The Hot Kid

Just finished The Hot Kid, by Elmore Leonard. My fiction reading, for the past couple of months, has been Stephen King's top ten list of 2005, which he compiled in his Entertainment Weekly column in December. I find King's tastes run similar to mine, so armed with an Amazon gift certificate, I bought eight of the books (one was the Harry Potter novel, which I'll get to in time, and another has not been published yet). The latest in the pile was The Hot Kid.

It's a story of bank robbers in depression-era Oklahoma, meant to recall tales of Pretty Boy Floyd and Bonnie and Clyde (all of whom are mentioned here). It's the fictional tale of U.S. Marshall Carl Webster, who guns down bad guys with calm precision. As usual with Leonard (and many other writers of this genre) the bad guys are dumb and usually die hoisted on their own petards.

I've read quite a bit of Leonard, starting with LaBrava about twenty years ago. I suppose the books I enjoyed most were Out of Sight and Get Shorty. I also enjoyed Tishimingo Blues. But some of his books, though easy reads, are the equivalent of fast food, in that there is little nourishment. They appear to be written quickly, as if he has to be somewhere. I could have used a little more detail, and a bit more subtlety. The dialogue is funny, as usual, but I would have liked more about the setting and the time period.

The thirties era outlaws and G-men is pretty fascinating, but this didn't capture my imagination the same way the Larry McMurtry novel Pretty Boy Floyd did, or the movie Bonnie and Clyde. The Hot Kid is just too sketchy.