middle, has decided to blatantly admit his inspiration by way of three epigrams at the beginning of the book. The epigrams are quotes from Dashiell Hammett, Akira Kurosawa and Sergio Leone, one novelist and two film directors who each told stories about lawless men who played one gang of criminals against another in the hope of getting paid by each. Perhaps Collins thought his rip off was too blatant and it was better to display rather than hide his appropriations. This was unnecessary because Quarry in the Middle stands very well on it’s own and merely nods to the works of these other artists.

All of Collins’s Quarry novels, this is the eighth, concern a midwestern hitman who has cut his mob ties and has decided to go freelance. Most of these books were written in the 1970s and are only available in used editions. Then, a few years ago, Collins decided to bring Quarry back with a final book in the series The Last Quarry. But that hasn’t stopped Collins from writing books that take place earlier in the criminal’s career.

Quarry in the Middle is his third recent novel in the series. It takes place in the mid 1980s with Quarry dressed like Don Johnson, spying on another known hitman and simply following him to his next “job.” This takes him down the Mississippi to a town called Haydee’s Port, Illinois. And the “job” the other man has is to kill the owner of an enormous illegal riverfront casino. Of course the suspected employer of the hitman is the owner of another illegal casino on the other side of the river.

Quarry intervenes in the assassination and gets himself hired by the man who was supposed to be dead. He then infiltrates the other casino and tries to get hired by the other owner as well. Both of these owners are backed by warring wings of the Chicago mob and Quarry nearly manages to get himself killed in each casino. And of course he makes friends with a couple ladies along the way. The book is pure sex and violence in the classic tough-guy mode.

Throughout the book, the first-person narration runs sardonic as Quarry trips his way through the less elite members of Ronald Reagan’s America:

“The joint was encased in the cheapest paneling known to God or man or even you uncle Phil, beautified by black-marker graffiti that made dating and other suggestions. Right now the tables were about half full, and the bar about the same. The clientele appeared to be blue-collar or below, displaying lots of frayed faded jeans, a look courtesy of factory work, not factory fabrication. One corner had been taken over by bikers in well-worn leathers — the bikers were pretty well-worn themselves, in their thirties or forties. Marlon Brando in The Wild One had been a long fucking time ago.”

Quarry’s narration, like the author’s prose, is simple and direct. Collins doesn’t waste any pages, paragraphs or even sentences on digression. Like all of the Quarry novels, this one is only about 200 pages and like the best ones, it has a fast pace with one scene intruding into another. There is no end to the action and violence and no chance for the reader to put the book down for the night. And, as usual with Collins, the plot is air-tight with no coincidences, holes or loose ends.

Once, in an interview years ago, Collins said that he would love to revisit all his old recurring characters that he invented years ago. The problem, he said, was that he didn’t want to conform to modern publishing schedules to do it. Quarry in the Middle is the third Quarry novel to lurk into bookstores in four years — hardly a tight schedule. There is also another book in the works but with no solid publication date as yet planned. Hard Case Crime, the small publisher with big distribution, seems to have helped Collins solve his dilemma.

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-4-0from 11 readers
PUBLISHER: Hard Case Crime (October 27, 2009)
REVIEWER: Daniel Luft
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Max Allan Collins
EXTRAS:
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: Read our review of:

Bibliography:

Nathan Heller series:

Road to Perdition:

Quarry novels:

Mallory Mystery:

Historical Mysteries:

Eliot Ness Novels:

Ms. Tree Series:

Other:

writing as Patrick Culhane:

with Mickey Spillane:

with Matthew Clemens:

Movies from books:

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