'Western stories revisited
The book is in no way autobiographical, but every now
and then you get the sense that Elmore Leonard, who is now pushing 80,
may be reflecting on the nature of his own vocation. By Charles McGrath
By Elmore Leonard.
William Morrow. €20
Elmore Leonard may have more kinds of fans than any other writer. He's beloved by the millions of satisfied readers who reliably propel each of his books onto the best-seller lists; by the Hollywood types, whose zeal for Leonard's novels seemingly burns in inverse proportion to their ability to make anything but turkeys out of them; and even by the literary establishment, including writers like Martin Amis, Saul Bellow and Ann Beattie, who have in effect awarded Leonard, a crime novelist, an honorary membership in the Serious Authors' Club. He holds the same chair that used to be occupied there by Chandler, Hammett and Ross Macdonald.
What literary writers like about Leonard is, presumably, the same thing everyone else does: his books are almost ruthlessly efficient entertainment machines. They have enough plot to make them page turners but not so much that you don't want to start them over again as soon as you've finished, not enough to get in the way of his characters, that great gallery of chiselers, hustlers, small-time hoods and drug dealers and the entourage of bimbos, bail bondsmen and loan sharks that attends them – all of whom speak in dialogue that, while never unconvincing, is also a jazzy, colourful improvement on ordinary speech.
The literary set also admires Leonard's style – or antistyle, rather. "If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it," he said once, and unlike EB White, for example, who wisely ignored many of the precepts set down in his Elements of Style, Leonard has resolutely stood by his own 10-point aesthetic manifesto, one version of which was scribbled down on a cocktail napkin. It begins with the warning: "Never open your book with weather". Over the years he has perfected the Hemingway-esque ideal of a style so clear, so simple and direct, that it's practically transparent, free of authorial fingerprints. His only stylistic tic is his frequent use of a present participle in place of a verb (as when he introduces a line of dialogue simply with a character's name and the word "saying"), and even that seems less an attention-getting mannerism than another little gift to the reader.
Leonard has also never burdened the reader by stuffing his books with a lot of ideas, and has preferred instead to work dozens of intricate variations on two reliable notions: that in this country there is hardly anyone who won't sell his soul for a quick buck and that the consequences of such a transaction are invariably comic and disastrous. But in Leonard's latest novel, The Hot Kid, there is the germ of something new; this is a novel that, not very far beneath the surface, is all about style, literary and otherwise, and in the end it gently proposes something like an ethics of storytelling. The book is in no way autobiographical, but every now and then you get the sense that Leonard, who is now pushing 80, may be reflecting on the nature of his own vocation.
The Hot Kid is uncharacteristic in other ways, too. For one thing, it's not terribly funny, or not by Leonard standards. And it's an historical novel, though not in the way of Cuba Libre, his book about the Spanish-American War, which occasionally sagged under the weight of research. The Hot Kid is set in Oklahoma in the 1930s, where Leonard and his family briefly lived before settling in Detroit, where Leonard has been based ever since. "There is something about that time which affected me," Leonard said last year in an interview with The Times. "It was said that there were probably 20 bank robbers for every doctor in America then, and I was certainly aware of the desperadoes."
Bonnie and Clyde, Pretty Boy Floyd, Machine Gun Kelly, John Dillinger and Baby Face Nelson – all the outlaws who captured both the headlines and the American imagination in the early 1930s make brief appearances in the novel, which is also at pains, in Leonard's minimalist fashion, to evoke the look and feel and even the music of the period. We get glimpses of the Light Crust Doughboys, the great hillbilly swing band, for example, and hear about the wild music played by coloured fellows named Count Basie and Louis Armstrong. There are scenes in tourist courts and roadhouses and in Kansas City speakeasies where the waitresses work in their underwear or in nothing at all. Where so much of Leonard's recent fiction has a sharp, almost hyperrealistic quality, The Hot Kid is noir-ish and even a little pulpy at times, in the fashion of 1930s movies and detective magazines.
The Hot Kid of the title is Carlos Webster, the son of a wealthy pecan farmer and Spanish-American War hero. When he is 15, Carlos witnesses a drugstore robbery and cold-blooded killing, and the experience both fascinates and matures him. He grows a "hard bark", as his father says, and a few months later, when he catches someone rustling his father's cattle, he shoots him without a second thought. The federal marshal investigating the case is so impressed by Carlos's coolness – by his "strutting", he says later – that he offers him a job. By the time he's 21, Deputy US Marshal Carl Webster is the hottest young lawman in the West, his reputation considerably enhanced by his knocking off the robber Emmett Long, the very one who committed the drugstore murder. At the time, Webster may or may not have stared Long down, saying, "If I have to pull my weapon I'll shoot to kill," but the line, genuine or not, quickly becomes his trademark: the only time Carl Webster draws his gun, or so it is said, "it's to shoot somebody dead".
Webster, it turns out, is not your traditional selfless lawman. He's not a bad guy, but neither is he preoccupied with the finer points of truth and justice. Being a marshal is just a role he hugely enjoys playing. He constantly practices and refines his catchphrase, and he can't pass a mirror without checking himself out: "He slipped a pair of handcuffs into a pocket of the raincoat – he didn't like the hard metal feel of the cuffs on the back of his belt. Spare rounds were always in his suitcoat pocket. What else? His wallet, change, a pack of gum, the keys to the Pontiac Eight sedan they were letting him use. Nine minutes later he pulled up in front of the Mayo Hotel. In the lobby he glanced at himself in a mirror, lifted his hat and eased it down a bit closer on his eyes, the brown hat working, Deputy Marshal Carl Webster looking good."
Like nearly everyone in the book – like his father, for example, who keeps a scrapbook of Carl's shootings, or his girlfriend, Louly, who used to yearn to be Pretty Boy Floyd's mistress – Carl is preoccupied with the dynamics of fame and reputation; he wants to be a celebrity. So does his chief antagonist, a small-time robber, roughly Webster's age, named Jack Belmont, who aspires to be Public Enemy No 1. Belmont is a more familiar Leonard figure. He's a thorough creep – and not a terribly bright one either – who sleeps with his friends' wives and once tried to kill his own sister just because his oilman father named a couple of wells after her . And yet, as is so often the case in Leonard's world, in which the losers are more interesting than the winners, there is something almost endearing about Belmont's ineptitude and delusions; he's more vivid than Carlos and emotionally, at least, he is the far hotter kid, flaring up like an oil-well blaze.
The most unusual character in the novel and in many ways the most crucial is, of all things, a writer. His name is Tony Antonelli – mercifully shortened, by a curmudgeonly editor, from the three-barreled byline Anthony Marcel Antonelli – and he is most certainly not a stylist of Hemingway-esque understatement. One of his most cherished leads, for example, is in flagrant violation of Leonard's Law No 1 (the one about weather): "The sky hung as a shroud over the Bald Mountain Club, gray and unforgiving, a day that dawned with an indifferent beginning, but would end in violent deaths for 12 victims of the massacre."
Antonelli, who, after an undistinguished stint with The Daily Times of Okmulgee, finds his real calling at True Detective Mystery magazine, is a hack, but an enterprising one. He manages to be on the scene, diligently taking notes, at almost all the novel's crucial moments, and he even figures in the plot a little, explaining the feds and the crooks to one another. We get little snippets of his prose throughout, and eventually it sinks in that he is working on a kind of shadow version of the very story we are reading -- one that will be considerably enhanced. At the close of The Hot Kid, which ends in unexpected fashion, Tony decides that his own version "would need dramatic effects, a certain tone and a strong sense of place".
There's a little irony here, of which Leonard is surely not unaware: he, the novelist, has written a sparer, more faithful account than we can expect from Tony Antonelli, the true-crime journalist. And yet The Hot Kid is not unsympathetic to Tony or to the pulp-magazine impulse – no surprise when we remember that Leonard got his start writing for magazines like Argosy, Dime Western and Zane Grey.
After leafing through an issue of True Detective, Tony is hooked by a single sentence: "Light beams, sweeping the sky like flowing yellow ribbons against a backdrop of black, shone from the walls of the Colorado State Penitentiary one winter night in 1932." He decides he is "meant" to write for True Detective because it means he can turn out prose like this and also "use more dialogue, the way people actually spoke". Even the photo captions have a kind of eloquence, he decides, and, better still, the magazine pays a nickel a word.
There is hope for this kid, we come to appreciate over the course of the novel, just as there is, eventually, for Carlos. Tony Antonelli isn't a portrait of the artist as young man, exactly, but rather a fond wink at the tradition of potboilers and genre writing that gave rise to Leonard himself and from which, for all his success, he has never cut himself off. Tony loves language – the purpler the better, unfortunately. But he has a good ear, a sharp eye, a soft spot for the downtrodden, and he knows a good yarn when he finds one. All he needs is a few tips – "Never use a verb other than 'said' to carry dialogue," for example (Leonard's Law No. 3), and "Try to leave out the parts that readers tend to skip."
Charles McGrath, the former editor of the Book Review, is a writer at large at The Times