On “52 Pickup” by Elmore Leonard ****

This is the first crime thriller I've read by Leonard, though of course I've seen several movies based on his work, movies, which I've read, often just lift his dialogue whole. Indeed, this work is quite cinematic: built in scenes, around people and events, not a lot of summary or exposition. As with the two westerns I've read by Leonard, this was a page turner, thrilling pretty much from about five pages in until the very end.

So Mitchell is the owner of a car parts manufacturer, a man who for a brief period uncharacteristically ends up having an affair with a woman one year older than his daughter. Three neerdowells decide that Mitchell is the perfect object of an extortion scheme. You see, the gal he's been carrying on with, she was into adult modeling and, as such, has links to a shady underworld. The three guys hatch a plan, based on photographs they've gotten of the couple together, to insist that Mitchell pay them $100k or the info gets leaked to the press, the family, the company, whatever works to make his life dreadful.

Mitchell, though, is a tough nut, and he's not sure he's ready simply to pay up. He doesn't want to go to the police, either, because things could get messy. He doesn't want to put his family through all that. When he doesn't comply, on time, the three crooks murder the girl and arrange things so that the crime can be easily pinned on Mitchell. Now they want $100k every year. Mitchell says he'll think about it and continues along his usual way, delaying and generally being cool to their attempts to intimidate him. This involves, for example, coming clean with his wife, and it evenually involves him turning the three crooks against one another through various nefarious means so that in essence they do the work of solving the problem for him.

The plot thrills, and the characters are well drawn, and the dialogue is fresh. What's not to like? I was ready to hand this five stars, but the ending was a letdown. The story, I suppose, is over, but there are all kinds of ramifications to what Mitchell has done. He does so much, supposedly, to save his family, but in the process, his wife suffers terrible consequences; he doesn't go to the police, but at some point not going to the police seems more a plot point than mere logic, and in the end, the police will be involved, and how exactly is Mitchell going to come clean? He has a lot of great plans, but it's obvious the crooks know where he lives and have access to his wife and family. They're capable of killing—or at least Mitchell actually believes they are—so why would he not safeguard them, send them away, or whatever? It's these sort of issues that pulled me away from genre fiction when younger, and while I can enjoy thrills, the lack of emotional link to the characters and their feelings makes for a less compelling work.

On "Hombre" by Elmore Leonard *****

Another fine western by Mr. Leonard. This one, apparently, is the only novel that Leonard wrote in the first person, but he uses the voice effectively if unironically. It's a taut thriller from start to finish. The story involves a man who is actually called Tres Hombres at one point, because he manages to shoot as many as it would take three men to shoot. In typical western fashion, that is our book's superhero—a man raised by Indians who sympathizes with them and lives half on the edge of civilization.

Our narrator is a young man who has just lost his job with a wagon company, the railroads having taken most of the business. But there is a need for a wagon on his last day on the job, and one of those passengers needing a ride is a young gal who has been held captive by Indians for a month and is now free and wanting to get home. Other passengers include Russell, the aforementioned hero, and a rich man and his wife. It's the rich man who agrees to pay for the journey, so the young man's boss agrees to allow use of a wagon to carry them, to the young man's chagrin, as he wanted to drive (something he hadn't done before). But the good thing is that this gives opportunity for the young man to sit in the carriage with the young gal. Also along for the ride is a military man readying for marriage and a new job, but though he's bought a ticket, he's bucked out of his seat by a bully named Braden, who shows up at the last minute.

The rich man insists that they take a seldom-used shortcut since he's paying for the journey. But this off-road experience proves to be as harrowing as one might expect. And then, that's where things get really interesting. Spoilers follow.

The reason the main road was not a good option, it turns out, is that the rich man is transporting stolen goods, money he's stolen as a federal Indian agent, allowing the Indians for whom the money was designated to starve. The main road is more likely to be dangerous in terms of thieves (or, one might also assume, law enforcement). As such, it takes the thieves, who actually were aware of the rich man's bounty, extra time to catch up, word being sent to them by Braden, who it turns out is part of the party. Once they circle the wagon, they take the bag of money and the rich guy's wife (for insurance) and leave the party to die.

Except that things don't work out that way. Russell, as would be expected, comes to the rescue, recovering the money and leading the party out of the area. The wife, though, is still a hostage, and the thieves are keen on getting their loot. Alas, a man who steals from Indians is not to be trusted and certainly has no honor when it comes to either his wife or the others in his party. Is he worth saving, after he himself steals the money (again) and leaves the party for dead and then finds himself in trouble? Some people seem to think so; others not so much. When it's at the cost of lives, who gets grace and who does not? Tragedy unfolds.

On “Being Cool” by Charles J. Rzepka ***

This is a critical study of the work of Elmore Leonard, and a pretty good one at that. Though a devoted reader to Leonard's work, Rzepka doesn't idolize Leonard the way the biographer of Get Dutch does. Readers get close readings of several works and a bit of biography as well. The biographical sections come in mostly near the start of the book, but Rzepka's main focus is in the title: What makes Leonard's characters “cool.” By “cool,” we're not talking what makes them great characters so much as “cool,” as in collected. Leonard, as such, has characters who are cool and others who are not. The “cool” characters are those who maintain grace under fire, who handle stress well, who don't get unnerved. Leonard's work is often violent, but the violence is usually a result of characters losing their cool, characters who don't maintain ease in the face of stress.

One of the most interesting readings Rzepka engages in is regarding Leonard's form of narration, which is almost always omniscient, or rather, third-person limited but wherein he travels to the different limited vision of various characters. As such, Leonard, as author, disappears. This is something that didn't happen as much in his early fiction. There, you'd find the author sometimes intruding with an adverb or a description that was clearly that of a narrator or author, not something coming from within some character's head, but in time, Leonard moved himself further and further into the shadows so that what we have in his fiction is simply characters perceptions. Several close readings over time demonstrate this.

On “The Holy Land” by George W. Knight ***

I've had this pictorial guide on my shelf for probably close to a decade now, a gift from someone at church. It's made to be picked up, read a bit, and put down. But I finally decided to do more than that, to actually read it from start to finish. When I say that it's made to be picked up and put down, what I mean is that it's structured around various sites, prolific with photographs, and somewhat interesting in the short term. But that was precisely the reason I never read it in full. There is not a through-line, so anything but short reading into the book doesn't tend to hold one's focus. The book is, in essence, set up like an Insight Guide, one of those marvelously illustrated travel guides to a region, full of info and pictures, but really intended for you to read about sites of interest rather than to read it from start to finish. There wasn't much to be gained from the book in terms of new information; it was interesting, I suppose, on the level of thinking about events spatially and regionally: this is the area where X and Y and Z happened. Sometimes, it was enlightening that way, making one realize that certain events shared a place. For what it is, however, within its genre, it's a great book, wonderful to look at and drop into occasionally—which is why I've kept it on the shelf.

On “Get Dutch” by Paul Challen ***

I feel like I chose the wrong introduction to Elmore Leonard, a writer whose books have been turned into several movies I've liked and who I've until now read just one book by, a very good western. I was looking for one biography and one critical study. I chose this biography because it is the most recent (the other was written a decade earlier); I chose a particular critical study also because it is the most recent, but it is limited in scope. I stayed away from the Twayne series book on Leonard, because the series seems so formulaic and basic, even as I'm now thinking the one in the series may actually have been more in line with what I wanted—a true critical introduction.

Challen's book is the work of a fan. Not being an aficianado of Leonard's, other than the impression he's worn on me via film and the one book, I actually found myself a bit turned off by the work. You can sell a subject too hard, and that's how I felt here. I'm not particularly keen on violence, but there's supposed to be lots in Leonard (so this book makes clear, with gusto). So why am I reading more by him? Because I was impressed by the one book.

As a fan, Challen doesn't engage much in actual critical analysis. More often, the work talks about the various books and how Leonard writes. Challen did a lot of interviews with people who knew Leonard, many of whom are also fans. So there's lots of gushing about how great Leonard is as a person and as a writer. And I guess that was what Challen aimed for—nothing negative or even anything that might be seen as such. This is not a warts and all biography.

So what did I learn about the writer? He comes from a middle-class background; his father worked in corporate America, and Leonard sort of followed in that vein, becoming a copywriter for an ad agency. That was his day job. Most of his life was spent in Detroit. His off-time job was writing, at which he worked hard. He started at a time when the short story era was just coming to an end. What I mean by that—people obviously still write short stories—is that it was the end of the era where magazines were devoted to stories and had substantial subscribers and paid substantial amounts. So Leonard sold his first story for a thousand bucks, and this at a time when that was several months pay at his regular job (today, you might get a few thousand in a glossy magazine, but it would likely take only story an issue; most publications pay nothing or a few hundred if lucky). It was a western. An agent noticed the work and got in touch with him, offering to help. Leonard took her up on it.

For many years, Leonard churned out western short stories, selling them for a hundred or so dollars apiece. It wasn't enough to quit working, which the agent made clear. Indeed, the agent worked with writers like Leonard in the hope of one day scoring big, once such authors started writing novels. And so Leonard did. Again, he was paid a modest sum, something like three thousand dollars, which if you think about how much he was paid for that first story, tells you how little/much such work paid: not quite a year's salary with no guarantee of more money to come. But Leonard plowed on, and his books sold for movie production, at which he made a little more money.

His agent, meanwhile, started to push Leonard to write something other than westerns (indeed, other than stories involving Indians). She knew the market for such stuff was drying up. She encouraged him to write adventure tales. And so he started.

And that's, of course, when he started to really hit the big time—or at least, do well enough that he felt he really could quit his day job writing ad copy. From there, he'd churn out mystery books with regularity, selling quite a few to film companies, and also getting work as a screenwriter here and there (his first screenplays were for a series of documentaries). As decades passed, his reputation grew until two decades in or so he started hitting the best seller list.

As a writer, Leonard treated his profession like a job, writing each day from about 9:00 to 5:30. He worked longhand, on the first draft, and then with a typewriter thereafter. Very old school. He didn't plot out his novels. Rather, he let the characters take him where the books were to go. Dialogue was his huge focus, enough that you'd think, based on what he said in interviews and what Challen writes about him, that his books were just collections of dialogue, which they are not—there are plenty of descriptions, even if they aren't florid. But I do think it interesting that he didn't know where a book was going or how it was to end until about forty pages to the end; given how intricate some of his plots are, one would think he planned a bit more. What he did do, though, he says, is as he was nearing that end, he'd realize certain things were important and then go back and add in the scenes that were needed to make that ending work. He was clearly a talented guy. I find that plotting something out in advance tends to give a work a kind of shallowness and fakeness, because one is forcing characters to do things rather than letting the characters guide themselves, so I understand his point; on the other hand, when one is writing longer works, it's also easy to lose track of characters and history and so forth, which is a big challenge of book-length fiction. It's also easy for a character to become completely predictable in terms of the plot that comes into being. So in those senses, Leonard seems to have been gifted with a good memory and kind of natural ease of finding ways to keep characters from simply falling into standard tropes, or at least that's my impression of him. I guess I'm going to find out over the coming months, as I read a selection of his work.