The Drop-off by Patrick Quinlan

Smoke Dugan, one-time bomb-maker for the mob, is on the run. It's not easy to keep a low profile when you've got your girlfriend (Lola), her best friend (Pamela) and a retired professional assassin (Cruz) with you; and if you're carrying $2.5 million in cash, you can be sure the people the money belongs to won't let the trail go cold. The tiny Caribbean island of Saint Mark's seems a safe bet, but that's reckoning without the unexpected presence of ex-Navy Seal Stone, an old enemy of Cruz. Stone has heard of the massive finder's fee placed on Cruz's head by Big Vito back in New York, so he's very motivated. Soon the rest of the mob is on the way and the scene is set for a game of cat and mouse amid the palm trees and on the high seas.

Well, that's what the blurb says, anyway. It also says that author Patrick Quinlan is a writer who weaves together elements of Pulp Fiction, Kill Bill and Get Shorty. He is certainly a writer who is doing his damndest to be as cool as Elmore Leonard used to be (some say still is). There's a lot to commend in his writing, that's for sure. But I wasn't entirely won over by his latest offering.

The Drop-Off is the follow up to Quinlan's first novel Smoked, which received some rave reviews, comparing Quinlan to James Ellroy or Quentin Tarantino. In Smoked, James Smoke Duggan (aka Wally O'Malley) is an aging explosive expert with a gammy leg who rips off the mob to the tune of $2.5 million ably assisted by his twenty-five-year-old girl friend and martial arts expert, Lola Bell. The mob, who used to employ Smoke (unbeknownst to Lola Bell) send a stone-cold killer, Denny Cruz, and two nasty assistants, Moss and Fingers, to despatch Smoke and retrieve their $2.5 million.

You might suppose, then, that The Drop-Off is simply a rewrite of Smoked. And, as Barry Norman might once have said, why not? The plot is, of course, predictable but it's all about the action. Unfortunately, sometimes the action sometimes chugs along rather slowly (at one stage a mobster says to his sidekick, This is about the slowest f***ing car chase in the history of the world, which is a summary of at least the first half of the book). Quinlan has an annoying habit of giving the reader the full backstory of every new character he introduces which, despite their always colourful backstory, I just found a tedious brake on the action – to hell with the backstory, I wanted to get on with the frontstory! He also seems to write for the lowest common denominator. To give just one example: we are told when we meet Cruz's girlfriend that, until she fell for the stone-cold killer, Pamela had her job at the library, her quiet life, her cute little apartment. Fine. It's a cliché, but we have an effective picture of Pamela. But Quinlan then goes on to remind us of Pamela's backstory nearly every time she crops up, including her final scene when we are told that, Pamela, the formerly shy and retiring librarian, was going to do just fine.

These are just minor quibbles to explain why I don't think Quinlan is in the Ellroy/Leonard league just yet. But the book does have humour, some exciting set-pieces and a good deal of stylish violence. If you want a book to take away on your holidays and read by the pool with a Mai Tai or two, then this book is as good as any.

I'd like to thank the publishers for sending a copy to The Bookbag.

Further reading suggestion: The debut novel by Quinlan, Smoked, introduced the characters in this latest offering. If you like a novel where there are no '‘goodies', just different shades of ‘baddies', you might like Small Crimes by Dave Zeltserman.

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