Hit Man - Hardcover

Block, Lawrence

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0752814370 ISBN 13: 9780752814377

Publisher: Orion, 1998

Synopsis

The hit man of the title, Keller, tells his story episodically job by job. His tasks come as and when and with little warning. The call comes, he visits his paymaster to collect instructions, he travels to the hit's home city, does the job, returns. Often he likes the town he visits - enough even to look into real estate prices, but he always returns to New York City, to the chance of another job.

Nothing changes until he begins visiting a therapist - a man who after a number of visits works out what our hero does for a living. He proposes a hit - he wants a woman killed. But in doing his job, Keller realises that he has been used and returns to take revenge on the therapist.

The upshot is that in killing his therapist Keller orphans a dog. The dog needs a home, Keller provides one, prompting the next major change in his life. When he goes away Keller needs a dog walker...finding a suitable candidate is easy enough, but before long she's resident in his flat and a whole new set of life rules are looking Keller in the face. Can he keep his job - can he keep his dog and his lover once they know what he does for a living?

About this title

Review

A man known only as Keller is thinking about Samuel Johnson's famous quote that "'patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel'... If you looked at it objectively, he had to admit, then he was probably a scoundrel himself. He didn't feel much like a scoundrel. He felt like your basic New York single guy, living alone, eating out or bringing home takeout, schlepping his wash to the Laundromat, doing the Times crossword with his morning coffee.... There were eight million stories in the naked city, most of them not very interesting, and his was one of them. Except that every once in a while he got a phone call from a man in White Plains. And packed a bag and caught a plane and killed somebody. Hard to argue the point. Man behaves like that, he's a scoundrel. Case closed." But Lawrence Block is such a delightfully subtle writer, one of the true masters of the mystery genre, that the case is far from closed. In this beautifully linked collection of short stories, we gradually put together such a complete picture of Keller that we don't so much forgive him his occupation as consider it just one more part of his humanity. After watching Keller take on cases that baffle and anger him into actions that fellow members of his hit-man union might well call unprofessional, we're eager to join him as he goes through a spectacularly unsuccessful analysis and gets fooled by a devious intelligence agent. We miss the dog he acquires and loses, along with its attractive walker. Like Richard Stark's Parker, Keller makes us think the unthinkable about criminals: that they might be the guys next door--or even us, under different pressures. For a small selection of the many Blocks in paperback, try Coward's Kiss, A Long Line of Dead Men, The Sins of the Fathers, Such Men Are Dangerous and especially When the Sacred Ginmill Closes.

Review

"Leave it to Lawrence Block to write a knock-out novel about a hit man staggering through a midlife crisis. . .Block deliversa one-two punch of humor and introspection. . .Along the way, readers will find themselves analyzing why they are eager forthe killer to discover inner peace."-- "Boston Herald"An odd and appealing combination of the hard-boiled, the surreal and the whimsical. Keller grows on us, story by story. ..But he is also a cold-blooded killer. . .Unlike Keller, who likes movies where you can tell who the good guys are, Blocksfans can grateful for a book in which you can't always tell which is which."-- "San Francisco Examiner & Chronicle"

Edition details

• Publisher: Orion
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0752814370
• ISBN 13: 9780752814377
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 256