Hit Man by Lawrence Block

collection of linked short stories first published in book form 1998

this story:

Keller on Horseback

Keller ordered a Coors at the bar. On the jukebox, Barbara Mandrell sang a song about cheating. When she was done, a duo he didn’t recognize sang a song about cheating. Then came Hank Williams’s oldie, “Your Cheatin’ Heart.” A subtle pattern was beginning to emerge.

“I love this song,” the blonde said. A different blonde, not the perky young thing from the front desk. This woman was taller, older, and fuller-figured. She wore a skirt and a sort of cowgirl blouse with piping and embroidery on it.

“Old Hank,” Keller said, to say something.

“I’m June.”

“Call me Tex.”

“Tex!” Her laughter came in a sort of yelp. “When did anybody ever call you Tex, tell me that?”

“Well, nobody has,” he admitted, “but that’s not to say they never will.”

commentary: This might be the perfect short story. It is certainly the only one I have ever read that seems to be composed of equal parts Country & Western song and Greek tragedy: it embodies both of those genres.

Everything had happened exactly the way it had had to happen. Encountering June in the Meet ’n’ Cheat, running into Hobie at the Burnout Bar. He could no more have avoided those meetings than he could have kept himself from buying the paperback western novel that had set the tone for everything that followed.

Lawrence Block is a giant of crime-writing, he seems incapable of writing a bad book. I’m not usually a fan of short stories but this book could almost convert me. Keller, the protagonist, is a hit man: a paid professional killer who commits murders to order. By the end of the book I was half in love with him, and entirely forgiving of his minor sins, and  I was rooting for him throughout. That is quite an achievement…

The stories are also very funny:

There was a tavern across the street, a perfect vantage point, but one look inside made it clear to Keller that he couldn’t spend time there without calling attention to himself, not unless he first got rid of his tie and jacket and spent twenty minutes rolling around in the gutter.

“Keller, I’ve been keeping your secrets just about as long as you’ve had secrets to keep. And you’re asking me—”  

“I wasn’t exactly asking you. What do they call it when you don’t really expect an answer?"   

“Prayer,” she said.  

“Rhetorical,” he said.

The individual stories, which do definitely have an overall arc, appeared separately in magazines such as Playboy. The whole effect is of something much longer ago than 1998, partly because of the revolution in communications since they were first published: information is hard to come by, phone calls and messages are problematic, but on the other hand Keller can be off-grid, travelling around in the USA leaving no fingerprints (metaphoric or real) and paying cash while giving a false name.

But none of that matters. You can never tell where the stories are going: there might be a long disquisition on stamp-collecting (most informative), a quote from Dr Johnson, or a joke about corsets from Corsica. The stories enthralled me. Lawrence Block completely removed the disapproval I would certainly have for a contract killer in real life…

The Western shirts are from a Sears catalogue.