Celebrating Quarry’s Half-Century Career

Crime novelist Max Allan Collins has unveiled the cover of Quarry’s Reunion, his 18th book starring the killer-for-hire known only as Quarry. The book is due out in late 2026, with artwork by Paul Mann, whose talents we have celebrated before on this page.

This is being promoted as the 50th-anniversary Quarry novel, the first installment in that series being The Broker (later retitled Quarry), which was published in 1976. Collins explains in his blog that he “wrestled with the plot [of Quarry’s Reunion], which is an unusual one for Quarry as it’s a more traditional murder mystery than a crime novel, and has lots of moving parts, more Christie than Spillane. Right now I don’t know how my editor and agent will react to a change of pace like this; but I can really only write the novel that wants to be written. This one, appropriately given the 50th anniversary aspect, delves into Quarry’s past in a way I never have before.

“The story that presented itself to me was almost something out of Grace Metalious. If that reference doesn’t mean anything to you, or even if it does, I’ll just say she was the underrated author of Peyton Place, one of the best-selling (and most scandalous) novels of the ’50s and early ’60s. I had to develop a whole cast, even generations thereof, the residents of a town in Ohio about the same size of my own smallish Muscatine, Iowa. I literally (not figuratively) wrote half a dozen breakdowns of the characters and their relationships, both familial and romantic, detailing a trust fund that would be the engine of the mystery, i.e., who would/could benefit financially from the death of a character or two.”

Complicating matters further were Collins’ ongoing health concerns. He says he’d completed several chapters only of Reunion before he was sent into care “for an ablation procedure to deal with my a-fib [abnormal heart rhythm]. This turned into a nightmarish month of emergency room visits, ambulance rides, and three hospital stays, the middle one of which found me hallucinating about where I was and whether or not I was investigating a murder.”

All of this certainly makes us look forward to a finished copy of Quarry’s Reunion, with its Natalie Wood cover lookalike. But we’d also be interested in a novel about a writer hallucinating that he’s investigating a murder. Have you got time to pen that one too, Max?

Angel on the Lam

Sorry, everyone, for the long silence on this page. My last post went up at the end of March, and the one before that promised the imminent unrolling of a new series. Since then, I’ve experienced computer issues and the death of one of my closest friends. If you’re a reader of my other blog, The Rap Sheet, you will have noticed a drop-off in activity there as well, though not quite as serious.

My absence became persistent enough, that I received an anonymous comment here earlier this week, asking, “Where have you been?”

With any luck, this post marks my return. Yes, it will likely take some while to resume my normal blogging pace, but a start must be made. Therefore, I am bringing you today the latest Hard Case Crime paperback cover from artist Paul Mann, about whom I have written before. The Get Off—shown above—is due out in March 2025, and is the third hard-boiled novel from Christa Faust to feature her ex-porn star protagonist, Angel Dare. (The previous installments in that series were 2008’s Money Shot and 2011’s Choke Hold).

Hard Case Crime’s synopsis of the book’s plot reads:

Tagged as a cop killer when a mission of vengeance goes wrong, Angel Dare finds herself on the run, with an unexpected burden: she’s pregnant. Her desperate flight takes Angel across the rugged American west, where cattle barons lock horns with rodeo bullfighters and life can end suddenly and brutally. A renegade couple living off the grid near the border might offer a chance of escape—but can Angel reach them in time ...?

It’s hard to believe that almost a decade and a half has passed since Choke Hold reached stores. And that, according to Hard Case, The Get Off will conclude Angel Dare’s story.

You can read a sample chapter of Faust’s latest yarn here.

Mann, Oh Mann!

I’ve had the opportunity over my years as a journalist and book critic to interview a great many people. They’ve ranged from relative unknowns to prominent figures such as actor James Garner, Doonesbury cartoonist Garry Trudeau, Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee, jazz singer Sarah Vaughn, and architect-futurist Buckminster Fuller, as well as crime novelists on the order of Ross Macdonald, Robert B. Parker, Elmore Leonard, and Philip Kerr.

Not all encounters of this sort have gone smoothly, and scheduling difficulties have sometimes arisen. However, I don’t recall ever being so challenged in seeking to arrange an interview as I was when I tried to connect with Salt Lake City-area artist-illustrator Paul Mann (shown at right).

You may recognize Mann’s moniker from an article I posted last week about his work on the front of Too Many Bullets, the new, 19th Nate Heller private-eye novel by Max Allan Collins. Over the last half-dozen years, Mann has become a regular contributor to publisher Hard Case Crime’s cracking line of hard-boiled yarns. His mastery of retro-style imagery has made him a go-to HCC cover artist, along with Robert McGinnis, Ron Lesser, Claudia Caranfa, Mark Eastbrook, Laurel Blechman, and others. Having long been interested in book illustration, I wished to ask him about his four decades spent perfecting his craft, his creative techniques, his favorite book covers, his Hard Case assignments, and his extensive portfolio of cinema-related spec pieces.

When repeated efforts to make contact via e-mail failed, I asked Hard Case editor Charles Ardai for help in reaching Mann. Ardai said he was happy to pass along my message “with a note encouraging him to reply to you. He still might not—he’s a very nice fellow, but may not like doing interviews or might just be dealing with a lot of other commitments. But I’m glad to give it a try.”

In the end, I never heard so much as a whisper from Mann.

So I moved on. There were other people to speak with, other artists to showcase in Killer Covers, other book reviews to write. But recently Ardai mentioned on the social networking service formerly known as Twitter (sorry, I’m never going to call it “X”—that’s just too moronic a name) that Hard Case is planning next year to issue a trade paperback version of Lemons Never Lie, a 1971 novel that Donald E. Westlake released under his pseudonym Richard Stark. In 2006 HCC had published Lemons in mass-market size (with cover art by Richard B. Farrell), but copies of that ran out long ago, and as Ardai explained, Westlake’s widow “agreed we should reprint in the larger format to match all our recent editions of Don’s books.” Said forthcoming reprint will boast a new and captivating cover—exhibited atop this post—by none other than Paul Mann.

That finally kicked it over the edge. I was going to have to go ahead and exhibit Mann’s remarkable talents on this page without interviewing the man himself. Below you’ll find what I believe is his entire Hard Case oeuvre—so far. Among the titles are several by Westlake, including Forever and a Death (2017), which is said to have started out as a James Bond film treatment; Collins’ 18th Nate Heller historical tale, The Big Bundle (2022); Ardai’s Death Comes Too Late, a short-story collection due out in March of next year; and a 2019 illustrated edition of Stephen King’s The Colorado Kid (originally published in 2005 with a cover by Glen Orbik).

I look forward to seeing many more of Mann’s sexy, traditionally fashioned Hard Case Crime fronts in the near future.

The Inconvenience of Abundance

It was while I was putting together a rather lengthy Rap Sheet interview with Iowa fictionist Max Allan Collins, most of which had to do with his new historical crime novel, Too Many Bullets (Hard Case Crime), that I realized just how many book fronts featuring those words “too many” can be found in my computer files.

Too Many Bullets, the cover of which is displayed atop this post (with art by Paul Mann), is the fifth entry* in a sort of mini-series within Collins’ string of 19 novels starring hard-boiled, Chicago-based private investigator Nate Heller, all of them in some way featuring John F. Kennedy and/or his younger brother Robert F. Kennedy. Bullets imagines the ubiquitous Heller on hand at Democratic U.S. Senator Bob Kennedy’s 1968 slaying in Los Angeles, and then follows him as he endeavors to untangle a conspiracy meant to pin that headline-grabbing tragedy on “lone gunman” Sirhan Sirhan.

When I typed “too many” into the search window of my computer’s Picasa image viewer, looking from the jacket of Too Many Bullets—surprise!—more than one cover came up. Not just Collins’, but also the fronts from 10 other novels, none of which I remembered downloading or storing away for future use. There was the 1962 Bantam paperback cover of Rex Stout’s Too Many Clients (with art by Bill Johnson), as well as the fronts from two other Stout works: Too Many Cooks (Dell, 1951; art by Robert Stanley) and Too Many Women (Bantam, 1949; art by Hy Rubin). In addition, I found Too Many Murderers, by Manning Lee Stokes (Graphic Mystery, 1955; illustration by Clyde Ross); One Murder Too Many, by George Harmon Coxe (Pyramid, 1967; artist unidentified); Too Many Beds, by “Tony Calvano,” aka Thomas P. Ramirez (Nightstand, 1961; artwork by Harold W. McCauley); Too Many Sinners, by Sheldon Stark (Ace, 1954; artist unidentified); Too Many Crooks, by Richard S. Prather (Gold Medal, 1956, featuring a Barye Phillips illustration); Too Many Women, by Milton K. Ozaki (Handi-book Mystery, 1950; artist uncredited); and finally the third Too Many Women tucked into in my files, this one by Gerry Martin (News Stand Library, 1950; art by Syd Dyke).

There are probably still more vintage books to be found with such titles. I shall add to this post as I stumble across them.

* The previous four books were Bye Bye, Baby (2011), which found Heller probing “blonde bombshell” Marilyn Monroe’s sexual involvement with both Kennedy siblings, at the same time as he sought to determine whether it was really suicide that sent the actress to her grave in 1962; Target Lancer (2012), which revisited a plot to do away with President Kennedy in Chicago in 1963—even before his tragic public slaying in Dallas, Texas; Ask Not (2013), about a succession of suspicious deaths in 1964, involving witnesses to President Kennedy’s assassination; and Better Dead (2016), in which Heller got better acquainted with Bobby Kennedy, while he investigated the case of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, a New York City couple convicted of espionage for having reportedly leaked U.S. nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union.

And a Happy Halloween to You, Too!

Blood Sugar, by Daniel Kraus (Hard Case Crime, 2019).
Cover art by Paul Mann.

READ MORE: “A Conversation with Daniel Kraus on Blood Sugar,” by Scott Adlerberg (Mystery Tribune).

A Bond by Any Other Name …

Here’s a story that’s almost too good to be true, coming from a blog I had never heard of until today, Birth. Movies. Death. It seems that in the 1990s, Donald E. Westlake—the prolific author perhaps best known from his series about a professional thief known as Parker (The Hunter), who had also scripted the 1999 film The Grifters (based on Jim Thompson’s 1963 novel of the same name)—sought to make a contribution to the film series based on Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels. According to Birth. Movies. Death.,

In 1995, before [the 17th Bond film] GoldenEye was even released, Westlake turned in to Eon [Productions] two treatments for “Bond 18.” Both his treatments apparently used as their backdrop Hong Kong’s transfer of sovereignty to China. In one of the treatments, Westlake had 007 facing off against Gideon Goodbread, an American businessman who planned to level Hong Kong after robbing its banks—a revenge scheme for the death of his missionary parents at the hands of the Red Chinese. Westlake described his Bond villain as “John Goodman with a Southern accent,” and likened him to the lead character in Jim Thompson’s The Killer Inside Me. Goodbread commanded an army of Amerasian orphans he called “the Children.” (For more details about Westlake's take on the Bond franchise, pick up Issue 32 of MI6 Confidential.)

Westlake floated the following titles for his Bond adventure: Dragonsteeth; Nobody Dies; Forever and a Death; Never Look Back; On Borrowed Time. That last title was prophetic; the time-sensitive nature of the Hong Kong changeover backdrop was deemed unsuitable, we got Tomorrow Never Dies [1997] instead, and Westlake’s script was shelved.

Now Hard Case Crime has resurrected this lost story, which at some point Westlake rewrote as a novel—Forever and a Death. It’s no longer a James Bond story of course, and we’re not sure how many (or indeed, if any) of the details described above will be included, but the vestigial elements of the story seem to be in place, and at any rate a new novel by the late Donald Westlake is nothing to sneeze at. As a bonus, the novel will contain an afterword by one of the Bond producers, describing the history of the project.

This book is due out next June, with stunning cover art by Paul Mann. Click here to read an excerpt from Forever and a Death.

(Hat tip to Bill Crider’s Pop Culture Magazine.)

READ MORE: “Donald E. Westlake’s Sort-of James Bond Book Coming Out Next Year,” by Matthew Bradford, aka Tanner (Double O Section).