Here's a short story that seems somewhat typical of Leonard's work: the violence, the tough guy focus, the criminal element. Even the fact that this is set in rural Michigan might be seen as emblematic of Leonard's work—bringing together a common setting (Michigan) and the western elements of his early work. Evan has married his sweetheart. The two are expecting guests, but they hope, strangely, that the guests won't show: in fact, they'd be okay with the guests getting in an accident or something else dreadful. The reason soon becomes clear why. Cal (a relative) and Ray (a former boyfriend) are tough guys here to spend time with Evan's wife and not too keen on seeing her poor horse farmer husband. Leonard's work probably works better over a larger page count, where the plots can unfurl in unpredictable complexity. Here, as seems inevitable in so much Leonard fiction, a fight ensues, and we see the parties come to a head, the situation “resolved,” though the degree to which that resolution is permanent, I have to wonder, would be questionable outside the tidy resolution of the story. You can read it here at Harper's Magazine.
Tuesday, December 2, 2025
On "City Primeval" by Elmore Leonard ****
The subtitle of this work is "High Noon in Detroit," which essentially sums up this cop versus robber (or really, killer) novel. Raymond Cruz works in the homocide division of the Detroit Police Department. Clement robs the occasional person and shoots the occasional person for fun.
Clement currently is setting up a scam with an Albanian, but he's interrupted by a lousy driver. His reaction: Shoot the dumb driver--and his passenger. The driver turns out to be a judge. Only, the judge was crooked and not well liked. So you figure maybe folks wouldn't care too much, maybe? But the police go after the killer like any other.
In a whodunit, we'd be wondering, well, who done it? In this work, we know who's done it from the first chapter. In many another book, we might know who done it, but we'd be walking with the police as they figure that out. Neither is true here. The police know pretty quickly the killer. The issue is that the killer is good at snaking out of any charge that is given to him, so the book is mostly about gathering evidence and also about setting Clement up so that he can't slink away.
And that's where Raymond comes in. In a central scene in the novel, the two protagonists square off, and they talk about how if this were the Old West, they'd have a duel. And that's really what this becomes: the wits of one man against another until only one is left. (Without giving much away, I'll say that in a way, the book ends twice. I prefer the first ending, but I think Leonard felt a need to bring it back to that faceoff, so we get a tag that seems unnecessary and less fitting to the circumstances.)
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