Customer Reviews

Hit and Run

5 star:		(25)
4 star:		(14)
3 star:		(7)
2 star:		(8)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

Keller is a professional hit man. He specializes in paid-to-order death that looks like an accident and has always gotten away without being caught. However, Keller is also a man with a conscience. Not about the people he kills, because that would get in the way of him doing his job. But he dwells on how he spends his life, the people he spends it with, and what life is ultimately all about. That aspect of Keller is the one that I most enjoy spending time with in the books.

HIT AND RUN is veteran mystery/suspense writer Lawrence Block's fourth book about Keller. It's also the first of the four books that's actually a novel. The previous three books were collections of short stories gathered in a loose novelistic style. Block first published the stories in PLAYBOY magazine and other magazines. Block always threw in a few new stories each volume as well.

I love the characters of Keller and Dot, the woman who brokers the services Keller offers to discriminating and wealthy clients. I look forward to the times they sit and discuss the world and their lives after Keller's adventures. Despite the lethal business they are in, Keller and Dot appear like people you could meet on the street and engage in an idle chat that would give you something to think about. Each time I closed a Keller "book" in the past, I could think about different thoughts or revelations that Keller experienced in those stories.

Block took his time writing the stories. I can tell how much he enjoyed exploring the characters and themes he developed over the course of bringing Keller and his assignments to the page. Throughout the books, the character and his situation changed. The relationship with Dot altered too, and the two of them became even closers friends than business partners.

HIT AND RUN changes a lot of things, though. For the first time, Keller's face is in the news for a murder. The kicker is that Keller didn't kill the governor of Iowa. He was framed, and he doesn't even know who did the framing.

The book divides neatly into three acts, though I didn't notice that at the time I read the book. I started on the novel intending to read just a few pages, just enough to close the book on Keller's first kill. Instead, Keller never even gets to whack the guy he hired on to kill. By the end of the first chapter, he's running for his life. Not only are the cops pursuing him, but so are the faceless people he just became the fall guy for.

I read the book from cover to cover. Could not put it down. As I said, the book divides neatly into three acts. The first act is pure adrenaline as Keller doubles back and tries to figure out what to do. Dot is off-line for the first time since forever, and there's not a single other person in the world that Keller can talk to about his career.

Keller makes it back to New York and his apartment in time to see the story about Dot's "accidental" death on the television news. In his apartment, he discovers that someone has ransacked his home and taken his stamp collection. Regular readers of Keller's adventures know that the stamp collection is the one thing that the hit man has allowed himself to care about other than Dot. All the money that Keller once had is also gone - his retirement, etc., because his real name is known to the police and he's a person of interest.

Act two covers a lot of ground. I enjoyed watching Keller trying to get it together, trying to figure out what he was supposed to do since he'd been cut off from his other life. The sincerity and weight Block brings to his character's ruminations are dead-on emotionally. In this time when so many drastic changes occur in a person's life, seeing Keller struggle with the same things is almost cathartic and lends hope.

The relationships Keller builds at this time, not only with others but with himself, are extremely well done. The love story and the resolution of the woman's sick father was well played. All the characters are vivid and believable. Block even takes time to dig into the problems New Orleans (the city where Keller ends up) faces even now.

The third act, even though it's predictable in nature to a degree, revolves around Keller's search for the men that burned him and Dot. It offers some introspection and humorous moments as well, and a lot of tension because I really didn't know how Block was going to bring everything to a close.

HIT AND RUN is a game played by a master. Block put me on the ropes even though I was dead tired that night, and he kept me there. The gentle delineation of character, the effortless plot twists and surprises, and the pared-to-the-bone writing infused me with new energy that kept me turning pages till I reached the final one with a mixture of excitement and sadness.

I'd really recommend reading other Keller "novels" before this one, but you don't have to. But to get all the subtlety Block pulls off with the character and the plot, I think it's better if you have a passing acquaintance with Keller. This is a great book.

Lawrence Block is one of the most well known and highly "decorated" mystery authors of all-time. He has written over fifty books and been named a "GRAND MASTER" of the Mystery Writers of America and is a four-time winner of the prestigious "EDGAR" and "SHAMUS" awards along with numerous international awards. There are several individual series within the author's fifty-plus books, and the most recent series is "KELLER'S GREATEST HITS" of which the fourth and latest episode is "HIT AND RUN".

John Paul Keller, or "Keller" as he is known, mostly to his best friend and business associate "Dot" and a few other people in the world outside of his business life... and his business is killing people for money. After all he is a hit-man. Keller has saved his money over the years, and with Dot's surprising savvy business investments he has accrued quite a nest egg. He has thought of getting out of the "business" for quite awhile, but his one special "indulgence" of a hobby is quite expensive: He collects stamps. Because of his penchant for valuable stamps, every time he says this is going to be his last job; he finds another costly must-have stamp to buy, and it throws off his retirement plans. But this time, the job that Dot sets up for him to "whack" another unknown victim in Iowa, is going to absolutely, un- categorically, unconditionally, be the last one! When Keller arrives in Iowa from his home in New York, something... and everything... feels wrong. He gets the idea he is being set up... but doesn't know for what. Mr. Block's humorous "snappy" dialogue has never been crisper. Keller always uses aliases or no names at all, and it isn't surprising when he uses so many aliases during a caper that it might be handy to have a scorecard. When he meets his contact in Iowa the man says to Keller: "THEY NEVER TOLD ME YOUR NAME,... Keller says: "THEY NEVER TOLD ME YOURS, EITHER." "MEANING LET'S KEEP IT THAT WAY? FAIR ENOUGH." He is registered in the hotel under the name Leroy Montrose, and he rents a car at Hertz under the name of Holden Blankenship.

Perhaps the author's greatest strength, is in the machine-gun like pace of the parenthetical humor and insight that he imbibes the main character with throughout this first rate saga. Keller stops by a stamp shop and he impresses the owner with the fact that he pulls his own "tongs" out of his pocket. Keller laments to himself that with the current airport security that he's afraid to carry his stamp "tongs" on a plane. "If you were going to get on an airplane, some clown at Security would confiscate them. Imagine a terrorist with a pair of stamp "tongs". Why, he could grab the flight attendant and threaten to pluck her eyebrows." While he is at the stamp shop there is an announcement that John Tatum Longford the first black Governor of Ohio was assassinated while visiting Iowa. When Keller gets back to his room he turns on CNN and as they report the assassination, all of a sudden he sees his picture on the screen identifying him as the killer. And that leads to Keller-aka-Leroy-aka-Holden to go on the lam and try to get himself safely back home to New York. What follows are stolen cars, switched license plates, murders, more aliases, sleeping in cars, a valuable Homer Simpson hat, and as Keller himself sadly states: "He'd suffered the two greatest losses of his life in the course of a single day. His best friend was killed and his stamp collection was stolen."

Don't worry, I would never give anything away that would ruin the story for you. The author never lets go of the reader's interest and some of his dialogue is so smooth and finely tuned it should be taught in colleges and universities. And we even have a good dose of revenge. Lawrence Block is still at the top of his game and I wish he would publish books more often. One real-time probably-not-meant-to-be-humorous-fact in the book, is even though this story is set in current time, when the protagonist gets gas for his car while on the lam... THE PRICE IS $2.50 PER GALLON!!??

There is an 800-pound elephant in the room this political season, and it makes people so queasy they don't want to talk or even think about it. But it's impossible to ignore since this year marks the 40th anniversary of the assassinations of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Senator Robert F. Kennedy.

Great fiction reflects the time in which it is written. And great fiction is fearless. Richard Condon wrote a novel called THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE, which became a classic film in 1962. The movie was pulled from public viewing for 25 years after the murder of President John F. Kennedy. But no sane person would say that Condon and director John Frankenheimer's fiction had anything to do with the tragic events in Dallas.

Now in 2008, veteran mystery writer Lawrence Block has written a novel in which his hit man, Keller, is in Des Moines, Iowa, on assignment when the African American governor of Ohio, John Tatum Longford, is assassinated while exploring a run for the White House. And Keller has been fit for the frame. Of course, this book was written months before Senator Barack Obama began his meteoric rise to the Democratic presidential nomination.

HIT AND RUN is not a political thriller. After it happens, the assassination and its political or social significance is barely mentioned. That is not what the book is about. This is a noir story about the innocent man trapped. Yet the paranoia that has been present in the American psyche since those dark days of Dallas and Memphis and the pantry of the Ambassador Hotel lingers faintly in the background here, like a discordant jazz soundtrack from a classic film noir.

For five decades, Block has been writing mysteries and is one of the greatest writers in the history of American letters to work in this genre. Whether in the dark novels of alcoholic PI Matthew Scudder or the lighter books involving burglar Bernie Rhodenbarr, Block has consistently proven he deserves his place in the pantheon of great American mystery writers alongside Ed McBain, Elmore Leonard, Donald Westlake and Robert B. Parker.

So those of us who are fans of Block expect good, extremely well-written books. But by page 28 it becomes apparent that HIT AND RUN is not merely a good book but a great book in the noir tradition. And then it does something truly amazing: it transcends that dark tradition to become a novel of redemption and hope.

Hit man John Paul Keller was first introduced to us in a Playboy short story many years ago. Like a corporate downsizing consultant, he has an unpleasant job to do. He does it very well but does not particularly enjoy killing people. Keller does evil work but is actually a nice, apparently normal guy who readers can't help but root for.

Keller is now looking forward to retirement with his beloved stamp collecting hobby when he reluctantly agrees to "the last job." You know trouble will ensue when something is the last job. And it does. He immediately senses danger when he is escorted around Des Moines by a mystery man working for somebody named "Al." But Keller is always careful where he leaves his prints.

Then the assassination occurs and Keller wonders, "If you wanted to frame someone for murder, why not pick a murderer? Hire him to kill some nonentity, and time it so that he's in the right place at the right time, and then frame him for the real killing, the important killing." Shades of our collective paranoia.

Sure enough, Keller's face is soon on every TV channel 24/7. "He was on his own," Block simply writes. Now the most wanted man in America, the hit man who didn't make a hit, is stuck with $200 in cash and a rented car with stolen plates. He has nobody he can trust and must make the 1,000-mile dash home to safety in New York City. Throughout his career, Keller has worked hard to keep his home city separate from his professional life. Initially he convinces himself he will be fine once he makes it home.

But about halfway through his journey east, the dark truth sets in. Block writes with concrete simplicity: "It was over, he saw now... But however much people both in and out of the city might prefer to think otherwise, New York was part of America. New Yorkers watched the same newscasts and read the same newspaper stories... He'd come as far as he had in life by staying out of the spotlight, and now he was in it and that was the end of it... The end of John Paul Keller."

Block here has worked a modern story out of two classic noir themes: the Trapped Man made famous by Cornell Woolrich and the Wrong Man worked to perfection by Alfred Hitchcock. We follow Keller on the run as he travels a hundred miles at a time with no destination, his days spent hiding in movie theaters and nights spent in little motels, sleeping occasionally on sheets recently abandoned by adulterous couples, constantly waiting to be recognized or for his money to run out, whichever comes first.

If this were a typical noir story, we would follow Keller down that Lost Highway until the road inevitably ends in The Big Sleep. But Block is too good a writer to take the easy way out. And let's face it, Keller might be a bad man, but he's our bad guy. We like him despite what he does as only a mother can. After all, he makes sure to leave his fast food wrappers in the trash cans when finished and always has time to rescue a damsel in distress.

This is when HIT AND RUN takes a few incredible twists that I will leave for you to discover and enjoy. Suffice to say the Block manages to inject a note of redemption, hope and love into a really dark story. And while the darkness and paranoia are real and cannot be denied, perhaps at the end of the day, real change is still possible for a hit man and the rest of us.

Lawrence Block has written a novel that transcends the mystery genre and manages to be topical without being sensational. It is one of the greatest accomplishments of his long storied career.

--- Reviewed by Tom Callahan

Lawrence Block has a knack for writing protagonists saddled with an immoral bump. Me, I'm very partial to the housebreaking Bernie Rhodenbarr who is featured in Block's delightfully lighthearted BURGLAR WHO... series. And John Paul Keller, impersonal professional hit man, he makes for a compelling creature himself. But while Bernie is a criminal who at least manages to solve crime and help nab other criminals - mostly for self-preservation, because, else, it'd be Bernie behind bars - Keller, on the other hand, doesn't do as much for society. I guess the only redeeming qualities Keller demonstrates during his contract killings are that it's never personal and that he doesn't take pleasure in his actions. It's strictly business. It's a bit worrying that I find him so likable, and I don't think it's simply because the guy is an avid stamp collector...

Having finally made enough money to retire on, Keller still can't pass up one last assignment. But this one, from the get-go, has been giving off bad vibes. But Keller goes thru with it anyway. Sent to Des Moines, Iowa and forced to linger for days as he awaits the go-ahead to off his target, Keller is browsing in a stamp dealer's store when the breaking news blares out over the radio. A popular governor has just been assassinated in Iowa - and now alarms really begin to go off in Keller. And, in fact, it's not too long before Keller is watching the killer's face broadcasted over the television. His face.

Keller is immediately forced to go on the run, stuck with driving a rented Sentra and with an alarmingly dwindling cash flow (most of his money went to purchasing stamps in that store). What's worse, his contract agent and sole confidante, Dot, won't answer his calls. Now the object of a nationwide manhunt, it's only a matter of time before his vehicle is tracked down. And he has to get from Iowa to his home city of New York, where Keller believes safety awaits. But, on this, he's very wrong.

This is the fourth volume featuring Keller, after Hit Man (John Keller Mysteries), Hit List (John Keller Mysteries), and Hit Parade, all three of which either come off as a short story collection or formatted as episodic adventures with a recurring theme. I haven't read a bad book by Lawrence Block yet, and this trend keeps on. HIT AND RUN regales us with more of John Keller's exploits, professionaly and philatelically. That Lawrence Block is a master storyteller is again evidenced by his making this particular anti-hero so disturbingly damned sympathetic. Keller is engaging enough that I find myself excusing or overlooking his more reprehensible actions. Partly, it's because Keller's "hits" seem to take place off-camera, thus lessening that impact. Partly, it's because there are bits of humanity, an appealing yearning, lurking in Keller's sociopathic recesses. Not to mention, dude can be whimsical and funny. When not engaged in murdeours deeds, Keller comes off as an unassuming normal bloke. For a while now, he's been pining for retirement, and what could be more "normal" than that, especially to us old fogies? Only the need to fund his stamp collecting drives him to press on with this career.

Note that HIT AND RUN isn't packed with wall-to-wall thrills. Seems as if half the pages is devoted to Keller merely driving from state to state, staying under the radar. Kinda like a travelogue for fugitives from justice. Yet, somehow, the pace of the story comes off as both taut and leisurely. I still felt that sense of anticipation one gets with a good book. It's not only that the innocent-on-the-lam premise is always a can't-miss hook, but also that Block allows us to get into Keller's thought processes. In his efforts to stay out of harm's way Keller constantly preaches caution to himself, to the point where he had me edgy, expecting his pursuers to pop out of the next page. But, even as I marvelled at Keller's professionalism, I coudn't help but wish that he's more reckless and less resourceful because I would've loved to have seen him placed in more jeopardy. But Keller is the consummate professional. So, even when he finally deals out revenge on those who set him up, it's still not personal.

I found myself drawn into Keller's routine of scurrying from town to town, forced to drive thru fast-food joints for grub and to pass the day by sneaking in and out of movie theaters. At one point, he finds himself waiting for a hotel room to be vacated by illicit trysters just so he could sneak in after to grab a good forty winks. One humorous touch has Keller donning a Homer Simpson cap as a disguise (it's also a tad pathetic). All this doesn't sound exciting, I know, but not for nothing is Lawrence Block a literary Grand Master, because he did the job and I got all caught up.

There seems to be an elegiac feel to this, as Keller ventures from aimless running to becoming resigned to his career being a thing of the past. There is one instance in New Orleans in which he foregoes his own strict rules and places himself in unnecessary peril. But this one rash act would have a life-changing effect on him, opening his eyes to other possibilities. In an interview Block has already stated that All The Flowers Are Dying (Large Print) is the last Matthew Scudder story. The way HIT AND RUN ends, I get the sense that Block intends to also put closure to his hit man's story. I hope I'm wrong, but if this is the last we hear of John Keller, then it's a good way to go out.

And, if you're not done feeling a bit guilty about enjoying reading of immoral, murdering protagonists, then author Jeff Lindsay's your next huckleberry. I've really liked his darkly lyrical thrillers about Dexter Morgan, a compulsive serial killer who preys on other serial killers. I get the feeling, though, that the businesslike John Keller probably wouldn't approve of Dexter.

Imagine a world where everything unexpectedly moves in reverse: Doing your job could send you to jail; going home may mean meeting a hit man who is out to get you; instead of having money and credit, you have to steal to survive; any stranger can be a lethal threat; your most precious possessions are gone forever; and your best friend is dead. Lawrence Block uses that concept to humanize hit man John Keller and to provide you with lots of sociopathic humor about the normally unflappable killer.

The first half of this book amused me more than any other section in the earlier books in the series. I think you'll like it. I also think you'll like it more if you've read the earlier books in the series.

The second half wasn't nearly so much fun, but except for one lengthy sequence about a golf course it moved along pretty well in typical fashion for a Keller story.

I came away from the book with lots of questions about what might come next in Keller's life. When that happens, I know a book has been well written. I can hardly wait for the next book in the series.

Well done, Mr. Block!

This appears to be the final novel we will get from Larry Block about the world's nicest hit man, John Paul Keller. It must have been tough for the author to lead Keller into retirement. Here he gives it a great try, but the final result seems just a little flat, compared to the sustained excitement of the other Keller entries. Block, over the years, made us care for this hired assassin, and not just care, but root for him. Keller took the lives of strangers, but for the most part, they were "bad" people. In each novel, Keller goes on a dishonorable mission and somehow behaves only honorably, or at worst, when he dispatches a person who does not seem to deserve it, we understand the necessity for him to do the act. In this one, we learn a lot about cross-country escapes on a budget, and Keller finds someone to love and love him back, and we grieve for Keller's only friend until an unexpected possible happy ending shows up. Yet the happy ending does seem contrived, and the dispatching of Keller's new arch-enemy is undramatic. If you loved the prior entries in this series, you will want to read this one. If you are not familiar with this character, go back and read the earlier volumes first.

This is the best Keller yet! Block's portrayal of a sympathetic hitman is superb. He manages to make the protagonist's occupation secondary to the character, one the reader can empathize with. I've read and own all the Keller books, but Hit and Run is by far the most exciting of the four books, with twists and turns that leave the reader breathless. And a most satisfying ending! It's one of those books you'll wish you were just starting when you finish the last page. But don't peek! Enjoy the ride!

Hit List (John Keller Mysteries)
The latest Keller novel by Lawrence Block is a must read for long term fans of Keller/Block! If you're just being introduced to Keller, Block's quiet and moral hit man, I recommend starting with the first Keller novel and get to know him through Block's timeline While the book certainly stands out on its own; it is fun to read Keller's first exploits right up until Hit and Run.

This is a beautifully-begun book which rushes to the end like Lawrence Block was just tired of the Keller Concept. I enjoyed the first 3/4 very much and then felt the author lost control, or didn't plan ahead, or was simply writing to fulfill a contract. A fair read, but not a fitting closer to the Hitman series. Definitely not recommended for those who haven't read the previous books.

This is the most cohesive of the Keller books, less episodic and more of a page-turner. There was a point in the book where I had NO IDEA where Block was going with the story, which makes it a much different Keller book. I would call this a MUST READ for Keller fans, though I wonder if this will be the last Keller story.(I'm not going to spoil it, you'll have to read the book.)