Critical Essays on Elmore Leonard E-Book

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 410

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

A scholarly exploration of Elmore Leonard--provides original essays and fresh insights on the author's works and influence Labelled as "the closest thing America has to a national novelist," Elmore Leonard's clean and direct writing, engaging bad guys, and deadpan humor resonate with readers around the nation and throughout the world. Popular films based on his books continue to introduce new audiences to Leonard's unique way of engaging with complex themes of American culture and pop-culture history. Yet surprisingly, academic treatments of his writing are almost nonexistent. Critical Essays on Elmore Leonard is an original anthology that covers the topics, themes, literary and narrative style, and enduring influences of one of the finest crime writers in the history of the genre. This unique collection of essays explores the ways in which Leonard's work reflects America's dynamic, ever-changing culture. Divided into two parts, the book first examines major themes and topics in Leonard's works, followed by detailed case studies of five individual works including Get Shorty and Out of Sight. Essays discuss topics such as Leonard's skill at conveying sense of place, his use of dress and appearance in his crime fiction, the influence of romantic comedies and westerns on his writing, and the concepts of moral luck, determinism, and existentialism found in his novels. Unique and thoroughly original, this book: * Covers Leonard's entire career, including his early Western novels and his work in visual media * Illustrates Leonard's genius at handling free indirect discourse * Discusses the author's influence, legacy, and contemporary relevance in various contexts * Explores Leonard's success at making himself "invisible" in his own writing * Includes an insightful introduction from the book's editor Critical Essays on Elmore Leonard is an ideal resource for academics and students in the field of genre studies, especially crime fiction, and general readers with interest in the subject.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Cover

Notes on Contributors

Introduction

References

Part I: Topics and Themes

1 Nostalgia and Authenticity in Elmore Leonard's Conflicted Heroes

The Oklahoma Wildman and the Gunfighter:

City Primeval

A Machete and a Bag of Photographs:

Pagan Babies

Choices and Consequences

References

2 Elmore Leonard and the Romantic Comedy, or “Get Some Love into It”

References

3 The Sense of Place in Elmore Leonard's Crime Fiction

References

4 Visual Clues

Introduction

Dress and Demeanor as Communication

Perceptions and Descriptions

Cops and Cons in

Out of Sight

From Book to Screen: Visual Clues of Casting

Conclusions

References

5 The Mozart of the Motor City

References

Part II: Five Case Studies

6 The Man with Five Names

What's in a Name?

Authoring the Hollywood West

Killing

Hombre

, Whitewashing John Russell

References

7 Pitching Cinematic Identification in

Get Shorty

Michael Weir's Method

Karen Flores and the Producer's Eye

Chili Learns the Industry

Conclusion

References

8 “It's the

way

they're done”

Techne

and Style

The Repertoire of Illusions

Fashion, Style, and Self‐Transformation

Timing

Coda

References

9 Moral Luck and Determinism in

Rum Punch

One: Constitutive Luck

Two: Circumstantial Luck

Three: Causal Luck

Four: Resultant Luck

Conclusion

References

10 Disjointed

Djibouti

References

Index

End User License Agreement

Guide

Cover

Table of Contents

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Critical Essays on Elmore Leonard

If it Sounds Like Writing

Edited by Charles J. Rzepka

This edition first published 2020© 2020 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

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Library of Congress Cataloging‐in‐Publication Data

Names: Rzepka, Charles J, editor.Title: Critical essays on Elmore Leonard : if it sounds like writing / edited by Charles J Rzepka.Description: Hoboken, NJ : Wiley‐Blackwell, [2020] | Includes bibliographical references.Identifiers: LCCN 2019053464 (print) | LCCN 2019053465 (ebook) | ISBN 9781119576693 (hardback) | ISBN 9781119576686 (adobe pdf) | ISBN 9781119576709 (epub)Subjects: LCSH: Leonard, Elmore, 1925‐2013–Criticism and interpretation. | Detective and mystery stories, American–History and criticism.Classification: LCC PS3562.E55 Z636 2020 (print) | LCC PS3562.E55 (ebook) | DDC 813/.54–dc23LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019053464LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019053465

Cover Design: WileyCover Image: A view of the Renaissance Center, downtown Detroit © Linda Goodhue Photography/Getty Images

Notes on Contributors

Frankie Y. Bailey is a professor in the School of Criminal Justice, University at Albany (SUNY). She is the author, coauthor, or coeditor of a number of nonfiction books, including Wicked Albany: Lawlessness & Liquor in the Prohibition Era (2009), and Crimes of the Centuries (2016). She is one of two 2018 Albany Literary Legends honorees of the Albany Public Library Foundation and the 2010 recipient of the George N. Dove Award for research on mystery and crime fiction. She has been nominated for several other awards, including the Edgar, Agatha, and Anthony, and is the winner of a Macavity Award for African American Mystery Writers (2008). She has five books and two short stories in a mystery series featuring crime historian Lizzie Stuart. Frankie's near‐future police procedural novels set in Albany, New York, The Red Queen Dies (2013) and What the Fly Saw (2015), feature Detective Hannah McCabe. Her short story, “The Singapore Sling Affair,” features former World War II nurse Jo Radcliffe (EQMM, Nov/Dec 2017). Frankie is a former executive vice president of Mystery Writers of America and a past national president of Sisters in Crime. She is at work on a nonfiction book about dress, appearance, and identity in American crime and justice. She is also working on a historical thriller set in 1939.

Philip Derbesy is a PhD candidate in English at Case Western Reserve University. He studies the impact of film on the postwar American novel, especially the work of Jack Kerouac, Walker Percy, and Joan Didion. His dissertation posits a new theory for reading the scenes of moviegoing that appear in these novels. He has published articles on Shakespeare and the Catholic novelists C. S. Lewis and G. K. Chesterton, author of the Father Brown mysteries, and currently has an essay on Jack Kerouac that is being submitted for publication.

David Geherin is professor emeritus of English at Eastern Michigan University, where he taught courses in modern and contemporary literature and in crime and mystery fiction for 40 years. Born in Auburn, New York, he received his undergraduate degree from the University of Toronto and his PhD from Purdue University. He is the author of nine books on crime and mystery fiction, including the first book of criticism ever written on Elmore Leonard, and two others – The American Private Eye: The Image in Fiction and Scene of the Crime: The Importance of Place in Crime and Mystery Fiction – that were finalists for the Mystery Writers of America's Edgar Allan Poe Award. His latest book – Carl Hiaasen: Sunshine State Satirist – was published just last year.

George Grella, retired professor of English and Film Studies at the University of Rochester, taught courses mostly in nineteenth and twentieth century American literature, twentieth century British literature, and film. He is the author of “Film in Fiction: The Real and the Reel in Elmore Leonard” (1998), a seminal essay in Leonard criticism. His research and writing mostly deal with three major subjects: detective fiction and related subgenres, film, and baseball. He has published upwards of thousands of reviews of books and films in scores of publications and hundreds of essays and articles on those three topics, in both critical anthologies and peer‐reviewed journals such as Texas Studies in Literature and Language, NOVEL, and The Massachusetts Review. He is currently writing a study of the American noir novelist Ross Macdonald.

Kris Mecholsky teaches English and writing at Louisiana State University and is the author of James M. Cain: Hard‐boiled Mythmaker (Scarecrow Press) as well as numerous articles in peer‐reviewed journals and edited anthologies on noir, the thriller, crime fiction, and the mass media.

Korine Powers is a PhD candidate studying English literature at Boston University. She focuses on violence and masculinity in postwar American film and fiction, with an emphasis on the valorization of addiction, wounding, and mental illness in popular texts. Her article, “Hannibal Lecter as Avenger and War Orphan,” will appear in a special issue of Twentieth‐Century Literature in Spring 2020.

Charles J. Rzepka is a Professor of English at Boston University, where he teaches courses in British romanticism and detective and crime fiction. In addition to writing Detective Fiction: A Cultural History (2005) and coediting the Wiley‐Blackwell Companion to Crime Fiction (2010), he has published extensively on the major Romantic authors and on writers of crime and detective fiction, including essays on Raymond Chandler, William Godwin, the Choctaw detective writer Todd Downing, and Earl Derr Biggers, creator of Charlie Chan. His latest book, Being Cool: the Work of Elmore Leonard, was published by Johns Hopkins in 2013 and appeared in paperback in 2017. He is currently researching a book on the emergence of the American ethnic detective during the interwar years.

Michael Scrivener, Distinguished Professor of English at Wayne State University, has published numerous scholarly monographs on British Romanticism, cultural politics, and class consciousness, including Radical Shelley (1982), Seditious Allegories (2001), Poetry and Reform (1992), The Cosmopolitan Ideal in the Age of Revolution and Reaction, 1776–1832 (2007), and Jewish Representation in British Literature, 1780–1840 (2011). He received a Keats‐Shelley Distinguished Scholar Award in 2006 and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2007. He is an ardent admirer and student of Elmore Leonard's fiction and looks forward to applying what he has learned as a seasoned scholar of the underclass to his contribution to this volume.

Michael Sinowitz is the author of Patrick O'Brian's Bodies at Sea: Sex, Drugs, and the Physical Form in the Aubrey‐Maturin Novels (McFarland). His other publications include articles on Graham Greene and Carol Reed's The Third Man in Modern Fiction Studies, Thomas Berger's Little Big Man in Clio, and Angela Carter's Nights at the Circus in Metafiction and Metahistory in Contemporary Women's Writing. His current project, Wine Theory, explores parallels between ongoing debates and trends in wine culture and literary theory. At DePauw University, he regularly teaches courses on literary theory, postmodernism, James Joyce, New Hollywood Cinema, and Noir.

Rossitsa Terzieva‐Artemis is professor of literature at the University of Nicosia. She is the author of Stories of the Unconscious: Sub‐Version in Freud, Lacan, and Kristeva (Peter Lang, 2009), editor of Ford Maddox Ford's The Good Soldier (Brill Rodopi, 2007), and translator of three novels from Bulgarian into English. She has published numerous articles on noir and crime fiction, on modern writers such as Toni Morrison and Salman Rushdie, on crime writers like Patricia Highsmith and Umberto Eco, and on theorists Julia Kristeva and Michel Foucault.

Introduction

Had he survived the stroke that killed him in 2013, Elmore Leonard would be celebrating his 95th birthday in October of this year, 2020. Had his mental faculties remained intact, he would also, presumably, have completed Blue Dreams, the book he was working on when he died. It would have featured a young Hispanic bull‐rider targeted by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent for deportation, and raised to 46 the number of books he had written since 1954. He might also have added another short story or two to the dozens he'd published since his first in 1951. Even to have reached the age of 87 evokes admiration, considering how many fatal diseases threaten to take down chain‐smoking octogenarians, not to mention those who had drunk themselves into the hospital and AA's Twelve‐Step program by middle age. Leonard's physical and mental longevity testifies to a constitutional fortitude that was more than matched by his indefatigable creative energy. Over the span of his writing career, working a regular nine‐to‐five weekday shift in his office while sitting in front of a stack of yellow lined paper and a typewriter, Leonard completed a book every 16 months, on average. During the period when he was writing crime novels predominantly, that rate was closer to a book a year. Impressive as they are, however, longevity and stamina are not sufficient reasons for taking a writer's work seriously enough to devote a collection of critical essays to it. George Simenon wrote upwards of three books a year in the nearly 60 years of his writing life. That's not why his work has drawn the attention of those who devote their careers, academic and otherwise, to studying and writing about crime fiction.

Elmore Leonard found the readers he sought not long after he began writing westerns at the age of 25. That readership continued to grow steadily up to the point where he shifted from westerns to crime fiction in the mid‐1960s, and almost immediately resumed its expansion until, with the publication of Glitz in 1985, he first established himself as an almost permanent fixture on the New York Times bestseller list. Academic interest in Leonard's work, meanwhile, lagged behind. Before the publication of my own critical biography, Being Cool: The Work of Elmore Leonard, in 2013, just days before the author's death, only three books on Leonard had been published, all necessarily partial because they appeared while their prolific subject was still breathing. During that span of years, little other criticism appeared besides reviews and interviews, while the list of Leonard's admirers among serious writers grew to include the likes of Saul Bellow, Martin Amis, Robert Pinsky, Walker Percy, Joyce Carol Oates, and Ann Beattie. This anthology of essays was solicited, selected, edited, and published with the hope of inspiring more of my academic colleagues who teach and write about crime fiction to follow their lead.

What attracted renowned authors like these to Elmore Leonard's work?

Amis may have put it best when he told an American audience, in a public interview he conducted with the writer in January 1998, that Leonard came “as close as anything you have here in America to a national novelist, a concept that almost seemed to die with Charles Dickens but has here been revived” (Amis 1998, p. 1). There's something to this, but also much more. Unlike Dickens's complex, often ornate prose, Leonard's writing is clean and direct, simple but not simplistic, and for that very reason capable of engaging with some of the most enduring and complex themes of American cultural and pop‐cultural history without strain. His characterizations rarely venture beyond a limited set of types, but only because he is interested in the archetypes of American character they represent. Nearly all of them, nonetheless, achieve a vividness of self‐definition that can surprise you, less through physical description than by the idiosyncratic ways they respond to their historical place and time, whether we are talking about Contention, Arizona in 1884, Detroit, Michigan in 1974, Oklahoma City in 1935, or Havana, Cuba in 1898.

Three other features of Leonard's style stand out and, I believe, largely account for his appeal to both professional writers and the common reader. First, his bad guys (and gals) are often the most engaging of his characters and the most distinctly individuated, bordering on grotesque. They run the gamut from highly intelligent to moronic and from cunning to stupid and often combine both of the latter traits without apparent contradiction. They can be buffoonishly amateurish or proudly professional, psychopathic or drawn to a life of crime by what seems (to them) just common sense. Whatever their personality profiles, however, even at their most menacing, Leonard's lawbreakers can elicit an unexpected smile, and even a gleam of recognition in an unwary reader.

One of the things that often helps mitigate their otherwise unappealing qualities is the second outstanding feature of Leonard's writing: its deadpan sense of humor. For all the talk about how funny Leonard's way with dialogue is, it's only so in context. He doesn't, as a rule, write witticisms, because he doesn't find characters funny if they think they're being funny. Here's an example from Killshot, in which Carmen Colson is reading a real‐estate brochure for Cape Girardeau, Missouri. She and her husband, Wayne, are thinking about relocating there as participants in the Federal Witness Security Program because they've been targeted by two career criminals. The brochure tells Carmen that Cape Girardeau is so friendly that strangers on the street will stop to ask who you are, “And if you give them the opportunity, they will take the time to know you.” Carmen imagines being stopped by a friendly citizen and asked where she's from:

She answers, “I'm sorry, I can't tell you. We're in the Federal Witness Security Program, hiding from some people who want to kill us.” And the person says, “Oh, uh‐huh. Yeah, well, have a nice day.”

(Leonard 1999, p. 155)

Most of the time, Leonard's humor works because he's allowing us to listen in on characters like Carmen talking to themselves, not to others, and certainly not in order to get a laugh. As a rule, they don't know they're funny. This was one reason why so few of Leonard's books that seemed tailor‐made for film succeeded onscreen. Many directors didn't understand what made his humor work. Get Shorty did work, in part because Leonard told Barry Sonnenfeld, its director, “When someone delivers a funny line, I hope you don't cut to another actor to get a reaction, like a grin or a laugh or something, because these people are serious” (Orr 2014, para. 11). Sonnenfeld listened.

Third and last, but not least, among the features that distinguish Leonard's style of writing and make it worthy of serious critical attention is his genius at handling free indirect discourse. Here's a minor example, from Tishomingo Blues (Leonard 2016), in which Dennis Lenahan gets his first sight of the Tishomingo Lodge & Casino, where he'll be setting up his high‐diving act:

It featured a tepee‐like structure rising a good three stories above the entrance, a precast concrete tepee with neon tubes running up and around it. Or was it a wigwam?

(Leonard 2016, p. 659)

The question at the end of this passage marks it as free indirect discourse. It's a question, clearly, that Dennis is asking, but it's conveyed in the voice of the narrator. Just as clearly, Dennis is posing the question silently, not vocalizing it. Otherwise, it would be in quotes and we'd call it direct discourse. If it were speech that Dennis was describing or reporting to someone else, without quotes around it, we'd call it indirect discourse. In addition, while we seem to be listening in on Dennis's question as he asks it, it's posed in the historical past tense, rather than the present tense of conscious thought, as would be the case with interior monologue. This is free indirect discourse: third‐person narration that behaves like first‐person reflection. Leonard is capable of making these seamless transitions into and out of his character's heads repeatedly and over narrative stretches that can span several pages at a time. He is as masterful in handling them as Jane Austen or Gustave Flaubert.

Dennis's question is, ostensibly, trivial or even irrelevant to the plot of the book, unless we know that Leonard does know the difference between these two words: he was a painstaking researcher on the culture and history of the Plains Indians populating his early westerns, who lived in “teepees,” and he knew the Delta country, where Tishomingo Blues takes place, as well as its history because he was born in New Orleans, where much of his extended family remained after his immediate family moved away when he was a boy. Tishomingo was among the last full‐blooded chiefs of the Chickasaw Nation that once lived in that region and who lived in dome‐shaped huts generically called, in English, “wigwams” (from the Algonquin and Ojibwa languages). Dennis's hesitation marks the level of indifference that modernity imposes on white America's historical imagination by collapsing history into tokens of the past, most often in order, as here, to make money. Dennis, like every other white character in the book, is thoroughly interpellated into this attenuated cultural sign system. (Entire chapters of Tishomingo Blues are devoted to Civil War reenactments and their participants.) Leonard's free indirect discourse lets us listen in on how a typical modern white subject tries to make sense of what is missing – the past – from the present, and presence, of its simulacra. The result can border on nonsense. At the Tishomingo Lodge & Casino, which occupies land stolen from a people who were force‐marched along President Andrew Jackson's “Trail of Tears” to vast concentration camps called “reservations,” Dennis meets “Chickasaw Charlie,” a washed‐up professional baseball pitcher who now makes a living off tourists who think he can't strike them out.

Free indirect discourse is the primary means by which Leonard achieved his most important aim in writing: authorial transparency. The title of this anthology, in fact, is taken from the “eleventh” of his “10 Rules of Good Writing” (a list cited by several contributors): “If it sounds like writing, I re‐write it.” Well known to Leonard's fans, epigones, and peers, the eleventh rule testifies to the author's success at making himself what he calls “invisible” in his own writing, but it also poses a challenge to any critic trying to understand how Leonard achieves so much with so little “visible” effort. I believe it's a challenge well worth accepting because the payoff can be immense, as I hope the essays assembled here will demonstrate.

The chapters that follow are divided into two parts, the first tracing recurrent threads of interest in the warp and weave of Leonard's writing, the second presenting case studies of individual works. Three of Leonard's titles, Get Shorty, Out of Sight, and Rum Punch, appear repeatedly, in part because these books went on to become popular motion pictures and some of the authors writing about them have things to say about their cinematic as well as written versions. The essays as a whole cover a wide span of Leonard's career, range of interests, and choice of locales: from his westerns to his penultimate completed book, from fashion to metafiction, and from Detroit to Rwanda.

Part I, “Topics and Themes,” opens with an essay by Michael Scrivener, “Nostalgia and Authenticity in Elmore Leonard's Conflicted Heroes,” that focuses on existentialism as a force shaping characterization in City Primeval and Pagan Babies. Leonard's introduction to existentialism, and to Jean‐Paul Sartre in particular, came when he was an undergraduate minoring in philosophy at the University of Detroit. Scrivener is interested in how the Sartrean concept of nostalgia – one's identification with a prefabricated social role – informs the behavior of police detective Raymond Cruz, the protagonist of the first book, and small‐time crook Terry Dunn, the protagonist of the second. Cruz's nostalgia for a vanished archetype of the frontier gunslinger (a theme drawn from Leonard's early days as a writer of westerns) is a form of “bad faith” that leads him into the thickets of inauthenticity, while, ironically, Dunn's cynical adoption of the role of priest, which is, in effect, a family inheritance, leads him in the opposite direction.

“Elmore Leonard and the Romantic Comedy,” by Michael Sinowitz, traces the author's surprising debts to this durable, upbeat genre, principally in its twentieth century cinematic form. Making note of examples ranging from Shakespeare to Woody Allen, Sinowitz focuses on how Leonard adopts, but also adapts to his own purposes as a crime writer, the plots of American romantic comedies that he would have seen growing up, including screwball and divorce variations like The Awful Truth (1937) and The Philadelphia Story (1940). In the end, however, books like Swag, 52‐Pickup, and Killshot seem to have more affinity with the revisionary “radical romantic comedies” of the 1970s than with the classics of the genre.

In “The Sense of Place in Elmore Leonard's Crime Fiction,” David Geherin begins with Leonard's westerns and takes us on a whirlwind tour of times and locales to show how, by being made to observe a place through a particular character's point of view and free indirect discourse, we can learn as much about the character as the place. Detroit, Florida, Atlantic City, and Hollywood appear on the itinerary, revealing Leonard's love of contrasts and his agility at conveying a sense of locale not only through attitudes but also through memories of what is now missing.

Like Geherin, but focusing on representations of character rather than place, Frankie Y. Bailey argues that Leonard's fondness for adopting and shifting among a wide range of points of view provides opportunities to tell readers about the character who is watching as well as the character being watched. “Visual Clues: Dress, Appearance, and Perception in Elmore Leonard's Crime Fiction” first examines this device at work in Leonard's novels before moving on to his best‐known films, where point of view and free indirect discourse are not available for such purposes and an actor's previous movie roles must fill the void, for better or worse.

In “The Mozart of the Motor City: Elmore Leonard and Noir Buffa,” Kris Mecholsky combines Scrivener's interest in existentialism with Sinowitz's interest in genre to produce a historical study of parallel generic developments in the transition from opera seria to opera buffa in the eighteenth century and from noir seria to noir buffa 200 years later. In both developments, he points out, what began as a rebellion on behalf of realism against the artifice and implausibility of, in the one case, Baroque Italian opera and, in the other, the Golden Age whodunit, became itself the target of a rebellion promoting a more tragicomic and quotidian version of realism. Leonard's noir buffa participates in and exemplifies this second‐wave rebellion in American crime fiction.

Part II, “Five Case Studies,” offers close readings and analysis of individual works spanning nearly half a century of Leonard's career, from the publication of Hombre in 1961 to that of Djibouti in 2010.

We begin this second half of the anthology with Korine Powers's “The Man with Five Names: Hombre on Race and the Cinematic Western.” Powers reads this prizewinning novel, the capstone of the author's early engagement with America's most original and characteristic genre, as a commentary on race and racism in postwar Civil Rights America. While noting Leonard's cinematic debts to western films like Stagecoach and Shane, Powers is particularly interested in how Leonard's use of a first‐person narrator – the only such example in his entire oeuvre–crucially mediates and shapes the challenges that the indeterminate race of John Russell, the “hombre” of the title, poses to America's formulaic constructions of race, not only on page and screen, but in the white American imaginary.

“Pitching Cinematic Identification in Get Shorty” examines theories of audience identification through the lens of one of Leonard's best‐known metafictions. Philip Derbesy sees the portrait of the Hollywood film industry in this novel as the author's means of reflecting on the complicated dynamics of sympathy and empathy at play in the novel itself and in Leonard's work as a whole. Does our moral judgment of a character's behavior affect our ability to identify with them? Is it possible to “identify” with a “bad guy”? Do we need to understand a character's “backstory” before we can make sense of their behavior? These are questions that Get Shorty poses as it describes its characters' attempts to conceive, as well as “pitch,” movies. They are also questions that Leonard's fiction consistently raises in the minds of his readers.

My own contribution, “‘It's the way they're done”: Style and Legerdemain in Out of Sight,” pursues a close reading of Leonard's popular novel in light of its title, which I interpret as an allusion to tropes of magic shaping the plot throughout the book and reflecting the author's own writing practices. Shape‐shifting, vanishing, dismemberment, tele‐transportation, and above all, timing are among the repertoire of “illusions” and techniques that Leonard references as we follow bank robber Jack Foley in his amatory pursuit of US Marshal Karen Sisco, his law enforcement nemesis.

Questions of moral judgment take center stage in Rossitsa Terzieva‐Artemis's “Moral Luck and Determinism in Rum Punch.” Drawing on current theories regarding the impact of random events on our moral judgment of others' actions, Terzieva‐Artemis finds ample illustrations of the four major types of “moral luck” shaping readers' judgments in Rum Punch, where the concept affects our moral evaluation of nearly every major character, as well as our feelings about the way the novel ends.

We end Part II, and this anthology, with “Disjointed Djibouti: Elmore Leonard's Final Metafiction,” which I volunteered to coauthor with George Grella when a serious illness prevented him from completing the essay he had originally conceived for this collection. In it, we argue that Leonard's penultimate novel was intended as a career retrospection on the challenges and choices facing narrative artists, conveyed through a story about making a documentary about pirates that starts turning into a much more sensational tale about terrorism. Dara Barr and Xavier LeBo, the filmmaker and her assistant, represent two roads repeatedly diverging in their creator's long history as a popular writer with one eye on the cinema and TV screens: remaining true to your talents, to your respect for the facts, and to your worldview, or compromising them in the pursuit of a Hollywood success. All the hard lessons he had to learn are here summarized in Dara's and Xavier's opposing views of what kind of movie – a documentary or a feature film – they should be making. Dara's final choice, though strongly implied, is never confirmed.

On that note, I end with the hope that readers will find in these essays evidence enough to confirm that the choices Elmore Leonard made over the six decades of his writing life were not only the right ones, but also worth our critical attention, reflection, and discussion.

References

Amis, M. (1998) “Martin Amis interviews Elmore Leonard at the Writers Guild Theatre, Beverly Hills, January 23, 1998.”

http://www.martinamisweb.com/interviews_files/amis_int_leonard.pdf

(accessed 18 August 2019).

Leonard, E. (1999).

Killshot

. New York: Quill/Morrow.

Leonard, E. (2016).

Tishomingo Blues

. In:

Four Later Novels

(ed. G. Sutter), 653–885. New York: Library of America.

Orr, C. (2014). The Elmore Leonard paradox.

The Atlantic

(January‐February)

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/01/the‐elmore‐leonard‐paradox/355734

(accessed 31 May 2019).

Part ITopics and Themes

1Nostalgia and Authenticity in Elmore Leonard's Conflicted Heroes

Michael Scrivener

Some of Elmore Leonard's fictional heroes like Raymond Cruz (City Primeval 1980 in Leonard 2015) and Terry Dunn (Pagan Babies2000) have identities fractured by nostalgia and inauthenticity, or what Jean‐Paul Sartre called bad faith (mauvaise foi). That Leonard was familiar with French existentialism, that he minored in philosophy at the University of Detroit and came to intellectual maturity when Sartre, Camus, and existentialism were influential in postwar educated circles, are well established (Rzepka 2013, pp. 39–40). I am not suggesting Leonard was a careful student of Sartre's work or that there are direct influences on the fiction from philosophical sources. Rather, Leonard's writing is often shaped by existentialist concerns, such as identity and freedom, the concept of the absurd, and the issue of autonomy and responsibility. People do grow intellectually as they get older, and some experience radical changes, but it is also true that the way people look at the world in their early twenties is both formative and in many respects enduring. I am not the only reader of Leonard's work who sees strong continuity between his 1950s westerns and his later crime fiction (Noçon 2013, pp. 117–119; Hynes 1991, p. 184).

Nostalgia, as I am using the concept, is a form of Sartrean bad faith in that one is lying not only to other people but also to oneself (Sartre 1965, pp. 137–140). The myth of the American West is an obvious example of cultural nostalgia, a way of avoiding historical reality in order to substitute a set of comforting lies about white supremacy and innocence for a painful and guilt‐laden understanding. Leonard's westerns, while remaining within the generic boundaries of the western, dismantle this myth with effectiveness and moral insight. A part of the western myth that has carried over into the twentieth century and our own era is the idealized figure of the rugged individualist who upholds a chivalric code of honor and masculine strength, protection of women and the weak, physical courage, and sexual power. While Leonard's fiction, early and late, exposes the delusions and immorality of white supremacy by representing with respect and honesty Hispanic, black, and Native American characters, it also shows how his conflicted white heroes struggle against ideological delusions.

Leonard's protagonists are not just flawed but occupy the role of hero only with considerable awkwardness. Raymond Cruz, who ordinarily follows the professional norms of police work, also models himself after the heroes of Hollywood westerns, and stages a confrontation with the mass murderer Clement Mansell that resembles an old western gunfight. Cruz is playing a mass‐mediated role attached to the nostalgic mythology of frontier justice, and that very artificial structure brings him close to what postwar existentialists like Sartre call inauthenticity, the inability to encounter reality without myths or lies or false assumptions. By contrast, in Pagan Babies, where Terry Dunn – thief, con man, alcoholic, and anything but sexually abstinent – also plays the role of Catholic priest in Rwanda during the genocide of 1994, the path to authenticity is, ironically, by way of a highly conventional nostalgia. The plot of the novel seems to be moving in a direction that would allow “Father” Dunn to exploit his role and his photographs of orphaned Tutsis to embezzle money for his own use, but the novel concludes with Dunn returning to Rwanda and his Tutsi girlfriend Chantelle, eager to help the people as if he were a real priest. If nostalgia made Terry want to please his uncle and mother by playing priest – which helped him avoid an indictment for cigarette smuggling – it also led to his confrontation with reality, the Hutu slaughter of his Tutsi congregation. Dunn's traumatized witnessing of the massacre and daily interaction with the survivors leads in a circuitous way to his authentic identity, someone who is priest‐like, if not a real priest.

The Oklahoma Wildman and the Gunfighter: City Primeval

One of Leonard's most memorable villains is Clement Mansell, the Oklahoma Wildman, a psychopathic killer who is insightful, charismatic, and clever. As Leonard explained in a 2000 interview, the bad guys are more fun to create (Taylor 2000, p. 134), and as one can also see there is a degree of self‐identification with his scoundrels, even the most murderous. Leonard, who as a boy lived briefly in Oklahoma before his family moved to Detroit when he was eight, reports that as a child he pretended he was one of the famous gangsters of the 1930s like Pretty Boy Floyd and Machine Gun Kelly (Taylor 2000, p. 138). By making Mansell hail from Oklahoma and by making his antagonist Raymond Cruz a Detroiter from the age of 10, Leonard seems to be infusing both characters with his own life experiences. As an author Leonard has an ability to get inside even the most despicable of characters, and as readers experience the world through the feelings and sensations of loathsome characters like Mansell, they understand more and judge less. With City Primeval Leonard presents the reader with spectacularly violent crime focalized through the character of a police detective in a city that by the late 1970s was internationally famous as a site of urban blight and decay, black crime, white flight, and postindustrial ruin (Herron 1993). The novel pushes against white fantasies of black criminality by depicting blacks as victims of violence rather than symbols of violent wildness.

Detroit is depicted as a kind of wilderness, if by that we mean an absence of civilized order. The novel opens with a report on Judge Alvin B. Gay, who is about to be removed from the bench for gross misconduct and corruption. He threatens to expose powerful people if the state supreme court acts against him (Leonard 2015, pp. 3–7). Judge Gay is modeled after the real Judge James Del Rio who was in fact removed from the bench (Dudar and Laitner 2018) and who played a prominent role in the racial politics of the 1970s in the era of Mayor Coleman A. Young. When in the very first chapter Mansell murders Judge Gay, the novel puts race and violence in the front of the reader's attention, but not in the way it was usually represented at the time, with whites fearing black violence – unreasonably, because most victims were African American. In the racially polarized atmosphere of the late 1970s, Leonard here decides to approach race a little off center, bracketing out the stereotypical divisions by pitting a racist white murderer against an Irish‐Hispanic policeman. Other than Judge Gay, who like most victims of violent crime in Detroit is African American, the black characters play a minor role in the novel. Race rather exists as a powerful imaginary construct, especially in the racist rhetoric and racist killings of Mansell. If Leonard's white readers thought that their preconceptions about urban black violence were going to be reinforced in City Primeval (CP), they must have been disappointed. In the essay Leonard wrote in 1978 for the Detroit News Sunday Magazine, “Impressions of Murder,” the sympathetic treatment of the Detroit police is joined with a compassionate if brutally honest depiction of blacks killing other black people (Leonard 2015, pp. 937–948).

The novel focuses rather on the phenomenon of wildness, something that in Leonard's treatment is either racialized as white racism or located in a mythical West. His novel thereby encourages a thoughtful angle on urban violence. Raymond Cruz's love interest is named, not accidentally, Carolyn Wilder, who is Mansell's defense attorney. Wildness in some form is something shared by the main characters; it is also something at the heart of what Leonard is imagining to be the essence of American rugged individualism.

By opening the novel with Judge Gay's flamboyant lack of professionalism and murder at Mansell's hands, Leonard dramatizes the relevance of Yeats's (1956) famous lines in “Second Coming” that “the centre cannot hold” (l. 3), that the rule of law that enables a civilized society to function nonviolently and legitimately has been severely compromised. Cruz himself is both a proud professional who upholds the rule of law and someone who ignores the law for a form of frontier or western or wilderness justice. Mansell, who even before killing Judge Gay has already killed eight people, most of them black (Leonard 2015, p. 80), kills Gay mostly because he's a black man with a pretty white woman. He has spent only a short time in prison for all his crimes, and he was able to escape punishment for murder on a technicality engineered by his lawyer, Carolyn Wilder. Early in the novel the police know with certainty that Mansell has killed Judge Gay, but they can't prosecute him for the crime unless they find the murder weapon; even then he might evade conviction if the evidence is equivocal. The rule of law doesn't seem to work, as the law seems indistinguishable from lawlessness.

Indeed, the novel sympathetically represents the Albanians who seek to kill Mansell after they discover he has victimized one of their own. The Albanians here seem like the Apaches in Leonard's westerns, a tribal culture deserving respect for its integrity (Devlin 1999, p. 71). What exactly then is the rule of law? the novel seems to be asking. The Albanian Toma speaks of killing Mansell while looking in his eyes (Leonard 2015, pp. 142–143), and in the climactic scene when Cruz kills Mansell he is looking him in the eyes (p. 204), thus connecting Toma and Cruz, even though the one is officially an Albanian criminal and the other a police detective. The question is whether the tribal system of justice is designed to contain or to initiate violence. The Albanians seem interested in containing violence, but the reader is uncertain what Cruz is doing.

Another uncertainty is the relationship between Carolyn Wilder and Cruz. The detective confronting and having sex with the successful woman attorney follows a pattern that could bolster stereotypes about professional women who really need the protection of a strong man. Leonard's depiction of this problematic relationship plays it both ways or, perhaps, creates an undecidable ambiguity. In chapter 16 Cruz challenges Wilder because she is supporting Mansell's alibi for the time period when he attempted to kill Cruz at his Palmer Park apartment. In the next chapter they have sex or, as Cruz would phrase it, “make love” or, after he is annoyed with her, “fuck” (Leonard 2015, pp. 101–113). In Cruz's eyes there is a point where he and Wilder seem to connect in an authentic way, giving rise to his saying “I know you” (p. 109), but shortly afterwards he thinks she's assuming the role of lawyer and he is disillusioned (Leonard 2015, p. 110). His “I know you” sounds like a moment of authenticity, or at least Cruz would like it to be, but he suspects that Carolyn only pretended to be needy and weak in order to seduce him:

He wondered what he felt about her beyond the fact he liked her eyes and her nose and her body. He wondered if he had been genuinely moved or if he had only wanted to mount and subdue the dignified, distinguished lady lawyer, or if it had been the other way around and it was Raymond Cruz who had been seduced.

(Leonard 2015, p. 111)

Because the reader has only Cruz's focalized consciousness to see through, we don't know for certain what is going on with Carolyn. Another way to look at their sexual encounter is that she wanted to cement the alliance between herself and Cruz to protect her from her dangerous client Mansell in case she had a difficult time controlling him, something she says several times she thinks she can do. Moreover, she can compromise a police detective, which will be helpful in her future legal work, while enjoying good sex. She has little to lose here. She can still defend her client if that is what she has to do. It turns out that she cannot control Mansell, although she has taken pride in thinking that she can indeed do so (Devlin 1999, p. 68); instead, Mansell physically abuses her, at which point she gives up trying to help him and collaborates wholly with Cruz. During Wilder's conversation with Cruz after Mansell has physically beaten her, she asks what Cruz meant when he said earlier that he “knew” her.

Well, it was like I saw you. Not what you do or who you believe you are, just you.

(Leonard 2015, p. 183)

Wilder does not say that she understands Cruz or experienced anything similar, leading the reader to infer that the authentic connection with Wilder was something Cruz wanted and imagined he had; she, however, seems noncommittal – indeed, noncommittal to the very end. Did they really connect as two human beings rather than as calculating social beings looking out for their own interests? Cruz seems to be playing a hypermasculine role, using the notion of a genuine connection as a form of domination. The day after they have had sex Cruz imagines retaliating against her for telling him their sex was “about what I expected” (Leonard 2015, p. 113); he wishes he had said something to her to “nail” her “to the antique headboard, her mouth open” (Leonard 2015, p. 114). By the novel's end the reader does not know exactly what Wilder feels for Cruz. After she is beaten up, she wants revenge for not being able to control Mansell; she tells Cruz that she wants Mansell killed (Leonard 2015, p. 182), knowing that Cruz might actually do it – and he eventually does. When things fall apart, and her strategy for containing Mansell's violence fails, she expresses no remorse or insight into the ethics of her professional conduct. In her own realm she is “wild,” exercising her power within a legal system without a moral “centre.”

The wildness of the Oklahoma Wildman encompasses the murder of nine people, but it is surprising to see the police detective Cruz achieve a connection with Mansell that seems stronger than his relationship with Carolyn Wilder. Early in the novel, with just a little evidence, Cruz figures out that Mansell is the murderer of Judge Gay. He recalls Mansell's role in a triple murder three years earlier at the drug house on St. Mary's where the Wildman used a Walther P38, which wends its way as a real and imaginary object through the plot like a traditional MacGuffin – the term popularized by Alfred Hitchcock to describe an arbitrary object that propels the plot. It is something more than that as well because it is the material object linking together Mansell and Cruz. Cruz speaks of Mansell with language inflected with sexual fantasy – “he's got very large balls” (Leonard 2015, p. 61) – and seems to admire his physical courage – “a daredevil, a death‐defier” (Leonard 2015, p. 61). The two of them do a dance, as Cruz makes the first move, then Mansell countermoves, then Cruz counters, and so on, up to the violent climax in the final chapter.

When they first meet face to face in the office of Carolyn Wilder, Mansell's lawyer, Cruz wants to dominate the Wildman physically – “Pick Clement up and throw him against the wall, hard enough to put him out” – (Leonard 2015, p. 67), but he also feels “a strange rapport with the man that excluded the woman lawyer, made her an outsider” (Leonard 2015, p. 68). Shortly after this encounter Cruz has Mansell arrested on minor traffic violations just in order to interrogate him tête à tête, and their exchange brings them remarkably close to one another. While Cruz conducts a factual interrogation trying to get Mansell to give information and confess, there is a subtext of sexual tension and sadomasochistic pleasure. Cruz speaks of “nailing” him, while Mansell remarks “you really want my ass, don't you?” Mansell remarks on the small size of Cruz's gun and asks if he is “good” with it (Leonard 2015, p. 81). They get to a point where they agree their conflict is “personal” – as Mansell says, “‘you just want me’” – and he continues to make insightful observations that Cruz has no “higher motive,” is playing a