Quarry (31 page)

The thesis consisted of
Bait Money
,
No Cure for Death
and the unfinished
Quarry
. My memory is fuzzy (not advancing age—it’s always been fuzzy) but I believe I set
Quarry
aside to write sequels to the two novels that had already sold.
Quarry
was probably finished by around late 1972 or ’73. It did not sell till 1975.

The idea behind Quarry was two-fold. I’d already followed my other mentor, Donald E. Westlake, into writing about a thief (
Bait Money
was an homage to his Richard Stark-bylined Parker series, homage being French for “rip-off”). I had trained to write private eye fiction but the times were wrong for that, and also wrong for cop heroes—cops were guys with nightsticks clubbing friends of mine at the ’68 Chicago Convention. So the anti-hero crook was a convenient retreat for a writer who was (as my first agent Knox Burger put it) “a blacksmith in an automotive age.”

But I thought Parker and Nolan were to some degree cop-outs. They were “good” bad guy thieves—oh, sure, hardbitten as hell, but they stole mainly money and only killed other bad guys. In the ’60s, banks and the Establishment in general were worthy targets of fantasy revenge. Also, “Richard Stark” and I both wrote our crook books in the third-person. Safe. Detached.

I wanted to take it up a notch—my “hero” would be a hired killer. The books would be in first person. In the opening chapter, Quarry would do something terrible, giving readers an early chance to bail; late in the book he would again do something terrible, to confront readers with just what kind of person they’d been easily identifying.

And Quarry himself would be somebody like me, just a normal person in his early twenties—not a child of poverty or cursed by a criminal background, but a war-damaged Vietnam veteran. I had a good friend (now deceased) who was very much like Quarry—a sweet, smart, funny guy who had learned to kill people for “Uncle Sugar.”

In addition, I wanted to make a comment about Americans in general—that we had, through Vietnam, become numb to death. That we had grown used to watching body bags being loaded onto planes even as we ate our TV dinners taking in the nightly news.

This book, when originally published in 1976 by Berkley Books, was retitled
The Broker
. This was done without my permission or even knowledge. When my character Quarry grew into something of a cult favorite by the 1980s, and I was approached by Foul Play Press to have the first four published in trade paperback, I restored the original title. Now those Foul Play Press reprints are as rare as the original paperbacks, and I’m pleased that John Boland’s Perfect Crime is bringing those first novels, and the fifth Quarry written in the mid-’80s, back into print.

Quarry apparently is again a cult favorite, in part because Hard Case Crime invited me to write several new novels about him. But I never forget what Don Westlake told me: “A cult favorite is seven readers short of the author being able to make a living.”

Max Allan Collins

August 2010