Max Allan CollinsCríticas

“I had learned to kill in the jungle of Vietnam and figured I could kill in the zoo of America just as easily.”
“Society sanctioned killing strangers in war, but didn’t like it when you took out some bastard you knew who richly deserved it.”

That is Quarry. And this is his 'first' story. "Some first job. Six kills but not the guy I was hired for. Two beautiful women and more sex than I'd had in the last six months. I'd survived..." And it kept my interest and entertained me enough that I read it in one day! Good ending too!

And Sambos restaurant!?! Man, we had one of those racist places in my hometown growing up. I cannot believe they were allowed! WTF?!?

A Hit on the Hitman
Review of the Titan Books / Hard Case Crime Kindle eBook edition (November 12, 2019) published simultaneously with the Hard Case Crime paperback and Skyboat Media audiobook.

She leaned in. “We should’ve stopped this shit ten years ago. We could have, you know. If we’d just disappeared then, who would have cared?”
“But we didn’t.” I shrugged. “Maybe this is a second chance.”
“Maybe. But we’re going to have to kill some people.”
I shrugged again. “I’m okay with that.”
She shrugged. Sipped. “So am I.”

This is Quarry #15, a late entry in the long-running Quarry series (1976-2022) about an anti-hero hitman. After a betrayal, the anonymous character (Quarry simply being a trademark nickname) turned the tables on the various middleman brokers and the contract hitmen by stalking the stalkers and taking his fees from the planned victims. The prolific novelist and comic book author Max Allan Collins (761 books to his credit on Goodreads! 😲) returns periodically to this protagonist, but usually places the settings back in the late 1900s rather than aging the character up to the present day.

Thus Killing Quarry finds the hitman in retirement and running a motel resort. But suddenly it appears that he himself is being stalked by hired killers possibly in search of payback for his disruptions of the status quo. Eventually he manages to join forces with another character who is perhaps seeking retirement and together they end up infiltrating a summit of contract brokers. Will they manage to breakup the conspiracy and not turn on each other by the end? Never count Quarry out even when the chips appear to be down.

I read Killing Quarry from picking it up as a $1.99 Kindle Deal of the Day and after enjoying some recent books by Scott Von Doviak from Hard Case Crime.

Trivia and Links
Killing Quarry is part of the Hard Case Crime (2004-) series of new works, reprints, and posthumous publications of the pulp and noir crime genre founded by authors Charles Ardai and Max Phillips. GR's Listopia is not complete (as of April 2024) and the most current lists of publication can be found at Wikipedia or the Publisher's own Official Site.

“Ask not who you can kill for your country…”

Quarry gets married again! And his wife is expecting!
And then, his past pays him a visit…

Someone wants to hire Quarry to assassinate Donald Trump, I mean ‘Preston Freed’. When he says no, bad things happen. But Quarry is badder, and he’s pissed! And he wants revenge!

A fast read, lots of Quarry being a bad ass, and ultimately, he gets what he seeks! And, there is more than one way to assassinate a person! A good fifth book in this series!½

I cannot fault this book in any way. It is a very pure and classic example of the hard boiled genre. I read it because I’m looking at the Edgar nominees. Plotting was taut, characters given just enough flesh and blood. Sex and violence dolloped out with aplomb.splashes of humor and pathos raise it above the average

“Ignorance is bliss, all right, but it’s also a good way to get blown away.”

Quarry runs into Turner, an old partner whom things went sour with five years before. Following Turner, Quarry ends up on a porno film set, which is in a snowbound lodge. Two murders quickly follow. It's not the best of the Quarry books, but it is entertaining! On to #5!

“Killing people with blunt objects isn’t really my style, but then style is a luxury I can’t always indulge in.”

"I hoped I wouldn't have to kill her. I probably would. But I hoped not."

Ahh, big hearted Quarry! He comes into contact with a female version of himself, as he is trying out his new business plan to prevent killers from killing - for a fee! He's still got the Broker's list, and he is hoping he can use it to be in business for himself. This is his first attempt at the new plan. And it's a pretty good read (and quick!), with an interesting ending.

“Maybe next time.”

Quarry is a professional hit-man working for a man known only as Broker. He works as a part of a finely tuned organization and has no qualms about his work - recently back from Vietnam, Quarry is more than acquainted with death and in new line of work he is almost always targeting people that are living on the other side of the law. So it is not like he is losing sleep over any of his contracts.

Then out of the blue somebody tries to kill the Broker - unfortunately Quarry was also present so he took the unsuccessful attack on Broker as an assault on his life too. So he gets a new contract to find who are the perpetrators and this takes him to the southern parts of the USA where he will get head to head with some pretty unsavory and violent characters.

This is my first quarry novel and I gotta say it got me hooked. Main character is not exactly Matt Helm but he is very close.

Violence is present but it is not central but supportive part of the story (sometimes you will read a sentence in which Quarry just plainly says "I shot him" and that is it).

Recommended to all fans of fast action, thrillers, witty story and lots of violence.

Excellent thriller about part of JFK murder I knew very little about. If you like your heroes flawed but just then Nathan Heller is your man. I am now on the lookout for more Nathan Heller adventures.

Highly recommended to all fans of thrillers.

“But this corpse had better manners than most, and wasn’t smelling up the room at all. He was, in fact, better company than a lot of people I’ve met.”

This one begins with an assassination attempt on Quarry at his cabin in Wisconsin. It fails, of course, and Quarry finds out the name of the man behind it - Ash. So, Quarry goes after Ash. But what does it all have to do with the Broker? And the Broker’s widow? And ‘the list’?

A good second book in this series, fast paced and fast to read! Can't wait to read the next one!

[b:Girl Most Likely|41148772|Girl Most Likely (Krista Larson, #1)|Max Allan Collins|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1551111409l/41148772._SY75_.jpg|64317619]
I have come to the conclusion that my kindle unlimited account has made me enjoy authors I would not often look at. I have truly enjoyed books an authors I would not normally pick up. Girl Most Likely, appears to be the beginning of a new series starring young Galena police chief Krista Larson and her retired police detective father, Keith Larson. The setting is small tourist town Galena, Illinois and a change from Collins' hardboiled detectives with more of a midwestern feel and an underlying menace.
The plot involves a mysterious killer who targets members of Krista Larson's graduating class at the time of their tenth-year reunion. I like the concept for the series and hope to see more of Krista and her father (MAC notes on his blog that he is currently writing the prequel to this novel dealing with the murder she helped her father solve two years earlier). Keith Larson seemed more of a fully formed character who, dealing with his wife's recent death, has moved in with his police chief daughter and becomes involved in the murder investigation. Krista Larson was not fully fleshed out as a character for me; I learned more about her fashion choices than her personality. Maybe she will assume a more forceful role in future books in the series.
Girl Most Likely entertained me and provided some insights into small town policing. The ending seemed a bit rushed and unsatisfactory, but overall the book breezed by and Collins' dialogue is crisp and enjoyable.

Part One is the RFK assassination. Part Two is the investigation, and implication that there was more than one shooter. Then essentially, Nathan “looking into Bob’s murder”. Yeah, they are on a first name basis.

Super conspiracy theory stuff in here. Sirhan firing blanks and being a “programmed assassin” through hypnosis. Multiple shooters. A coordinated assassination that was “Bolder than Dallas". The pieces of the puzzle in this story started to get blurry to me. Lots and lots of name dropping. Some paragraphs had nothing but famous people's names listed! And I started to wonder if the phrase “Private Eye to the Stars” had to be mentioned by each and every character that entered the book! Man, there should be a game - drinking whenever that phrase pops up in the story! You probably won’t finish the first eighty pages sober!

Nathan Heller is the Forrest Gump of detectives, literally connected to every famous person that existed during the timeline of this story. “Now, mama said there’s only so much fortune a man really needs… and the rest is just for showing off.” – Forrest½

Comprehensive biography of Mickey Spillane.

This book is wonderful. I knew a lot about the subject before diving in and still learned tons of new things. The writing is smooth and makes consuming all the knowledge easy.

Stacy Keach's gravelly old man voice is what makes these otherwise formulaic stories so compelling. I'm not sure it's fair since he could probably read a phonebook to the same effect.

I found my way to this novel the long way around after watching old television episodes on Youtube of "What's My Line?" from the 1960s. The most stellar member of the panel was Dorothy Kilgallen, a journalist. Wikipedia describes the unusual circumstances of her death: a healthy woman who did not appear to be suffering from depression swallows an lethal mix of pills and booze after having expressed skepticism about the JFK assassination in print and interviewing Jack Ruby. Perhaps there's nothing suspicious in that, or perhaps there is. Next I went seeking any books about Miss Kilgallen or that might feature her, and came up with this fictional thriller. Dorothy appears here as "Flo Kilgore", which would normally suggest he's taken liberal freedoms with her character. Flo, however, began as an amalgamation of more than one historical personage in one of his prior Heller novels. In this one, she is all Dorothy.

Max Collins is a marvel at establishing his period and setting. The number of historical figures and places he's able to integrate is astonishing, given how smoothly it's done; you might well believe he's simply making everything up, but the high degree of detail gives away his secret. Nearly everyone and everywhere, right down to the hotels his character stays at, you can google or read Wikipedia entries for. Apparently the whole series is like this (this is book 15, so I've obviously missed a few). The degree of incorporated historicity is incredible, so overwhelming that it actually gets in the way of the story. The degree of detail to which Collins makes links and connections creates a vast, complicated web far stranger than what normal fiction would weave, too much to keep track of without taking notes. Sometimes there's a shift out of easy thriller fiction into what feels like a complicated, conspiracy-unravelling morass of non-fiction that is more difficult to follow.

The KGB are shut out of the picture Collins draws, but Lyndon Johnson is heavily implicated as are Cuban exiles, the CIA and the mob. Jack Ruby in this telling knew everybody and anybody, including Oswald. The number of folks on the periphery who knew significant bits and pieces of the whole but were silenced or kept just quiet enough without blowing the lid off is the least likely aspect, but still almost believable for how it might have been managed. Of course Detective Heller cannot bring the assassins to justice - what reader would believe that? - but there's a satisfying conclusion to his own side of the story.

Why is the threat of rape from the first book included in this? And why would Morgan feel nauseous about the topic when he threatened it so many times as a way of intimidation? Disgusting. And again when Kim enters the story, Morgan says, “Come over here. I won’t rape you - I promise.” Sick.

Today, I wanted some light entertainment to get me through a disappointingly rainy August afternoon so I spent three and a half hours listening to an 'enhanced audio' performance of Max Allen Collins' 'Fancy Anders Goes To War: Who Killed Rosie The Riveter?'. It was exactly what I'd been looking for.

It's a delightful confection that sets an improbable story of murder and sabotage involving a cast of characters finely balanced to respect early Twenty-First Century sensibilities, against what seemed to be a reasonably accurate portrayal of women working in a warplane factory in California in late 1942.

Almost all of the interesting characters, good or bad, are women. Almost all the women are exceptionally good-looking, with comparisons being drawn to well-known film stars of the period. They also come from ethnically and socio-economically diverse backgrounds and are comfortable climbing on gantries and riveting and bucking metal together to make warplanes.

The main character, Fancy Anders, (who is, of course, very good-looking) is a twenty-something rich, white, college-educated socialite who wants to work as an investigator in her father's well-connected Confidential Investigations company. He recruits her as a secretary but leaves her in charge when he's recalled to military service setting up an intelligence unit in DC.

When the CEO of Amalgamated Aircraft, a man she's known all her life and who she calls uncle, needs someone to investigate the allegedly accidental death in his factory of the worker selected to be the real-life model for the Rosie The Riveter propaganda campaign, Fancy jumps at the chance to go undercover at his factory.

What follows is a fast, fun, uncomplicated but engaging romp as Fancy, who is not very good at being undercover, tries to find out what happened to Rosie and in the process gets herself into a great deal of trouble.

This was popcorn but the good kind of popcorn with just the right amount of melted butter and salt.

The 'enhanced audio' turned out to mean that appropriate background noises were added to the narration. To my surprise, the sound effects lifted the story by adding a retro Saturday Morning Matinee At The Cinema ambience that I enjoyed.

Gabrielle de Cuir's narration was perfect. Click on the SoundCloud link below to hear a sample.

https://soundcloud.com/skyboat_audiobooks/fancy-anders-goes-to-war

Mourn the living- good introduction of Nolan, can see the Parker influence
Spree- Can see the progression of Nolan, still heavy Parker type story, seems to be a mix of a few classic pulp fiction styles, end of the character storylines always bum me out½

Fantastic

Good collection

Really didn’t know much him, larger than life guy

Why does Heller tell us the brand names of his clothing all of the time? Did those companies pay the author to have them constantly repeated? Weird… And why are there so many names dropped in book two? Designer labels for book one, famous names for book two. The shift button must have been working overtime when this tale was typed out!

Book One is titled “Kansas City Shuffle”, in October of 1953. Book Two is five years later, and titled “St. Louis Blues”. Both are about the real life kidnapping of Bobby Greenlease, just a fictionalized account of it, based on facts. The first book is the kidnapping itself, and the second is Heller following the missing ransom money. It's a good story, and despite all of the proper noun name dropping, a decent read. I had never heard of this kidnapping before, so this was a new case for me!

So this was a book based on a movie that was based on a graphic novel, and both the graphic novel and book were penned by the same author. And you could tell. The book was a very simple, easily read, "beach read". There was nothing complex about the style or anything, but the book was good. A simple gangster story of revenge. If you're into that, and don't want anything too challenging, this is definitely the book for you!

It's kind of simple, but works very well as an introduction to the Dark Angel universe. There are some questions about why events in the book are never mentioned in the show, but apparently that'll pop up in the books that close of the tv-show, so if that's true I think this is an okay way to round off the tv-show.

Again; simple, like the previous two, but works in a way to tie up the loose ends that were left by the television series.
The end and some of the answers feel a little rushed, but aside from that it kind of works. Though I am sure there is fan-fiction out there that will give a more satisfying end to the show.