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?