Hit List

I just read Lawrence Block's "Hit Man" collection of short stories two weeks ago and really enjoyed it. I expected this story (second in the series) to be equally entertaining but it fell far short. I have to believe that this novel was constructed/expanded out of a couple short stories because each chapter is repeating elements of the prior chapter(s) like maybe we had forgotten them in a few pages. There is just too much recapping and padding in here to qualify as a good read. The interesting story elements (such as one involving a painter) were overshadowed by long weak sections. The story starts off very slow on top of it all but a twist to this wherein the hunter might be the hunted adds a little interest. It just seems like a poorly written sloppy fix-up novel. I'll give the next book a try sometime as I like the character "Keller" in here and the first book of stories was quite entertaining.

The astrologer subplot is a bit wonky and there's too many coincidences making everything unreal and I thought the strength of the character was that he was boring and the murders were realistic. OK, not realistic in a sense that it could happen but mundane.

I enjoyed these short stories immensely. Although, I guess they are more episodic than entirely separate.

Block's anti-hero is a rather boring blend into the crowd hit man. He is very normal, except he kills people. And he is likable, and yet - he kills people for hire and does it with about as much emotional angst as someone might have over firing an employee. He's not a sociopath, he's a business man.

Block does an excellent job of making Keller both entirely normal and likeable with homey descriptions of his life between jobs, his daily activities, his hobbies and girlfriends. It's all almost boring and yet very compelling. (which is the mark of a good writer, in my opinion) And then he startles us out of our complacence with Keller killing people. More or less innocent people are killed.

The strongest supporting character is Dot, the assistant to the old man, who gives Keller his jobs. She is tough and yet a bit motherly with lots of snark in her commentary, to which Keller plays the straight man.

It is not particularly realistic. I found myself aware that Keller had a very casual attitude about evidence, but the characters hold it together and so I never quite lost my suspension of disbelief.

Short stories kill my taste for detective series far quicker than reading, say, the whole Nero Wolfe corpus ever did. I still love Lawrence Block's stamp-collecting hitman Keller, but grew tired of the 'formula' pretty quick with this second instalment. The long 'quirky' conversations with his agent Dot, where one or both go off on a tangent, soon lost their charm in particular. Still, good fun and easy to read while travelling to and from work.

It is what you'd expect if you read Hit Man: it's fast and easy to read, the characters are engaging and interesting and the morals are not stogged down your throat.The only negatives are that the segue between "scenes" is a bit choppier than in Hit Man (or Hit and Run which were both excellent reads) and there is a bit too much coverage of Keller's stamp collecting hobby. Oh, and there is some "supernatural" stuff near the 2/3 mark that didn't really seem to fit Keller's character.