STEVE CARROLL WRITES

I have   long been a fan of all things espionage-related, but especially the various   book series that flourished in the wake of the popularity of the Bond   movies in   the 60s. I’m not talking A-listers like Matt Helm , Quiller , Modesty Blaise , or   Sam Durrel l here. I’m talking about the books that sincerely   aspired to be   also-rans, decent copies of the original that could be churned out quickly   while the iron was hot to satisfy a marketplace hungry for spy-fi   hijinks. They   had their cinematic equivalents in the realm of cinema as well, with countless   Euro-spy movies made on minuscule budgets with mostly   unknown actors doing   their best 007 impersonations. As with all fads, they ran their course and   mostly fell out of favor, although the best of them were   able to hang around   for a while into the 70s and 80s. I say all of this to highlight how unique it was to have   someone w...

I bought this book on a whim but was slightly reluctant about starting a noir crime thriller with a length of over 400 pages. Noir crime thrillers in my experience are best when they are lean and stripped of padding (like the Parker thrillers by Donald Westlake or the Quarry series by Max Allan Collins). The mistake was mine though in assuming that  Five Decembers  was just a crime thriller, as it is far more than simply that. Five Decembers  is simultaneously an action-packed period-set noir crime thriller, a murder mystery police procedural, a hard-edged unflinching view of war, a tragic love story, a multi-cultural adventure, and an espionage-infused cat and mouse chase around the globe. In a word, this book is genuinely EPIC! It’s 1941 and Honolulu cop Joe McGrady is getting his first big case after five years in the police department, investigating a particularly brutal double murder in which one of t...

The First Quarry  (2008)  by Max Allan Collins Having recently taken the plunge into crime fiction, I was excited to check out the  Quarry  series from prolific author, Max Allan Collins. I have read that Collins’ primary inspiration for Quarry was the legendary  Parker  book series by Richard Stark (aka Donald E. Westlake). There are immediate similarities in regards to ruthless men doing ruthless acts of crime within a specific code of honor, even as they operate well outside of the law.  Though it is the 8th in the series as written, as the title implies,  The First Quarry  details the first mission that our anti-hero protagonist takes on as a young man of 22, recently returned from war in Vietnam. Simply put, Quarry is a hit-man assassin. His mindset is straightforward—if it was acceptable to kill for the government and his country, then he can now kill for pe...