Killing Quarry

Author’s Note

Despite its period setting, Killing Quarry is not exactly an historical novel, and does not intend to suggest actual people or events, other than passing references to newsmakers and celebrities.

While the Lake Geneva Playboy Club Hotel, which opened in 1968 and was hugely successful for years, did close down in the early 1980s, it was not re-opened by Chicago-based organized crime interests — my suggestion of that in this novel is, like the rest of it, wholly fictional. Also, the geography of the actual facility is not strictly as it is depicted here. Much remodeled and updated, the former Playboy Club Hotel re-opened in 1994 as the Grand Geneva Resort and Spa, a highly regarded AAA Four-Diamond resort.

Information about the Cayman Islands and their banking system was culled from a number of Internet sources, as were any other number of topics from popular music to fashion, from automobiles to Solo cups. I lived through the 1970s and ’80s, but based upon how frequently I have to research just about everything about those years, I was definitely not paying attention.

As readers who have followed the Quarry novels know, the narratives fall into several categories, the two major ones being Quarry’s time as a hitman and Quarry’s years hiring out his services to the targets of other hitmen. This novel is the last, chronologically, of the second group of novels; this is not to say other “list” narratives may not yet appear. Since returning to the character in The Last Quarry (2006), I have been jumping around in the continuity — the original four books were written in the ’70s with another in 1987 — staying (usually) in a ’70s/’80s time frame, filling in the blanks as they occur to me.

Thus a series that began as contemporary has, like its author, become a period piece.

This novel is specifically a sequel to Quarry’s Deal (originally titled The Dealer), first published in 1976. That novel, with an afterword by me, is available in a new edition from Hard Case Crime. By the way, I never anticipated writing a sequel to a novel I wrote 43 years ago.

My thanks to HCC editor Charles Ardai for his continued good will and support; my friend and agent Dominick Abel; and of course my wife, writer Barbara Collins, my first reader/editor, who provided vital input during the writing of this novel.