John Keller

Series · 10 books · 1998-2017

By Lawrence Block

Books in series

#0.1

Keller's Therapy

2013

"Answers to Soldier" marked Keller's first appearance—and I never expected to write more about the wistful hit man. But time passed, and I got to thinking about him. I figured he was just the sort of Urban Lonely Guy to find himself on a psychotherapist's couch. And if the shrink has an ex-wife, and the ex-wife has a dog, well, you can see how one thing might lead to another … "Keller's Therapy" appeared first in Playboy, and won an Edgar Allan Poe award as the best short story of the year. And it launched Keller on a continuing career as a series character …

Hit Man

1998

Keller is an assassin – he is paid by the job and works for a mysterious man who nominates hits and passes on commissions from elsewhere. Keller goes in, does the job, gets out: usually at a few hours’ notice . . . Often Keller’s work takes him out of New York to other cities, to pretty provincial towns that almost tempt him into moving to the woods and the lakeshores. Almost but not quite. But then one job goes wrong in a way Keller has never imagined and it leaves him with a big problem. Finding himself with an orphan on his hands, Keller's job begins to interfere with his carefully guarded life. And once you let someone in to your life, they tend to want to know what you do when you're away. And killing for a living, lucrative though it is, just doesn't find favour with some folks.

Hit List

2000

Keller is a regular guy. He goes to the movies, works on his stamp collection. Call him for jury duty and he serves without complaint. Then every so often he gets a phone call from White Plains that sends him flying off somewhere to kill a perfect stranger. Keller is a pro and very good at what he does. But the jobs have started to go wrong. The realization is slow coming yet, when it arrives, it is irrefutable: Someone out there is trying to hit the hit man. Keller, God help him, has found his way onto somebody else's hit list.

Hit Parade

2006

Keller is friendly. Industrious. A bit lonely, sometimes. If it wasn't for the fact that he kills people for a living, he'd be just your average Joe. The inconvenient wife, the troublesome sports star, the greedy business partner, the vicious dog, he'll take care of them all, quietly and efficiently. If the price is right. Like the rest of us, Keller's starting to worry about his retirement. After all, he's not getting any younger. (His victims, on the other hand, aren't getting any older.) So he contacts his "booking agent," Dot, up in White Plains, and tells her to keep the hits coming. He'll take any job, anywhere. His nest egg needs fattening up. Of course, being less choosy means taking greater risks—and that could buy Keller some big trouble. Then again, in this game, there are plenty of opportunities for some inventive improvisation . . . and a determined self-motivator can make a killing.

#3.5

Quotidian Keller

a Keller short story

2017

What best defines a man. His profession? Or his passion?Keller's profession is murder for hire. He kills strangers for money. His passion is philately, which is to say that he's a stamp collector. Once he'd planned to retire from his profession. But how would he fill his time? He wound up returning to his boyhood hobby of stamp collecting, and it promptly ate up much of his retirement fund.These things happen...So when a man in Detroit hires him to dispatch another Detroiter, Keller's up for it. Only problem is it has to be done right away, and Keller's got plans for the weekend. He's flying out to San Francisco to attend a philatelic convention and take in an important stamp auction. (Well, important to Keller, if not to you or me.) How can he be in San Francisco and Detroit at the same time?Turns out he doesn't need to. Because the target will be making the same trip. His name is Sheridan Bingham, and he's a prominent philatelist specializing in issues of the German States, and he'll be in San Francisco, exhibiting some of his stamps at the convention, and bidding in the very same auction as Keller.But what happens when Keller meets him and finds him a kindred spirit? What happens when he gets to know the man?Besides being a collector and a killer, Keller is an unqualified Guilty Pleasure for an ever-increasing number of readers. "I don't think I ought to like Keller," readers tell me. "But I can't help myself..." Quotidian Keller is an extended episode in the third Keller novel, Hit Parade.

Hit and Run

2008

Keller's a hit man. For years now he's had places to go and people to kill. But enough is enough. He's got money in the bank and just one last job standing between him and retirement. So he carries it out with his usual professionalism, and he heads home, and guess what? One more job. Paid in advance, so what's he going to do? Give the money back?In Des Moines, Keller stalks his designated target and waits for the client to give him the go-ahead. And one fine morning he's picking out stamps for his collection (Sweden 1-5, the official reprints) at a shop in Urbandale when somebody guns down the charismatic governor of Ohio. Back at his motel, Keller's watching TV when they show the killer's face. And there's something all too familiar about that face... Keller calls his associate Dot in White Plains, but there is no answer. He's stranded halfway across the country, every cop in America's just seen his picture, his ID and credit cards are no longer good, and he just spent almost all of his cash on the stamps. Now what?

#4.5

Keller in Dallas

2009

A novella otherwise unpublished except in a philatelic magazine, and continuing Keller's story after HIT & RUN

Hit Me

2012

BESTSELLING AUTHOR AND GRAND MASTER LAWRENCE BLOCK RETURNS TO HIS DEADLIEST HITMAN A man named Nicholas Edwards lives in New Orleans renovating houses, doing honest work and making decent money at it. Between his family and his stamp collection, all his spare time is happily accounted for. Sometimes it's hard to remember that he used to kill people for a living. But when the nation's economy tanks, taking the construction business with it, all it takes is one phone call to drag him back into the game. It may say Nicholas Edwards on his driver's license and credit cards, but he's back to being the man he always was: Keller. Keller's work takes him to New York, the former home he hasn't dared revisit, where his target is the abbot of a midtown monastery. Another call puts him on a West Indies cruise, with several interesting fellow passengers-the government witness, the incandescent young woman keeping the witness company, and, sharing Keller's cabin, his wife, Julia. But the high drama comes in Cheyenne, where a recent widow is looking to sell her husband's stamp collection... In HIT ME, legendary Edgar Grandmaster and New York Times bestselling author Lawrence Block returns to one of his most beloved characters. Welcome back, Keller. You've been missed.

#10

Keller's Adjustment

2012

Keller, an introspective fellow, is your basic Urban Lonely Guy. He collects stamps. He used to have a dog, until the dog walker walked off with him. Now he soldiers on alone. It's his profession that sets him apart. He's a hit man. He kills strangers for a living. And he's a Guilty Pleasure for an ever-increasing number of readers. "I don't think I ought to like Keller," readers tell me. "But I can't help myself..." Keller’s Adjustment was written in the early months of 2003, in a small ship cruising the South Pacific from Tahiti to Guam. That was far indeed from New York City, Keller’s home base. (And mine.) I wrote the novella for Transgressions, a prestigious anthology of lengthy stories by prominent writers, commissioned and edited by my friend Evan Hunter/Ed McBain. It subsequently appeared as a key episode of Hit Parade, my third book about Keller—so if you own Hit Parade, you’ve already read Keller’s Adjustment. If not, or if you’re ready renew your acquaintance, I’m pleased to recommend the novella to your attention. It was written in the wake of 9/11, and shows Keller’s reaction to the assault on his city. And, as its title implies, it’s about adjusting to a new reality. Perhaps it echoes the story Sam Spade recounts in Hammett’s Maltese Falcon, about a man who has a narrow escape from accidental death on his way to work one morning. He reponds by disappearing, and by the time Spade finds him he has recreated his original life halfway across the country. He adjusted to a world in which beams fell, Spade tells us, and then no more beams fell, and he adjusted to that.

#14

Keller's Homecoming

a Keller short story

2016

Keller, an introspective fellow, was always your basic Urban Lonely Guy. He collects stamps. He used to have a dog, until the dog walker walked off with him. Then he soldiered on alone. It's his profession that sets him apart. He's a hit man. He kills strangers for a living. And he's a Guilty Pleasure for an ever-increasing number of readers. "I don't think I ought to like Keller," readers tell me. "But I can't help myself..." In the fourth Keller novel, HIT AND RUN, Keller's whole life in New York came to an abrupt end; by the time he'd sorted things out, he was married and living in New Orleans, with a kid on the way. And now, for the first time since the substance hit the fan, he's back in New York—once his home, and now the most dangerous place on the planet for him. And his job is impossible. He has to break into a monastery in the middle of Murray Hill and kill the abbott. Lots of luck, Keller... This edition of KELLER'S HOMECOMING (which was incorporated into the book Hit Me) includes as a bonus the opening sequence of another Keller adventure, KELLER'S DESIGNATED HITTER.

Author

Lawrence Block

Author · 178 books

Lawrence Block has been writing crime, mystery, and suspense fiction for more than half a century. He has published in excess (oh, wretched excess!) of 100 books, and no end of short stories. Born in Buffalo, N.Y., LB attended Antioch College, but left before completing his studies; school authorities advised him that they felt he’d be happier elsewhere, and he thought this was remarkably perceptive of them. His earliest work, published pseudonymously in the late 1950s, was mostly in the field of midcentury erotica, an apprenticeship he shared with Donald E. Westlake and Robert Silverberg. The first time Lawrence Block’s name appeared in print was when his short story “You Can’t Lose” was published in the February 1958 issue of Manhunt. The first book published under his own name was Mona (1961); it was reissued several times over the years, once as Sweet Slow Death. In 2005 it became the first offering from Hard Case Crime, and bore for the first time LB’s original title, Grifter’s Game. LB is best known for his series characters, including cop-turned-private investigator Matthew Scudder, gentleman burglar Bernie Rhodenbarr, globe-trotting insomniac Evan Tanner, and introspective assassin Keller. Because one name is never enough, LB has also published under pseudonyms including Jill Emerson, John Warren Wells, Lesley Evans, and Anne Campbell Clarke. LB’s magazine appearances include American Heritage, Redbook, Playboy, Linn’s Stamp News, Cosmopolitan, GQ, and The New York Times. His monthly instructional column ran in Writer’s Digest for 14 years, and led to a string of books for writers, including the classics Telling Lies for Fun & Profit and The Liar’s Bible. He has also written episodic television (Tilt!) and the Wong Kar-wai film, My Blueberry Nights. Several of LB’s books have been filmed. The latest, A Walk Among the Tombstones, stars Liam Neeson as Matthew Scudder and is scheduled for release in September, 2014. LB is a Grand Master of Mystery Writers of America, and a past president of MWA and the Private Eye Writers of America. He has won the Edgar and Shamus awards four times each, and the Japanese Maltese Falcon award twice, as well as the Nero Wolfe and Philip Marlowe awards, a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Private Eye Writers of America, and the Diamond Dagger for Life Achievement from the Crime Writers Association (UK). He’s also been honored with the Gumshoe Lifetime Achievement Award from Mystery Ink magazine and the Edward D. Hoch Memorial Golden Derringer for Lifetime Achievement in the short story. In France, he has been proclaimed a Grand Maitre du Roman Noir and has twice been awarded the Societe 813 trophy. He has been a guest of honor at Bouchercon and at book fairs and mystery festivals in France, Germany, Australia, Italy, New Zealand, Spain and Taiwan. As if that were not enough, he was also presented with the key to the city of Muncie, Indiana. (But as soon as he left, they changed the locks.) LB and his wife Lynne are enthusiastic New Yorkers and relentless world travelers; the two are members of the Travelers Century Club, and have visited around 160 countries. He is a modest and humble fellow, although you would never guess as much from this biographical note.