Metro Pulse/Pulp/Lawrence Block

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Lawrence Block and the zen of the professional assassin

by Dale Bailey

Midway through Lawrence Block's Hit Man, Keller, the paid assassin of the title, finds himself pondering his career choice. "I remember in high school," he confides to his dog. "There was this test, questions like would you rather pull weeds or sell cabbages or teach needlepoint, and I couldn't finish the test. Every question was utterly baffling. And then I woke up one day and realized I had a career, and it consisted of taking people out." This oddball confession captures the central conceit of Hit Man and its recent sequel, Hit List: the hired killer as tragicomic everyman, complete with existential crisis.

In a career including more than 50 books and four recurring heroes, Block has mastered the structure of the series mystery. His Matthew Scudder novels, for example, present both hardboiled noir in the manner of Dashiell Hammett and a multi-novel character arc charting Scudder's recovery from alcoholism and despair. In the process, Scudder acquires a diverse supporting cast, including a live-in lover and a streetwise surrogate child. And while making Scudder a family man weakens the gritty urban atmosphere, it also has its compensations: each fresh installment is a visit with old friends, and more than half the pleasure comes from checking on developments in their personal lives.

Turning Keller into such a franchise character, however, presents problems, not least among them the nature of the man's work. As his name suggests, Keller is a killer, and killers, however fascinating, don't make the most sympathetic heroes. Additionally, Keller's vocation requires him to live a secret life—a life that necessarily excludes the recurring secondary characters who usually animate such a series. Block cheats on this point with Dot, the matronly underworld connection who orchestrates Keller's hits, but otherwise Keller's supporting players tend to end up six feet under.

Yet Keller himself remains engaging. In part, this is because Block keeps the action off-stage. We see Keller stalk his victims and solve the sometimes thorny logistical problems of carrying out the hit, but in most cases Block wisely cuts away from the murders, relegating the details to post-mortem conversations with Dot.

Perhaps more important, Block places Keller in a moral context. In the series of linked stories that comprise Hit Man, Keller constantly wrestles with the ethical dimensions of his vocation. In some cases, as when he takes out a double murderer, there's a cosmic justice to his actions. In others, as in his encounter with a corrupt bureaucrat, Keller is morally superior to those who live more conventional lives. And in Hit List, when he becomes the target of a rival professional, Keller learns more than he ever wants to know about being in the crosshairs of a hired killer.

Both books feature these complex moral reversals. Privately, Keller is something of a saint, courtly, gentle, and open-hearted. Called for jury duty, he serves with enthusiasm. Co-opted by a clandestine wing of the government (or so he believes), he eliminates enemies of the state with patriotic fervor. Block consistently wrings serio-comic irony from similar situational paradoxes: Keller adopts a dog from the animal shelter, Keller takes in a homeless twentysomething, Keller saves the drowning grandson of a man he's been hired to kill.

Keller also longs to solve the mystery of his own character. Over the course of the two novels, he explores his past with a therapist, his karma with a new-age lover, his destiny with a professional astrologer. Like the reader, he is both fascinated and repelled by the contradiction at the heart of his personality, and his quest for personal understanding is rendered still more ironic by the fact that he almost inevitably divulges too much and is forced to kill the very people he reaches out to. Characters who would become recurring players in any other series wind up on ice in this one, and it's a mark of Block's dexterity that this technical challenge becomes central to his theme. Keller's problem is nothing less than a scale model of the human condition—the quest for meaningful connections—and the fact that we too often share his frustration lends pathos to his inevitable isolation.

"Living alone is what I'm good at," Keller tells Dot, but it's clear he wishes it could be otherwise. And when he takes up stamp-collecting to fill the empty weeks between jobs, we can't help recognizing the irony of the hobby: Keller has no one to write.

Fortunately, writing's not a problem for Block. In fact, with Hit Man and Hit List, he's a little like Keller himself. The ironies cut with a razor's edge and Block is a consummate professional. Fast and efficient, he delivers good value on the dollar.