"Fuck, it was cheese": Dietrich Kalteis' The Deadbeat Club

I'm not as high on Elmore Leonard as some crime fiction readers are, and my misgivings about George V. Higgins' The Friends of Eddie Coyle verge on heresy, according to at least one highly partisan commenter on this blog.Yet some of my favorite crime novels of recent years—by John McFetridge, Declan Burke, Charlie Stella, Garbhan Downey—are of the Higgins/Leonard school, with its humor; its ensemble casts and multiple points of view; its wry views of men and women at work; and equal measures of sympathy, understanding, and careful observation granted to cops and criminals alike.

The latest entry is Dietrich Kalteis' second novel, The Deadbeat Club, about the complications unleashed by a drug war in southern British Columbia, a war with at least five sides and ensuing complications of which Kalteis good narrative advantage.

Throw in fast action, an interesting observation about Canada and the United States as settings for crime*, and a use of cheese that you've likely never seen before in a crime novel, and you've got a few hours of heartwarming and violent fun on the way.

===================

* "His baby face defied his age, hair as wild as Tanner himself. Plenty of practice with Russian AKs, Tanner did a stint in the ashes of the former Yugoslavia. Left a body count up and down the Congo, hunted Al Qaeda and Islamics, popped off insurgents in Iraq, Darfur, more in the Gaza and Georgia. Now there was talk of North Korea. All the same to Tanner. A resume that had the military contractors drooling.

"North of the border things were different, no military contractors up here. Tanner lying low and getting high, starting to feel bored. So when he heard Travis wanted guns, sending his boys to the shipyard, he offered to throw in, not worried what the gig paid."

© Peter Rozovsky 2016

Why George V. Higgins but not Ross Thomas?

Crime writers and readers revere George V. Higgins for The Friends of Eddie Coyle, but we don’t talk much about Ross Thomas these days. This puzzles me, since Thomas was better than Higgins at some of the things Higgins is celebrated for: gritty looks at men at work, including criminals, and razor-sharp dialogue cleverly contrived to convey character and create the illusion that this is how people really speak.

 I base these remarks on Thomas' Missionary Stew, which appeared in 1983, thirteen years after The Friends of Eddie Coyle, and that's where the caveat comes in. Though an experienced novelist by the time ... Eddie Coyle appeared, could Thomas have been influenced by the younger writer, the way the similarly older, more experienced Elmore Leonard was?

I ask because the three previous Thomas novels I had read (Cast a Yellow Shadow, The Seersucker Whipsaw, and The Fools in Town Are on Our Side) either predate The Friends of Eddie Coyle or appeared the same year, and I don't remember those books bringing Higgins or Leonard to mind.

Though I don't get the esteem in which Higgins was held, I have no desire to knock him. But I would like to see a revival of interest in Thomas, and not just because he wrote with such wit about politics.

==========================

A wise commenter on my skeptical 2009 post about Eddie Coyle wrote: "I think it's comparatively rare for pioneering texts to stand up in the long term." Maybe Higgins is an example of that pioneer phenomenon, surpassed by his followers. I should like the guy, because I enjoy authors who look up to him and whose works is often compared to his: Bill James, Garbhan Downey, Dana King, Charlie Stella.

I'd hate to think that readers and critics might be scared off by Thomas because he wrote about politics. Don't be; he makes his subject real and funny/
© Peter Rozovsky 2015

Freaky Deaky: Elmore Leonard's post-Sixties trip in print and on screen

Poor 1960s! The decade that gave the world "Incense and Peppermints" does not get the respect it did for a while back there.  Elmore Leonard's Freaky Deaky, to name just one novel, has fun making fun of the decade's self-indulgent excess. An ex-radical recalls a meeting of

"The People's Coalition for something or other." 

"Peace and Justice." 

"Yeah, they had a bunch of celebrities giving talks. It was so goddamn boring, that's why I ripped 'em off."

Another character "didn't look at her again after that, as he collected the checks and left with the Panthers."

A third character recalls how a rock festival--you know, those bastions of freedom from the man, and all that--inspired him:

"I think it was at that moment, driving past everybody in that fucking stretch, I knew I would someday be in the entertainment business."

On Abbie Hoffman:

"I feel sorry for him too. The poor guy hiding out all those years and nobody was even looking for him."

On one of the era's half-assed impresarios:

"Fifteen-dollar admission a bummer. Should be a free concert. The promoter, a smart-ass youth-culture rip-off artist, asks if we give our newspapers away free."

Or this:

"And the guy's dopey girlfriend doesn't get it. She says, `Yeah, well, like there's plenty of freedom. We ball and everything.. ...' She was being used and didn't know it. You saw so much of that. All kinds of dumb kids taken advantage of by guys pretending to be gurus or Jesus..."

My favorite bit of the book, though, may be a blurb from an American newspaper that will likely surprise and amuse British readers:

"Leonard tops himself every time."

Boston Globe

***

I read Freaky Deaky after watching the 2012 movie adaptation, a film I did not know existed until I stumbled on it on Netflix. It's not a bad movie, incorporating much of Leonard's dialogue and judicious in what it cuts out. Did it disappear quickly, or did I just miss it?

One interesting decision was the casting of Breanne Racano, who was probably in her early twenties at the time, as Robin, who is around 40 in the book and doesn't pretend to be other than that in the movie (unlike, say, Emma Thompson, who changed Elinor Dashwood's age from 17 to 27 for her 1995 screen adaptation of Sense and Sensibility and was not terribly believable playing 27--no shock, since she was around 36 at the time.)

The makers of Freaky Deaky (Walter Matthau's son Charles directed) made the canny decision to have Robin wear lots of makeup and make sure the audience knows she's wearing it. And that makes her look like a woman trying to look younger than she is, which lets her slip rather smoothly into the role of a woman two decades older than she is. She's not a bad actress either, so her casting works better than it could have.

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

In memory of Elmore Leonard: The Westerns

In honor of Elmore Leonard, who died today after one of the longest and most influential careers in crime fiction, here's a Detectives Beyond Borders post from last year about the still-vital Westerns he wrote way back at the beginning. And here's a link to previous DBB posts about Leonard. Click the link, then scroll down. 

==============

Before I head east, a post about the West.

I don't know where Elmore Leonard fits in the history of the Western, other than that he wrote some good ones, Hombre and "3:10 to Yuma," to name two. But to this neophyte reader in the genre, Leonard's early stories make an instructive comparison with American crime fiction of the same time: the early 1950s. (That's right, the early 1950s. Leonard, whose latest novel, Raylan, has recently hit the shelves, was a published author at least as early as 1951.)

Here's the conclusion to one story:

"The Southwest was full of Hydes. And as long as there were Hydes, there were Billy Guays. Big talkers with big guns who ended up lying dead, after a while, in a Mimbre rancheria. Angsman would go back to Fort Bowie. Even if it got slow sometimes, there’d always be plenty to do."

The matter-of-fact resignation reminds me of hard-boiled crime writing from a few decades earlier. It's as if hard-boiled writing decamped for the West around 1951, leaving American crime fiction to the twisted mental worlds of Jim Thompson and David Goodis.

Leonard's Western stories are almost breathtakingly free of political correctness, unsparing in their discussions both of the counterproductive brutality of American policy toward the Apaches of the Southwest and of the blood-curdling violence and internecine feuds of some of those Apaches. Leonard is careful, too, to delineate different habits and war customs of various Apache bands, thus honoring their humanity more fully than do blanket views of Indians as bloodthirsty savages or creative and ecologically sensitive innocents.

Leonard gets great mileage of the tension between experienced Western scouts and hot-shot young military officers from back East, mining the theme both for dramatic conflict:

"It was his patrol and he was supposed to have the answers. That’s why he had a commission. But the face bore a puzzled expression. It was young, and lobster-red, and told openly that he was new to frontier station, though he had learned all the answers at the Point. You hesitate when it’s your command, your responsibility. When a dirty old man in an undershirt is studying you to see what you’ve got, waiting to pick you apart. And if he finds the wrong thing, the buzzards do the rest of the picking."

and for humor:

"`I’m only saying what if,' Travisin agreed, with a faint smile. `Could be one way or the other. I just want to impress you that we’re not chasing Harvard sophomores across the Boston Common.'''

And, Leonard being Leonard, he could work a good line out of a routine bit of description:

"A hundred things raced through his mind, and every one of them was a question."

or

"Six enlisted troopers prayed to six interpretations of God that the young lieutenant wasn’t a glory seeker … at least not on this patrol."

OK, that's it for now. More on Leonard later, and the next time I mention Western in a post, it will be next to Wall.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Elmore Leonard's "Raylan: A (non-) Novel"

Elmore Leonard's novel Raylan: A Novel is no novel, at least through its first two thirds, and I’ll eat my hat if it turns out to be one in the end.

Rather, it’s a collection of loosely linked stories, and a good one.  At least through the first two stories, it's as good as Pronto, the first Raylan Givens novel, and better than Riding the Rap. Characters in the second story will occasionally mention events in the first, but that’s as strong as the connection gets. I felt a bit cheated when I reached the first story’s satisfying end, only to find a new story beginning.

I wonder whether Leonard and his publishers really do regard the book as a loosely organized novel, or whether going out of their way to insist in the title that the book is a novel is strictly market-driven, a recognition that novels are an easier sell than short-story collections.

Any thoughts from Leonard fans and others?

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Hammett begat Leonard, and Leonard begat Nicol?

I finished Payback last night, first novel in Cape Town author Mike Nicol's "Revenge" trilogy, and I realized it reminded me a bit of Elmore Leonard.

Each author will have his protagonists pause amid the main action to engage in something like old-fashioned vaudeville cross-talk, one character cutting the other's verbal legs out from under him as they veer off into comic mutual misunderstanding. It can be great fun, and it does much to humanize the characters.

Then a Detectives Beyond Borders reader pointed out a passage from Dashiell Hammett's early story "Arson Plus" that does something similar. Hammett has the Continental Op stop, step back, and reflect upon the investigation in which he is engaged:

"We poked around in the ashes for a few minutes—not that we expected to find anything, but because it's the nature of man to poke around in ruins."

The humor here is darker and more introspective than Leonard's or Nicol's, but it similarly does much to flesh out the protagonists. The device helps explain what readers mean when they that say the characters are likable or that the authors have created sympathetic heroes (or, in Leonard's case, villains).

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Western

I felt right at home  in my first visit to Jerusalem in many years because the shuttle driver from Tel Aviv's Ben-Gurion Airport was impatient, as his kind proverbially are, but with a penchant for explaining things to the drivers at whom he raged (though no more than one could possibly have heard him). I didn't understand all his cursing, but the end of one string of invective sounded like simcha, the Hebrew word for happiness.

Spent my first evening wandering around the Old City, and I didn't get lost, at least not in any way worthy of the name.  The Old City is divided into Armenian, Christian, Jewish and Muslim quarters, so I saw:  Orthodox priests who, with just a splash of color in their garb, could have been Piero della Francesca's King Solomon; Chassidic Jews with hats cooler than those you'd see on any American hipster, and young Israeli Arabs who were more than happy to offer spur-of-the-moment advice, including one about 12 years old, who said, "It's closed" when I tried to wander down a side street to see the Al-Aqsa Mosque. "Only for Muslims."

Read some more Elmore Leonard on the plane over, including one story that began with a long, stolid, grimly straightforward description of a buffalo hunt that ended thus (the description, not the hunt):

"Wait until he rode into Leverette with a wagon full of hides, he thought. He’d watch close, pretending he didn’t care, and he’d see if anybody laughed at him then."

The man knows how to create tension.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Stuffed crowdedly with adverbs

Adverbs are out of favor in crime fiction these days, but American pulp writing in the middle of the last century was full of them — stuffedly full.

In Norbert Davis' stories, characters shave, kick, flip, search, punch, stab, fade, and flip through hotel registration cards "expertly." A  street car clangs its way emptily down the street. Raoul Whitfield, too, used adverbs more than is fashionable today and, if my memory serves me well, Raymond Chandler and perhaps even Dashiell Hammett would have a light blinking redly from time to time.

When did adverbs slip out of fashion? And why?

***

Was good grammar ever looked down on in tough-guy crime writing? The first-person narrator of a Mickey Spillane story originally published in Manhunt in 1953 tells us that "But having learned my lesson the hard way, he never got the chance to impose upon me again."

***

Finally, here's a bit from one of Elmore Leonard's stories published in 1951 (yes, the man has been writing for that long) that may be more pertinent today than ever:

"When he was through, he shook his head and silently cursed the stupidity of men trying to control a powder-keg situation two thousand miles from the likely explosion. ... Sometimes things get a bit hot; otherwise you just sit around and watch the desert."

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

I polish off Elmore Leonard

I've always hated one kind of self-consciousness in crime stories: the kind that has characters and narrators saying, "It was a foggy day, just like a detective story" or "If this were television, he would have solved the mystery in time for the commercial. But this wasn't television; this was real life." This does nothing but take me right out of the story.

Elmore Leonard's Riding the Rap offers the following:

“`I always wonder what that would be like, two guys facing each other with guns. 

“`Like in the movies,’ Louis said.”

*

“But the man didn’t drop like in the movies when getting hit over the head knocks the person out…”

*

“He had never seen it done in the movies this close.”

*

“Louis raised the Browning, cupped his left hand beneath the grip the way they did in the movies and fired.”

*

“Louis said, `We like in the movies, huh? The two hombres facing each other out in the street.’”

and more. And it would be a shame if readers didn't get the point after Leonard labored so hard to make sure that they do.

The contrast with Riding the Rap's predecessor is instructive. Pronto, published three years earlier, in 1992, evokes the feeling of Westerns without, however, hitting the reader over the head. Leonard trusted the reader to make the connection, and I was so thrilled to have done so that I went out and bought a book of Leonard's Western stories.  After the first reference in Riding the Rap, on the other hand, I wanted him to shut up already, and the references just kept on coming.

I've never written a novel and I can't imagine what it's like to do so, but I'd guess that spinning out a narrative hundreds of pages long requires an author to come up with a few ideas, then develop them. In Riding the Rap, Leonard doesn't develop his ideas, he flogs them. That some of the ideas are good mitigated my frustration only slightly.

One more example: Riding the Rap brings the protagonist, U.S. Marshal Raylan Givens, into contact with a young woman who claims to be a psychic. Leonard has the wonderful idea of having Givens begin to talk like a psychic himself in his exchanges with the woman. Once I got the excellent joke, I wondered what Leonard would do with it. But he does nothing except repeat it periodically throughout the rest of the novel.

What kinds of self-reference, in-jokes, and undeveloped ideas drive you nuts in crime novels?

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

A mystery full of question marks

A leading Leonardite among this blog's readers suggested yesterday that Elmore Leonard had shot his literary bolt by the time he wrote Pronto (1993) and Riding the Rap (1995).

I've read too little from Leonard's 60-year career to judge which have been his stronger and which his weaker periods, but Riding the Rap certainly seems a weaker book than Pronto.  Each features as its protagonist Raylan Givens, a courtly U.S. marshal from Kentucky thrown up against some serious criminals in Florida and Italy. The situation is ripe for social comedy, but Riding the Rap violates one of the keys to Leonard's low-key humor: Its characters sometimes seem to know they're being funny, which is a lot less funny than when they play it straight and leave the laughs to the reader.

Hints of romantic tension seem thrown in merely because Leonard felt the need to inject drama. Especially irritating to this copy editor/reader, Leonard tacks on question marks to declarative statements. Presumably this is meant to suggest the rising intonation some speakers use. Leonard makes the interesting choice of giving this stereotypically female tic to male characters as well as female ones, but the tic is still no less annoying in print than it is in real life.

Compounding the superfluous question marks, the book several times omits question marks where they are called for. This may be mischief on Leonard's part, or it may be sloppy copy editing, but whatever the reason, it's a bloody distracting pain. Y'know? 

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Elmore Leonard's first-person in disguise

An interviewer once noted Elmore Leonard's tendency to get inside his characters' heads without, however, resorting to first-person narration:

"So, when you say it’s character-driven," the interviewer [Martin Amis] asked, "do you mean you’re thinking, `How would this character see this scene?' Because you’re usually third-person. You don’t directly speak through your characters, but there is a kind of third-person that is a first-person in disguise."

Leonard replied that: "it takes on somewhat of a first-person sound, but not really. Because I like third-person. I don’t want to be stuck with one character’s viewpoint, because there are too many viewpoints."

Here's an example from Riding the Rap (1995), the second book to feature U.S. Marshal Raylan Givens:

"He was a rangy kid with the build of a college athlete, bigger than this marshal in his blue suit and cowboy boots—the marshal calm though, not appearing to be the least apprehensive. He said the West Palm strike team was shorthanded at the moment, the reason he was alone, but believed he would manage."

That's a decent bit of description — until it becomes something more in the highlighted portion. Leonard beautifully conjures the flavor of how Raylan Givens would speak and think but without dialogue. That has to be what Martin Amis meant by first-person in disguise. It also achieves the high comic goal of not just saying funny things (that is, cracking a joke), but saying things funny.

That, I think, is a big part what of what readers mean when they talk about Leonard's humor. His books may not about in slapstick, laugh-out-loud moments, but they sure do say lots of things funny. [Disclosure: I'd read just three Leonard novels and one short story before Riding the Rap: Be Cool, The Hot Kid, Pronto (the first Raylan Givens novel), and "3:10 to Yuma," so I don't know how pertinent this post is to his work as a whole. Comment from Leonardians is welcome.]

*** 

Leonard's influence is international. Among writers discussed here at Detectives Beyond Borders, the work of Ireland's Declan Burke, Canada's John McFetridge, and New Jersey's Charlie Stella bears an unmistakable and oft-noted Leonard stamp.

Who else has Elmore Leonard influenced? (Here's a post from the paleolithic age of Detectives Beyond Borders that asked "Who is the most influential crime writer ever?")

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

A hit and myth by Elmore Leonard

My recent reading of Daniel Woodrell's Bayou Trilogy got me thinking of other regions of the United States that are foreign to me. And that led me to Elmore Leonard's 2005 novel The Hot Kid, a crime story that reads like a Western and spans an intermediate era between the two.

The good guys are federal agents and the bad guys bank robbers, but the hero in particular gets a mythlike origin story and accompanying legend more reminiscent of the lawmen of America's storied Western past. That Leonard updates that past with realistic sexual and ethnic detail is part of the book's fun.

Leonard began his career writing Westerns before becoming famous as a crime writer. His melding of the two in this book got me reflecting on the common roots of those two great genres of American popular writing.

***

More than the previous Leonard I'd read, The Hot Kid made me understand what younger crime writers mean when they say they love his work. The rhythm of the man's sentences reminds me of John McFetridge, an avowed Elmore Leonard admirer, and also of Declan Burke, another Detectives Beyond Borders friend whose name often calls forth mentions of Leonard.

***

I'm always on the lookout for appearances of my profession in crime novels. There's a nice one here about a reporter who wants to write about the Ku Klux Klan's hatred of Italians and Catholics but whose editor has other ideas:

"Tony wrote a story about the happy Fassino family's popular macaroni factory. Another one about a social club, the Christopher Columbus Society and its twenty-five piece band that at festivals and on the Fourth of July.

"The editor said, `I think you're getting the hang of it. Now write one about the tendency of your people to overindulge in Choctaw beer and homemade wine.'

"That did it. Tony Antonelli quit ... "

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Elmore Leonard's cool, spare dialogue

Be Cool, a sequel to Get Shorty, seems not often to be mentioned among top-flight Elmore Leonard novels, but this reader liked it just fine. I enjoyed the author's apparent comfort amid the rock-and-roll world, and I especially liked the spare prose.

I'd tried just once before to read a Leonard novel, and I marveled at a lengthy scene built entirely of dialogue: no descriptions, no tags or attributions, no reactions. It was a virtuoso piece of writing, but a bit wearying to read. Be Cool contains similar, if shorter, scenes, and for me, they worked. My favorite example:

"Hi, I'm Tiffany? I love your movies. Tommy said I could be in the one you're gonna do about him? Only I guess you won't do it now."

Odds are you've read similar snippets of dialogue in which a character, usually female, ends her statements with a rising intonation that makes questions of them. Usually the author will have the narrator remark on this. But Leonard, avoiding any such commentary, let me hear that voice. And I hear it vividly.

I can also well understand why Detectives Beyond Borders favorites Declan Burke and John McFetridge revere Leonard. Like their novels, this one is less a straightforward crime story than a kind of adventure or odyssey along which the protagonist or protagonists encounter and maybe commit crimes. I'm betting they've both read this book.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

"Hombre," the movie

Yes, it's American, it's a Western, and it's a movie, but I have two excuses for writing about the 1967 Paul Newman film: One, I watched it last night, and two, Declan Burke's novel The Big O opens with an epigraph from Elmore Leonard, and Leonard, of course, went on to spectacular success as a crime writer after writing Westerns, including the novel Hombre.

Thus, the movie spurs some observations about crime fiction. It has been often remarked that the American private-investigator story, with its lone-wolf hero trying to rough out his own form of justice in a harsh world, has its roots in the Western. Hombre, at least in its film version, has an especially noirish overtone. On the one hand, the hero makes one gesture that sounds a false note, ably analyzed here. On the other, he winds up dead.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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