The First Quarry by Max Allan Collins

My rating: 1 of 5 stars

All these great reviews in Goodreads and I’m downgrading this novel. I found this book far below ‘The Last Quarry’. To me, the Quarry character did not seem the same to me.

I had real trouble swallowing this twenty something doing much that is written in this book. Collins writes this character too smooth, too willing to kill, too comfortable being holed up for days. Collins wrote this book as if this was Quarry’s first case, but Quarry came off, to me, as a seasoned professional. He seems to make no mistakes.

That includes with the women involved. The interaction of amateur Quarry and two women characters is the most unbelievable part and comes off amateurish for an author.

Quarry dispatches quite a number of people with no clever or fantastic scheme. Quarry just aims and fires. Hunh? The other characters are indicated as experienced. Are all of them, from various aspects of life, that slow and stupid? Of is this something worse involving writer Collins?

The author shirks off the never ending convenience of Quarry’s project as the setting being too small and everyone runs into each other. Sheesh! I might forgive this if the author hadn’t written scores of other stories.

I determined this book is a great example of an author’s lazy writing. The characters were otherwise pretty one sided. The setting poorly described. The time period is more than well noted, but only involving entertainment. As mentioned, Quarry came across as a different character than in ‘The Last Quarry’. All of the rest of the books I’ve read by Collins are head and shoulders better than this.

A likely reason why the writing of this book stood out so poorly to me is because I had just finished reading of Edna Ferber, Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley, Scott Fitzgerald, etc., and now also reading more Benchley. Collins writing is incomparable to any of them involving this book.

Bottom line: I do not recommend this book. 2 of 10.

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Above are the last 9 books I read through November and December. I went to simpler fiction to get to the 52 number. Quite different from the start of the year where the bulk of my reading was non-fiction. I’m aiming for 55 in 2010. Let’s see if I can make it.