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Type of bind: Mass Market Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN num: 9780380725410
ISBN number: 038072541X
Label: HarperTorch
Manufacturer: HarperTorch
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 352
Printing Date: February 01, 1999
Publishing house: HarperTorch
Release Date: February 01, 1999
Sale Popularity Level: 184918
Studio: HarperTorch
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Editor's Notes and Comments:
Product Description:
Keller is your basic urban Lonely Guy.He makes a decent wage, lives in a nice apartment.Works the crossword puzzle. Watches a little TV. Until the phone rings and he packs a suitcase, gets on a plane, flies halfway across the country...and kills somebody. It's a living. But is it a life? Keller's not sure. He goes to a shrink, but it doesn't work out the way he planned. He gets a dog, he gets a girlfriend. He gets along.
Amazon.com Review:
A man known only as Keller is thinking about Samuel Johnson's famous quote that ''patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel'... If you looked at it objectively, he had to admit, then he was probably a scoundrel himself. He didn't feel much like a scoundrel. He felt like your basic New York single guy, living alone, eating out or bringing home takeout, schlepping his wash to the Laundromat, doing the Times crossword with his morning coffee... There were eight million stories in the naked city, most of them not very interesting, and his was one of them. Except that every once in a while he got a phone call from a man in White Plains. And packed a bag and caught a plane and killed somebody. Hard to argue the point. Man behaves like that, he's a scoundrel. Case closed.' But Lawrence Block is such a delightfully subtle writer, one of the true masters of the mystery genre, that the case is far from closed. In this beautifully linked collection of short stories, we gradually put together such a complete picture of Keller that we don't so much forgive him his occupation as consider it just one more part of his humanity. After watching Keller take on cases that baffle and anger him into actions that fellow members of his hit-man union might well call unprofessional, we're eager to join him as he goes through a spectacularly unsuccessful analysis and gets fooled by a devious intelligence agent. We miss the dog he acquires and loses, along with its attractive walker. Like Richard Stark's Parker, Keller makes us think the unthinkable about criminals: that they might be the guys subsequent door--or even us, under different pressures. For a small selection of the many Blocks in paperback, try Coward's Kiss, A Long Line of Dead Men, The Sins of the Fathers, Such Men Are Dangerous, and especially When the Sacred Ginmill Closes.
User popularity level:
Rated by buyers 
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How this book gets so highly rated is beyond me. While I wasn't expecting literature, I expect a thriller to, well, thrill. No story, no action, no plot and flat, banal characters of little interest. Dialogue too sketchy to fill a Walker-Texas Ranger episode. Other than that, the pointless descriptions of the main character's imaginary conversations with his dog are real page turners--in the sense that you flip pages to skip those sections. This book has no tension, no drama, no conflicts of any kind. Any Jane Austin book is more pulse-pounding than this. The only mystery about it is why anyone would waste their time.
Rated by buyers -
The contract killer was really brought to the apex of his literary career in THE DAY OF THE JACKAL, the novel by Frederick Forsyth in which the hired killer is paid to knock off Charles de Gaulle. Since then, our literary conception of the professional who has chosen this career path is of the cool, suave, international ladies man, with fine tastes and an exciting life. Then comes Lawrence Block to put dull back into contract killing.
This is not an insult to the book at all. HIT MAN is actually, if not up to high literary standards, really quite readable and enjoyable. Rather, the dullness is a reflection of the killer himself. Keller, far from mingling at high stakes blackjack tables or carousing at the most exclusive nightclubs, is most happy when upgrading his stamp collection. Far from seeming cold and uncaring, he actually seems like a decent enough chap - when one is not reminded that he kills people for a living.
The strength of HIT MAN is that Lawrence Block does not try to extend the character into a full length book. This collection of short stories allows us to see Keller in action as well as in his home environment, but without necessitating a fuller character development that may stretch a reader's attention span. I would not recommend this book to anyone seeking intellectual stimulation. But for someone looking for some short mind candy to kill the spare moments here and there? Yeah, I would recommend it to him.
Rated by buyers 
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This is not a very good book. It don't have a mistery to be solved, it don't have a plot that take us awake to the last pages. But it have a great writer beyond it. And every time that Lawrence Block writes a book you can believe it will entertain you. It's amazing how he can make a killer such a good character. Sometimes the book becomes dark and you have to stop reading and take a time, because of the way Keller (the killer) faces the death of his targets and how he doesn't feel a thing when it happens for him to kill the wrong ones.
It's definitely not my king of book, but as an unconditional Block books reader, I recommend this one.
Rated by buyers -
Lawrence Block's Hit Man is an easy and relatively entertaining read. It feels less like a novel and more like a collection of short stories. This isn't surprising, considering Wikipedia states the original format the protagonist, Keller, appeared in was Playboy in the 90's. Each chapter could be taken on its own as they are neatly divided and feature little overlap besides the occasional mention of Keller's father and his childhood pet, a dog named Soldier.
The story had a few funny moments and generally interesting situations, which were interesting to follow along but always seemed to wrap up a bit too quickly. I also enjoyed the realism of Hit Man - the fact that Keller isn't a top-notch shot, that he gets heartburn from good brandy, and that he takes the easy way out instead of the explosive, guns-blazing, Hollywood way.
Keller himself was not a terribly interesting character but nonetheless readable. Some things in the story really detracted from the quality of the overall work, the most prominent example being the patronizing explanation that Keller = Killer if you just swap a vowel. His sadness at the pet shop and the zoo, along with the attachment to Nelson the dog were also peculiar. Keller seems to be on track to something normal and dare I say meaningful with the pet and the girlfriend but anticlimatically informs us that he let them slip away as quickly as they arrived. It seems strange that Lawrence Block included them at all. Whereas I could see Keller as a conflicted, possibly even emotional wreck of man - he just remains in the awkward, overly polite stage of friendship with the reader. Whatever moments of feeling and sympathy he tries to garner seem melodramatic and thrown in just to vary the predicatble pattern of call, flight, drive, plan, kill. Overall, Lawrence Block's Hit Man is a quick, mildly entertaining but ultimately forgettable read.
Rated by buyers -
I enjoyed Hit Man despite the fact that it lacks the basic elements that make a novel a novel, notably a major conflict, rising action, a climax... some semblance of a plot. Hit Man reads like a collection of short stories (which is apparently what its original format was) but that isn't a terrible thing. They're pretty entertaining short stories.
Since this is a novel without a plot, one might think it's a character study, but that would be an overstatement. Block doesn't offer much insight into the mind and motivation of the killer named Keller. In fact, Keller doesn't change at all as a result of the events in the novel. He doesn't evolve or develop a new perspective or have an epiphany or anything remotely similar. He's basically the same guy at the end of the novel as he was in the beginning.
As a character, Keller is a mass of contradictions. In some instances he seems concerned about justice, going so far as to kill the person who hired him rather than killing the likeable man he was hired to kill. In another instance he doesn't seem the least bit concerned when an innocent couple is inadvertently murdered. He feels badly for dogs confined in cages but has no trouble murdering dozens of people. These contradictions are presumably intended to give the character depth (he isn't a predictable stereo-type) but that isn't much substitute for genuine character development.
The appeal of Hit Man is rooted in its amusing premise (that Keller is just a regular guy with an unusual job). Block writes snappy, entertaining dialogue and he makes Keller, a mass murderer for hire, a pretty likeable guy. Ultimately, it is the improbable likeability of Keller that makes this novel a pleasure to read. It would have been nice if Block had gone to the trouble to develop a plot so that Keller had more to do than buy a dog, collect stamps, go to the movies, and kill a few people.
If you're looking for mystery - you won't find it here. If you're looking for suspense - it's not here either. If you're looking for an insiders glimpse into the mind of a hired killer - you won't find that either. In fact, you won't even find a plot.
What you will find is a likeable character, snappy dialogue, breezy writing and an amusing premise - the Hit Man as a regular guy, just putting in another day at the office.
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