Killing the blues

>> A back-to-work Hit List

by JULIET WATERS

A friend called me up last week overwhelmed by the January back-to-work blues, or as they should probably be called, the greys. Unable to face a hyper-mundane to-do list, and nothing to look forward to except February, she wanted to escape into a good mystery thriller. I said I'd get back to her.

I was immersed in Hit List, Lawrence Block's followup to Hit Man, an entertaining sort of neo-Hitchcock mood piece about a man who's getting weary of his job. It seemed appropriate to the season, but for some reason I couldn't yet put my finger on it--I was hesitant to recommend it.

John Keller, who prefers to be called Keller, is a bit of a loner, but in a kind of wistful, sexy way. If Gene Hackman were about 25 years younger, Keller would be the perfect role. An ordinary guy with a bit of an edge, a passionate stamp collector who's lucky with money and women. He's a generous tipper and a conscientious citizen who shows up for jury duty when he's summoned.

The only thing different about Keller is that he kills people. Anonymity--his capacity to be likable, but not memorable--is his greatest talent as a professional hit man. To be able to strike up a conversation with anyone, but to evade bonding. To be deeply violent, yet remain uncharismatic. Like the stamps he collects, he is unique, but to the masses, totally insignificant.

His only confidant is Dot, a middle-aged chatty dispatcher. Dot takes the orders from clients, instructs Keller on where to go, who to hit and how. Keller lives his life like a high-priced courier, hopping a plane ever few months to deliver his terrible package to some unsuspecting recipient.

"I envy you," says a liaison sent by one of Keller's clients, who commits the insensitive mistake of showing Keller a picture of the hit surrounded by his loving family. "In and out with no hassles, no complications, no dealing with the same assholes day in and day out." Thinks Keller: "You dealt with different ones every time. Was that supposed to be better?"

The sick charm of Keller is that he really does seem like a normal everyday person. As he starts to develop what seems like a conscience, you inevitably like him. It pains him to kill a man who has healthy, decent children. He starts to admire one of his hits and so ends up killing the client instead. He begins to question his raison d'être when an amateur palm reader tells him he has "murderer's thumb." But he's forced to snap out of his introspective cerebral mood when it becomes increasingly obvious that he's become the target of another hit man.

What hooked me was the intriguing enigma of Keller's character. What kept me reading was how the novel worked as such a creepy metaphor for contemporary America. Why couldn't the same Joe Average who crunched the numbers that justified laying off a 1,000 employees, just as "naturally" destroy lives as a killer for hire? With money such a core value in America, one hardly feels the need to stop turning pages to contemplate Keller's motives. He kills because it makes him comfortable economically. The irony of Hit List is that relative to a lot of the soulless, depressing jobs people do in a consumer society, assassination really can seem like nice work if you can get it.

Where Hit List lost me is with the sudden introduction of a paranormal subplot. Palm readers, astrologers, inexplicable events suddenly appear to convince us that murdering isn't just Keller's job, it's his destiny. Block takes up the challenge of making murder seem ordinary. Then just as we start to want to know more about what really makes Keller tick, the book takes a facile turn. And the author makes a quick escape.



Hit List by Lawrence Block, Harper Collins, hc, 272pp, $37.95