Pulp Poem of the Week

I saw to it that

it happened

fast and clean.

It was something

like working

in a butcher shop,

only my job

pays better,

the hours

are shorter,

and there isn’t

the mess.

Max Allan Collins

Quarry [a.k.a. The Broker]

1976

5 More Quick Questions with Max Allan Collins

In the second installment of 5 Quick Questions with Max Allan Collins, M.A.C. gives answers about his friend and collaborator Mickey Spillane. Of the many Spillane/Collins publications, two new ones to be aware of: (1) M.A.C. contributes an essay on Spillane’s One Lonely Night to Thrillers: 100 Must-Reads (2010; edited by David Morrell and Hank Wagner), and (2) M.A.C.’s completion of Spillane’s unfinished manuscript for The Consummata (the sequel to Spillane’s 1967 novel The Delta Factor) will be published in October by Hard Case Crime.

1. What was the first Mickey Spillane novel that you read?

One Lonely Night. Changed my life. My world. The private eye as crazed avenger, the private eye writer as noir poet. It belongs on the short list of great P.I. novels with The Maltese Falcon and Farewell, My Lovely.

2. What do you most admire about Mickey Spillane as a writer?

The surrealistic, fever-dream world he creates in the first six Mike Hammer novels is a unique, compelling creation. I would also cite Hammer himself as a voice/character.

3. True or false: Mickey Spillane is America’s most underrated hardboiled novelist.

Probably true. I say “probably” because those who love him really love him. Some major players consider him hugely important—Otto Penzler for one, Ed Gorman for another. And hundreds of millions of readers.

4. Which is more challenging: co-writing a novel with a living co-author, or completing the work of a deceased author?

I find the process quite similar, because with both Barb Collins (my wife and collaborator on the Antiques novels) and Matthew V. Clemens (collaborator on the forthcoming No One Will Hear You), I work from their rough drafts. The back-and-forth comes at the plotting stage. With Mickey, I work from unfinished manuscripts, which I treat as rough draft, and sometimes notes. Obviously the Spillane collaboration is tricky, but I have been unwittingly training for that role since about 1960.

5. What is your favorite Mickey Spillane novel?

One Lonely Night. Hands down. But the first six Hammer novels combine to make an epic hardboiled fantasy.

5 Quick Questions with Max Allan Collins

Max Allan Collins has cut a wide swath through the noirboiled world (and many other literary worlds, for that matter) as a prolific author of novels (graphic and otherwise), stories, screenplays, movie tie-ins, comic strips, and on and on. He is perhaps best-known to noirboiled fans for the Nathan Heller novels, which blend the private eye genre with historical fiction, as well as his series featuring Quarry (the assassin) and Nolan (the thief).

1. What is the first crime novel that you remember reading?

I read a lot of the Sherlock Holmes stories, and loved the Saint novels—I particularly remember The Saint and the Sizzling Saboteur making an impression. And the Dick Tracy comic books are a very vivid memory—the first story I read was about Junior Tracy’s girl friend, Model, who died as a result of her juvie brother’s misdeeds, quickly followed by a book collecting the Brow sequence, in which the sympathetic Summer Sisters drowned in a car. But the crime novel that kicked off everything came in the seventh grade—The Maltese Falcon. Still my favorite private eye novel.

2. Which crime novelist do you consider to be your biggest influence?

I have to dodge this, at least somewhat. Everybody thinks I would say Mickey Spillane, but he is only one of a quartet of great mystery writers I discovered when I was thirteen—Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Mickey Spillane, and James M. Cain. I learned 90% of what I know about crime writing from Hammett, Chandler, Spillane, and Cain.

3. Which non-crime novelist do you consider to be your biggest influence?

Probably William March, author of The Bad Seed, which inspired my films (and novels) Mommy and Mommy's Day. My other favorite mainstream writers during my impressionable years were Calder Willingham, who wrote End As a Man, and Willard Motley, who wrote Knock on Any Door. Not your standard picks, I’ll grant you. Later I came to like Mark Harris, author of The Southpaw.

4. Which crime novel (that you didn’t write) do you most wish you had written?

There aren't any. I only want to write my novels.

But I am very thrilled to be collaborating with Mickey Spillane—contributing real entries to the Mike Hammer series is an honor I wish I could share with my thirteen year-old self. Well, I guess I do.

5. What is the best novel by Max Allan Collins?

I don't know. I would suggest that the Nathan Heller novels, taken as a whole, represent my best work and major contribution. Of those I might pick The Million-Dollar Wound as the best representative example, and Flying Blind as the best atypical entry.

Book Review Revisited: Max Allan Collins, Quarry [a.k.a. The Broker] (1976)

Max Allan Collins has posted his thoughts on my recent review of his novel Quarry here (about midway down the page). Collins is mistaken in saying that The Hunter is the only Parker novel where Parker kills a civilian—The Jugger is another that comes to mind. Parker thinks nothing of killing a civilian if it is necessary to ensure his own safety. Beyond this quibble, however, Collins' response, which emphasizes the differences between the Quarry novels and the Parker novels, makes an interesting counter to my review, which emphasized their similarities.

Review: Max Allan Collins, Quarry [a.k.a. The Broker] (1976)

If Max Allan Collins hadn’t written his Nolan novels, then Quarry would probably be known as his last-name-only homage to Richard Stark’s Parker. Collins freely admits that Nolan was a Parker rip-off, but he explains (in his afterword to the recently reissued Quarry) that with his Quarry novels he wanted to “take it up a notch” from the Parker/Nolan novels in two ways: First, Quarry would be a professional killer (rather than a professional thief). Second, Quarry would tell his own story in the first person (rather than the more detached third person of Parker/Nolan).

The plot contours of Quarry follow the typical Parker novel almost exactly: The book begins quickly and violently, then slows down as Quarry and a confederate plan a job. The job seems to go well at first, but then turns sour. At this point, if Quarry were smart, he would cut and run, but can’t bring himself to do it. He stays in town to make things right, which means, in part, recovering the fee for his job, which was stolen from him. The novel ends with Quarry at home, making contact with a woman he met while on the job. In sum, it’s a Parker novel.

As for Collins’ changes to the formula: The switch from thief to killer is not much of a change, given how much killing Parker does in the course of his work. Indeed, if you compare Quarry to The Hunter (the first Parker novel), there is nothing in Quarry half as chilling as the scene in The Hunter in which Parker accidentally kills the owner of a beauty shop, and the overall carnage in The Hunter is greater. As for the switch to a first-person narrative (and Collins’ decision to make Quarry “somebody just like [himself], just a normal person in his early twenties”), the result is that Quarry is more human and thus a less frightening character than Parker. The switch to first person also has the effect of simplifying the storytelling in Quarry. Among the most consistently entertaining aspects of the Parker novels are Stark’s clever and surprising shifts in time and point of view, which would be difficult, if not impossible, to accomplish in the first person.

All of this is not to criticize or condemn the Quarry books; rather, it is just to say that they exist very much in Parker’s shadow. As for the first Quarry book, Quarry is well worth reading. If you’re familiar with the Parker books, then Quarry will seem familiar too, but if you kept reading the Parker books after you read the first few, then there’s no reason why you shouldn’t give the first Quarry a try. Grade: B-

Book Review: Max Allan Collins, The First Quarry (2008)

Though the title of 2006's The Last Quarry seemed to promise there would be no more, Max Allan Collins's crass, banal hitman has returned to narrate his genesis . . . and it's pretty good. In fact, if you read The First Quarry immediately after Deadly Beloved, MAC's previous effort for Hard Case Crime, it will seem like Raymond Chandler. Grade: B

Book Review: Max Allan Collins, Deadly Beloved (2007)

I could write at great length about the ham-handedness of Max Allan Collins' Deadly Beloved, but instead I choose to look at the bright side: I'm betting that MAC's next contribution to Hard Case Crime, The First Quarry, is going to seem pretty damn great by comparison. Grade: F

Book Review: Max Allan Collins, The Last Quarry (2006)

One problem with contemporary noir is that the freedom to curse openly and describe sex explicitly can make writers lazy. In The Last Quarry, for example, there is nothing even remotely sexy about it when Quarry pauses to describe the nipple measurements of the book's two female characters, and the actual sex scenes read like stale Penthouse Forum. This book is far from the worst that Hard Case Crime has published (see Stephen King for that), but noir writers should at least aspire to be Raymond Chandler or Jim Thompson or [insert name of great noir writer of your choice here], even if they can't quite pull it off. The saying, I believe, is that your reach must exceed your grasp, etc., etc. Grade: D+