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It is a truism of noir fiction and movies that the bad guys are often more fun than the good. Think of Jimmy Cagney playing Cody Jarrett in White Heat.
This certainly holds true for John Keller. Keller is the type of reserved, good-natured, nondescript fellow you might find yourself sitting next to during a business flight to Detroit. He'll tell you about his stamp collection, but will not talk much about his business because his business is murdering people for a fee.
But that doesn't mean you wouldn't want to spend some time with him.
HIT PARADE is a wonderful book. Lawrence Block is one of America's greatest mystery writers, winner of the Grand Master Award from the Mystery Writers of America. His private eye novels featuring alcoholic ex-cop Matt Scudder are classics that rank right up there with the work of Raymond Chandler and Ross MacDonald. Keller began as a short story written for Playboy. Block told me in 2003 that he never expected to write another word about Keller; his story seemed complete.
But then a few years went by and he wrote another Keller short story and then many more. HIT MAN collected those stories in 1998, followed by the Keller novel HIT LIST in 2000. This book, HIT PARADE, collects several previously published short stories now linked together to form a Keller novel.
What makes HIT PARADE so much fun is that you can't help but enjoy spending time with Keller, despite his line of work. These are not just wonderfully written crime stories; they are also a fascinating psychological profile of what novelist Jim Thompson once titled "the killer inside me." Keller is an intelligent, ordinary guy who just happens to be capable of extraordinary, often instantaneous, violence.
But he is not some sort of Tony Soprano wannabe wiseguy. "His edge professionally lay in his professionalism," Block tells us. We come to look forward to the calls from his partner in crime, Dot, the nice lady who invites Keller to come visit her in her suburban home for iced tea in the kitchen. Dot took over the business from the old man who hired Keller years ago. She is the one you call if you want somebody --- a business partner, baseball player, romantic rival, your wife or even an aggressive dog --- hit.
But it is all very corporate, very antiseptic. There is talk of "clients" and getting them through "brokers" and "booking agents." Keller is really just part of the corporate downsizing culture. When a big company wants to fire their employees, they bring in an "outplacement" firm to do the dirty work. The guy doing the firing doesn't necessarily enjoy it. But it's his job. It has to be done. The individual's needs must yield to the bottom line needs of the corporation. So too in modern crime.
All great hard-boiled fiction, such as practiced by Dashiell Hammett and Thompson, is subversive at its core. It deals with horrible things: murder, the disruption of the natural order. And Block does the same with his bad man, even while telling enjoyable stories with plenty of plot twists; oftentimes jobs are not what they first seem, and sometimes the client will be amazed at what emerges from the Pandora's box they stupidly paid to have opened.
Keller doesn't get any personal or sexual thrill from killing. It's his job. He is careful, though, and tries not to kill innocent bystanders. But is anybody really innocent, he wonders at one point. As for bystanders, sometimes they cannot be avoided. Keller doesn't need to remind us, but in wars, such as the ones we are now engaged in, the military has a name for bystander deaths: collateral damage. So too in crime.
Keller is the existentialist hit man. While he does not have moral problems with killing, he can't help but wonder if he is a sociopath. But how could he be? For as a child he did not set fires, or torture animals or wet his bed. And while he does not get physically sick when he completes a job, he throws up for days after 9/11.
And therein lies the rub. "He had, after all, lived alone for years and it worked for him. Most of the time, anyway," Block tells us. Keller is also the solitary man, so alienated from his work that he takes refuge in his expensive hobby: collecting stamps. He tells Dot he can't do this work anymore and starts a new retirement fund, which then he promptly spends on stamps. And the hits keep coming. What Keller really needs is to unburden himself and open up to somebody, which he can only do to a certain point with Dot.
But how can a hit man find the human touch? In one story, while driving from New York to a job in Arizona, Keller notices a kid hitchhiking. Block writes:
"Since he was running on cruise control, his foot didn't even move, and the hitchhiker slipped out of sight in the rearview mirror, unaware what a narrow escape he'd just had...Keller could picture the kid, listening wide-eyed to everything Keller had to tell him. He pictured himself, his soul unburdened, grateful to the youth for listening, but compelled by circumstance to cover his tracks. He imagined the car gliding to a stop, imagined the brief struggle, imagined the body left in a roadside ditch, the Camry heading west at a thoughtful three miles an hour over the speed limit."
Block is a brilliant writer because he makes the bad guy good. We enjoy watching Keller elaborately stalk his prey. Ultimately, we are on Keller's side and God forbid he should ever get caught or retire. Block takes us into a world not of black and white or good and evil, but a world of depressing corporate gray. In other words, the modern world. And then, when we least expect it, he does what he did in the paragraph quoted above: he lifts the mask and we see the horror lurking just beneath the surface.
All great mysteries are subversive. They entertain while holding up a mirror to the society they portray. Read everything by Lawrence Block. Read HIT PARADE and enjoy, and be prepared to shiver a bit despite the summer heat.
--- Reviewed by Tom Callahan
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