Hit man

Kind of done the hit man novel before (not that well), but been turning another over for a while. Waiting for two ideas to clash and throw up something interesting, but so far I have...

Hit man, London based, knocking off people for money without too much concern. We see a couple of jobs, mundane but horrifically brutal (or vice versa). Takes a new job, and client (a go between) mentions that it's a rush job as he's been having trouble placing the job. Our hit man does the job. Perhaps combine with near nabbing in a pub by plain clothes cops?

Then the next call he takes for another job asks whether he ever questions why he's been asked to kill the people he kills? Has he? I'm not sure. Anyways, this time, before he offs the guy, he asks him why anyone would want him dead. In between begging for his life the guy tells him he does what he does: he's a contract killer too.

BTW: we're not talking anything glamorous here, we're talking thug / bouncer level. No sniper rifles or poison blow darts. Just broken bottles, knives, clubbed to death and run over.

So now our hit man starts wondering what's going on. Sure enough, the next person he's asked to kill is another contract killer. How many can he kill before they come after him? And who wants them all dead? And who asked him whether he wondered what they did?

I've no idea.

Lawrence Block is writing a great series of Hit Man novels, well worth checking out. And there's a thriller about a terminally ill contract killer who takes out a contract on his own life, then finds out he's not dying. Can't remember who it's by, but it was great.

Rolling with the idea

With no pen I had to cling on to an idea that came during a presentation this morning...

The suicide mission to set off/destroy the bomb (whatever) on the spaceship. The team is gradually killed off till we are left with one guy who knows he can't make it. So he is captured, and reveals during interrogation that there are other teams all with the same goal: to set off the bomb. With the result that the enemy ends up doing what the team set out to do.

Now if there isn't a story in this...

Okay, it's possibly already been filmed in part, but some of the paranoid angles in James Jesus Angleton's (long-serving chief of the Central Intelligence Agency') wiki article would add an interesting spin to any novel. Take the Space/Macbeth idea, and then have the friendly Commander consumed with a search for an enemy squad in their lines. That doesn't sound so interesting written down anymore, but I'd make it work, dammit! Before they make it work against me...