Hit Man

Rex Feral

The incredible amount of attention Hit Man received after the 1993 James Perry case has blown the book way, way out of proportion, mostly because of first amendment issues. Paladin settled a lawsuit out of court by promising to pull all extant copies of Hit Man off the shelf and no longer offer the book for sale; this, of course, did nothing but garner huge amounts of free publicity for a book very few people had ever heard of from a press very few people had ever heard of, splash both book and press across the pages of newspapers across America, and immediately send the price skyrocketing on the collectors' market. (Copies of the book destroyed by Paladin—and this isn't the usual “strip” destroying, the books were actually torn in half horizontally—regularly go for upwards of $50 on ebay, well over three times the original cover price.) Another, even more harmful (from the lawsuit's perspective) side effect: the book is now out of copyright, and is thus easily found free online with a quick Yahoo search. What a great way to suppress a book: get it far more publicity than it would have ever had, and make it available free to any twelve-year-old who knows how to work a search engine!

Many already existing reviews on the book, and a good deal of commentary inspired by the court case, consider it a joke. (One wag goes so far as to suggest “Rex Feral” is actually a romance author, judging by “his” attitudes towards women in the book's last couple of chapters.) If so, it's a pretty good one; the author has taken a good number of pieces of data that one can find in your average David Morrell or Ian Fleming novel, put them all in one place, and constructed a how-to book on the art of covert murder for hire. As Reason columnist Jacob Sullum says in his rant on the idiocy of the lawsuit, “Still, it's doubtful that people like James Perry were the main audience for Hit Man. If they were, somehow the thousands of murders they committed have gone unnoticed.” No joke.

This leads to another, more interesting (and sinister) hypothesis, and note that I have no evidence at all to back me up on this: Rex Feral really is a hit man. He wrote Hit Man to eliminate the possible competition. (After all, how much work is really out there, per year, for a contract killer?) Any reader of murder mysteries and espionage books is going to chuckle at the impossible complexity of some of Feral's supposed methods; what better way to get earnest young would-be hit men out of the way than having them spend weeks working on homemade silencers while the pros from Dover are out doing the actual job and collecting the fee? (And lord knows that homemade silencer would be, how shall we say, distinctive, when pieces were found. Anyone who's read three or four espionage novels is already familiar with the “bang-it-together-in-five-minutes” homemade silencer preferred in novels, which requires nothing more than steel wool and a few washers.)

So the upshot? Don't believe the hype. It's amusing, for what it is, but the only real danger here is that a small cadre of stupid, incompetent criminals will end up dying of wood alcohol poisoning while trying to make these silencers.