Books that talk
In over 40 books, a great American novelist offers his wry take on the great American comedy through chatty characters that echo in the mind long after you’ve turned the last page.
THE best novelists create a world around the reader. You can feel it bubbling up in irrepressible invention. So we have “A guy by the name of Booker, a twenty-five-year old super-dude twice convicted felon” in his Jacuzzi when the telephone rings. No one answers it, and Booker gets out of the Jacuzzi. At the other end of the line, a woman, Moselle, asks him to sit down. When he does, she informs him that he’s triggered a bomb in the chair – “when you get up, honey, what’s left of your ass is gonna go clear through the ceiling”.
The bomb-disposal boys arrive in their nonchalant way: “Booker said, ‘Another one goes hmmmmm. I’m sitting here on high explosives the motherf***** goes hmmmmm.’” Is there a bomb? They can see 10 sticks of dynamite underneath Booker. But they can’t see a fuse. And now Booker really needs to go to the bathroom, and one bombdisposal guy is talking about his wife Phyllis’s bad behaviour in a restaurant. And there we leave them. Does Booker get bombed to bits? Oh yes, of course he does, as we find out much later, in passing. The magnificent first chapter of
Freaky Deaky is Elmore Leonard at his most audacious, balancing the promise of ultraviolence, a ludicrous situation, and a series of more or less cool dudes possessing a perfect, profane articulacy. As in many Leonard novels, the main action is preceded by an eyepopping set piece with limited connection to the story. It takes the unexpected path from beginning to end; it never abandons the possibility of humour, however rough the going; and it casts its sympathies unpredictably. There is no greater writer of crime fiction than Elmore Leonard, and no one who has more resplendent energy.
Leonard, 87, has had the classic career of a market-oriented novelist. Born in New Orleans in 1925, but growing up in Detroit, he began by writing novels and short stories in the then popular Western genre. During the day, he worked as an advertising copywriter. When the magazine market for Western stories dried up, he turned to crime fiction with
The Big Bounce. And his stature has grown steadily since.
With the publication earlier this year of his new novel Raylan – a revival of an old hero after the success of the TV series
Justified, which is based on a short story of his – his mastery of his own particular genre is complete. Anyone can write a plot in which crooks kidnap each other to extract each other’s kidneys; it takes an Elmore Leonard to conceive of one in which the kidneys are sold back to their indignant original owner.
Raylan is unmistakably a late-period work; its texture is spare, even by Leonard’s standards, and it cuts to the chase laconically. The hero-marshal, Raylan (the main character in the TV series), has cropped up before: Leonard likes to save himself time by repeating not just the type of character, but the same character under the same name.
Raylan, too, carries on with Leonard’s trademark energy, including some memorable members of the repulsive Crowe family who have previously turned up as pathetic villains; one here has an unbelievable collection of Elvis memorabilia; the other lives in a house so dirty that he entertains himself by shooting the rats in the kitchen and discussing whether it’s worth cooking and eating them afterwards. Like pretty well every Leonard novel, it is a delight.
The beauty of Leonard’s novels can be achieved at the expense of any kind of moral judgement. It’s often been said that it is hard to tell who the good guys and who the bad guys are in his novels. In a world of unbridled criminality, the criminal who carries out his robbery or murder with style and wit is the object of our admiration. Above all, the allure of intelligence and of articulacy carries the day: we tend to like the man who speaks best and most wittily in Leonard, the one who swears with the best timing.
Sometimes, the characters rise above moral considerations quite consciously. Jackie Burke, an airline stewardess, talking in an entranced erotic haze to the bail bondsman Max Cherry in Rum Punch, seems like a figure envisaged by Nietzsche, beyond good and evil: “We’re alike. We weren’t before, you were holding back, but now we are. You and I. Could you pass out complimentary tropical punch in little plastic cups? That’s my alternative and it’s unacceptable.”
Leonard’s novels are not, especially, thrillers; they are almost completely lacking in the puzzle element and the meretricious wielding of that most boring of novelistic features, mystery. In the end, they are closer to that most joyous of criminal genres, the “caper”. You always know very soon who killed whom, who is in charge of the scam, what the criminal’s plan is. And so do the forces of the law, more often than not.
There is also a high degree of irrationality in Leonard. One of the disorienting, as well as exhilarating, qualities in the books is the sense that neither narrative laws nor the laws of the world as we know it constrain the action. A pivotal book, Touch, which so disconcerted Leonard’s publishers that a decade elapsed between its writing and its publication in 1987, turns on a stigmatic with the gift of healing – memorably curing every broken bone in his enemy’s body after he has fallen four storeys. Leanne, Bob’s wife in Maximum Bob, is in touch with a long-dead slave girl called Wanda, who brings about the denouement.
Leonard’s work is a very long way from the average crime novel, with its sequence of atrocity, mystery, maverick investigator and solution. He is fascinated, for instance, with the mechanics of writing, and wants his readers to share that interest. Characters investigate the textures of dialogue – “‘How come,’ Raylan said, ‘you can’t answer a question without asking one?’” ( Riding The Rap.) They discuss diction in intricate detail – Foley and Buddy reading a newspaper report in Out Of Sight: “‘They think you may “flee the country”.’ ‘I’ve had to run like hell a few times,’ Foley said, ‘but I don’t think I’ve done any fleeing. You ever flee?’ ‘Yeah. I read one time I fled the scene of a robbery.’”
Most strikingly, Leonard often places the action in a context where we are going to have to contemplate the means of narrative.
Most powerful is Get Shorty, accurately described by Martin Amis as “a masterpiece” and surely one of the greatest novels of the century to come out of America. A dry cleaner fakes his own death and flees to Las Vegas, then Los Angeles, with the insurance payout. The protection man who has been fleecing him for years follows him, dropping in first on a Hollywood director who owes a fat wad to a casino. The protection man thinks it’s a good story, and, in the middle of the night, starts pitching it to the director.
The novel revolves around at least three film scripts and an enormous extended pitch, and clearly loves its own consideration of the narrative structure. Scenes begin, repeatedly, “Now they were having a drink,” like someone retelling, or telling in advance, a film. Get Shorty is the most intricate meshing of narrative and meta-narrative, concluding with a lovely Calvino-like consideration between Karen, Harry and Chili of how it should end: “Chili didn’t say anything, giving it some more thought. F****** endings, man, they weren’t as easy as they looked.”
The violence in Leonard’s action is not dwelt on, but swiftly rendered and passed over. What Leonard loves best is not violence, but the promise of violence expressed with some verbal wit, like the sign in a police station in Mr Paradise: “Too often we lose sight of life’s simple pleasures. Remember, when someone annoys you it takes 42 muscles in the face to frown. But it only takes four muscles to extend your arm and bitch-slap the motherf***** upside the head.”
In the absence of detailed description of sex and violence, what fills the novels – joyously, incomparably – is talk. Leonard is rightly celebrated for his mastery of dialogue, but it isn’t exactly a realist rendering. Rather, like P.G. Wodehouse, Dickens, or Evelyn Waugh, Leonard has half-heard and half-invented a totally convincing “idiolect”. No one ever talked so well in reality as Robert Taylor in Tishomingo Blues, telling the story of his life like a Scheherazade in a silk shirt, chain and pleated slacks: “I never got sent down. I went to Oakland University three years and did some dealing to pay for my tuition and books and s***, but only weed. I wouldn’t sell heroin to students ... I took eighteen semester hours of history – ask me a question about it, anything, like the names of famous assassins in history. Who shot Lincoln, Grover Cleveland. I took history cause I loved it man, not to get a job from it.”
The magic of Leonard’s own dialogue is that he never underestimates the potential pleasure of the elaborate, high formality and the abstruse in speech. And he allows even the most brutal of his gangsters the right to bicker over terminology – “‘We didn’t kidnap him,’ Louis said, ‘we took him hostage.’” ( Riding The Rap).
Most of all, he recognises the relish his characters have for single words, such as the splendid moment when the hangdog houseboy Lloyd comes into his heritage at the end of Mr Paradise and takes the guns to massacre the villains with the words: “I told you this ain’t your bidness.”
Leonard has long been seen as the greatest of crime writers, walking all over even Raymond Chandler, but perhaps the time has come to drop the qualification of genre. In his analysis through laughter of money, crime, spectacle and the play-acting of the powerful, he has created something entirely his own. In his 40-odd novels, his examinations of the way people manipulate language and stories have both recorded and created an aspect of human behaviour. He is just the great American novelist of the great American comedy. – Guardian News & Media