Even the enigmatic hit man called Quarry had to start somewhere. And for him that was the day he returned from Vietnam to find his young wife cheating. He'd killed plenty overseas, so killing her lover was no big deal. When he was recruited to use his skills as a contract killer, that transition was easy, too.
Anglo-American culture is marked by a gladiatorial impulse: a deep cultural fascination in watching men fight each other. The gladiator is an archetypal character embodying this impulse and his brand of violent and eroticised masculinity has become a cultural shorthand that signals a transhistorical ...
