Hired Lover

Hired Lover was first published in 1959 under the pseudonym Fred Martin, but the real author was king of the sleaze-crime genre, Orrie Hitt (1916-1975), and its supposed to be one of his best novels. Thanks to Stark House Press, the short novel is back in print in a double paired with Summer Hotel (1958) and a fascinating introduction by paperback scholar, Jeff Vorzimmer.

Our narrator is a Chicago driving instructor named Mike Callahan who is giving a wealthy young woman named Kitty driving lessons. She’s super sexy and wastes no time seducing Mike. Kitty is married to a much older man. She claims he’s a sickly and cruel man nearly three-times her age. You see where this is going.

Girls like that in books like this are addictive and Mike becomes hooked on the sex with young Kitty. Opportunities abound when Kitty’s husband hires Mike to be her full-time chauffeur. This gives Mike access to Kitty but also access to her husband’s estate and proximity to the life of wealth and privilege he’s never enjoyed before.

Eventually, it occurs to Kitty and Mike that all of it could be theirs if Kitty’s husband was dead. No surprise to the reader who has enjoyed this plot dozens of times within the genre, but Hitt does a nice job managing the twists, turns and betrayals along the way.

If you enjoy femme fatale classics by James M. Cain (The Postman Always Rings Twice) or Gil Brewer (The Vengeful Virgin), you’ll love Hired Lover. This is Orrie Hitt at the top of his noir game. Recommended. Get it HERE.

Quarry #17 - Quarry's Return

Quarry’s Return (2024 Hard Case Crime) is the 17th novel by Max Allan Collins featuring his contract killer character - a series that has spanned the author’s entire adult life.

We join Quarry in modern times at age 71. He’s a widower twice and living alone in a cabin during the tourist off-season. He has an adult daughter who is a successful true-crime author based in the Quad Cities that straddle the Mississippi River between Illinois and Iowa.

The novel also marks the return of an Asian-American female assassin named Lu who was introduced in Quarry’s Deal (aka The Dealer, 1976) and Killing Quarry (2020). For his part, the author does an admirable job of reminding the reader who Lu is. She’s a great partner for Old Man Quarry.

Quarry and Lu are dealing with two problems in this novel. First, hit men are trying to kill Quarry, and he needs to find out why and deal with the client who commissioned his murder. Second, Quarry’s true-crime writing daughter disappeared while researching an active serial killer case for a book.

Quarry and Lu basically serve as murderous detective partners investigating the serial murders in hopes of shedding light on the daughter’s disappearance. They are competent detectives and the solution to the paperback’s mysteries makes for a satisfying read. You can’t go wrong with a Quarry novel, and this one is a winner.

Despite that, you probably shouldn’t read Quarry’s Return without reading Killing Quarry and Quarry's Blood as the new novel is a direct sequel to the other "Old Man Quarry" paperbacks. Collins brings you up to speed just fine, so you won’t be lost, but why not read them in order? For that matter starting the four-book miniseries with Quarry’s Deal probably makes the most sense, but you’re certainly old enough to make your own decisions by now.

Solid novel. Solid series. Go buy them all HERE.

Open Letter to Max Allan Collins:

Big fan, here. Love the Quarry books best of all.

Not to bring up a touchy subject, but you’re 76 years old, and I can’t help but wonder how many more Quarry books you have in you. I hope there’s many more, but you’ve indicated you may be done with the series.

Mickey Spillane did you - and the reading public - a great service by allowing you to keep Mike Hammer alive in your excellent continuation novels. Any chance you can pay it forward by picking a young, talented author and allowing him to continue the Quarry stories (which have always been unstuck in time) after you’re gone?

It’s seems like a no-brainer and your fans will be able to enjoy new books in the series long after you’re gone. Or maybe the new books will suck, and everyone will spend an eternity talking about how you were the only one who could make Quarry work. Either way, you win.

Chew on it. 

Ranking Stephen King's Night Shift

In this exclusive video, Eric presents a top 20 ranking of Stephen King's Night Shift stories. Each story includes a capsule review with tons of book covers, movie clips, and magazine inserts through the years from various publishers. Also some fun facts about King's work is included. Watch it below or stream HERE.

The Road

Shortly before Cormac McCarthy's death in 2023 he received a passionate letter from a French artist named Manu Larcenet. In the letter, Larcenet explained how he had read the author's most prescient novel, The Road, over and over for six months. He pleaded with McCarthy and explained how he had almost lived in the book's bleak narrative for months. He asked McCarthy if he could adapt the novel into a graphic novel adaptation and the legendary author consented to the request. Unfortunately, McCarthy died before seeing the finished product. Larcenet's adaptation was published in 2024 by Abrams Comicarts.

This is an usual adaptation in the way that Larcenet doesn't actually write any of the book's dialogue or scenes. Instead, he simply quotes directly from the novel itself, straying from any semblance of the film adaptation. Larcenet pencils these dire apocalyptic scenes into harrowing exhibits of human loss and anguish. Often the scenes are washed out to properly convey the atmosphere of ash and snow blanketing America in a white sheet of doomed oblivion. 

If you are unaware of McCarthy's The Road, it was published in 2006 and serves as a post-apocalyptic melodrama as an unnamed father and son walk across a scarred landscape that has been obliterated by a  nuclear war. Along with marauders and bandits, the two face the cruelest enemy of all – starvation. Using that as a dismal background, Larcenet punctuates McCarthy's work in a more enhanced, deeply troubling adaptation that orchestrates humanity's downfall in the most intimate way possible. While the film left something to be desired, Larcenet's adaptation hones in on the insanity and utter hopelesness in a unique way. This is a stunning visual art. You won't be disappointed.

Get your copy of the book HERE.

Gone to the Wolves

In a New York Times 2009 interview with Gregory Cowles, author John Wray professes his love for abstract music and its dream-like ability to spawn creative processes. My take is that Wray likes really weird music – nothing more and nothing less. I'm a weirdo for music as well and authored hundreds of heavy metal and hard rock reviews for a decade (MaximumMetal.com). It was of great interest to me to find Wray's 2023 hardcover Gone to the Wolves in an indy book store in Tampa. It is fitting that the book begins and ends on Florida's Gulf Coast, an area about four hours west of my Florida coastline home.

Gone to the Wolves begins in 1990. A teenager named Kit arrives in Venice, Florida to live with his grandmother. Kit feels out of place but strikes up a bizarre friendship with a black bisexual teenage boy named Leslie. Kit rescues Leslie from what he believes to be an assault, then later realizes that Leslie was just buying weed from his dealer. Kit and Leslie quickly become friends through music. 

If you aren't a heavy metal mophead, the quick basics is that death metal music (cookie monster vocals over heavy distortion) was arguably formed in and around Tampa in the mid 80s. The genre hit corporate radars in 1990 and became a marketable trend. Leslie is up to speed on the early death metal movement and incorporates Kit into the vinyl and tape trading explosion of death metal and thrash. Kit quickly replaces his love for U2 and Huey Lewis with bands like Morbid Angel, Death, and Cannibal Corpse. 

Venice doesn't have much to offer so the kids hang out at a place called the Grids, an abandoned section of unfinished housing. It is here that Kit gets to know Kira, a distant teen girl that clearly has a lot of emotional baggage. The three become a tight-knit trio and eventually move to Los Angeles. This is the middle portion of the narrative and features events that you will typically find in any rock documentary ever made – heroin, cocaine, sex, music, the Sunset Strip, and heroin – did I mention heroin?

Kit and Kira become a couple, although its loosey-goosey at best. Leslie falls in love with a guitar player and then becomes hooked on drugs. This portion of the narrative is a rags to more raggedy story of kids coming of age through a baptism of fire. Eventually, Kira's love of extreme metal leads the couple to Europe. It is here that the third act takes place, a narrative in the darkest confines of Norway. Kira is taken by strangers at a metal show and Kit spends a year wondering where she is. Eventually Interpol contacts Kit and things get ominous very quickly. 

Again, if you aren't a heavy metal mophead, the quick basics is that black metal music (think Mariah Carey caught in a bear trap over three-chord riffs and blast beats) emerged in the late 1980s and exploded in Scandinavia with a lot of occult mysticism and Viking lifestyles that aggressively rebelled against Christianity. The infamous church burnings began and there were musicians killing themselves and other musicians during this arson phase. Needless to say, Kit and Leslie journey to Norway during the height of this era and begin investigating Kira's disappearance. 

It's a cliche, but I will say this book is a love letter to heavy metal. There are enough references to musicians, albums, songs, lyrics, and riff religions to blanket Wacken in a mortuary drape. The central story is a discovery of independence and the development of adulthood. Personality, hormones, identity, and a skewed remembrance are all key factors in the storytelling. There is a purpose to it all and the finale is a very dark place that dips the book into horror's blood red red room. 

Gone to the Wolves is a mandatory read if you love heavy metal. Without at least a minimum interest in abstract music, the book may not have as much of an impact. If you are a devil's horn denim and leather wharf rat then this book is all gravy. Highly recommended for headbangers. John Wray, if you ever see this review, I cracked the logos coding and path.

Buy your copy HERE.

Fatherland

The premise of Robert Harris’ most acclaimed novel, Fatherland (1992), is an interesting thought-experiment expanded into an alternate-history crime novel. The premise? What if Germany won World War Two and controlled Europe for decades thereafter under the leadership of Adolph Hitler?

The year is 1964, and the German Nazi party presides over Europe’s The Greater German Reich with an aging Hitler still at the helm. Our guide through this world is a Berlin police detective named Xavier March who, of course, investigates crimes for the Reich while driving a Volkswagen.

The novel begins with the discovery of an old man’s corpse by Berlin’s Havel River. March is assigned the case, and watching him investigate is a total pleasure. He’s so good. The author does a great deal of world-building for the reader to understand the fictional events of WW2 and the world as it exists in the Fatherland universe. I won’t spoil anything here, but Harris really thought this through.

The mystery of the riverside corpse opens the door to other mysteries for March to solve. He’s a good, honest cop working in a paranoid system with multiple layers of secretive bureaucracy and hidden truths.

Despite the excellence of the mysteries and the protagonist, the real star of the show here is the alternative history setting. The author seems to have thought of everything in his imagining of what the world would have looked like in 1964 Europe under Hitler’s unbroken reign and how a more successful Reich would have hidden it’s atrocities from the eyes of the world.

However you read it, it’s a certainty that you’ll enjoy this paperback quite a bit. The book has sold three million copies and been translated into 25 languages. There was also a so-so HBO film adaptation starring Rutger Howard. But start with the book. Always the book. Get it HERE.

Paperback Warrior Podcast - Episode 110

In this last episode of 2024, Eric takes a breathtaking leap into the high-adventure, high-octane world of Alistair MacLean. He dives into MacLean's career with capsule reviews and descriptions of every single novel including commentary on the various films and screenplays spawned by the author's work. In addition, Eric remembers the late Robert Randisi and reviews a historical action-adventure novel titled Viking Slave. A companion to this podcast episode can be found HERE which showcases Eric's robust Alistair MacLean book collection. Stream the episode below or download HERE. 

Listen to "Episode 110: Alistair MacLean" on Spreaker.