Riding the Rap

When Elmore Leonard died last month, he received several encomiums; he was hailed as a writer of popular fiction who transcended the genres he wrote in. I have read several of his books, so many that I'm not sure which ones I've read, as his books do have the tendency to blend into one another. I do know that I have read many of his best-known books, such as Out of Sight, Get Shorty, and Rum Punch.

One book I knew I hadn't read was Riding the Rap, which had been sitting on my shelf for years. I took the occasion of the man's passing to finally read it, and, in keeping with his legacy, it is wonderful, a tasty snack, consumed quickly, with an almost elegant brevity.

The story concerns Raylan Givens, who ended up being the centerpiece of the TV series Justified. Here he is a U.S. marshal operating out of Miami. After bringing in a fugitive and disrupting a car-jacking (bringing in the perpetrators along with his fugitive) he responds to his live-in lover Joyce, who worries about her ex, Harry Arno, a bookmaker.

We know that Harry has been kidnapped by the man who owes him several thousand dollars, Chip Ganz, a lazy scumbag, and two confederates: Louis Lewis, a Bahamian, and Bobby Deo, a murderous bounty hunter who initially worked for Harry. They decide they will use a psychic, Dawn Navarro, to trick Harry into revealing where he keeps his money, and then abduct him and demand he pay his own ransom.

As with many of Leonard's crooks, these guys aren't too bright. When Raylan goes looking for Harry, it doesn't take him long to find Dawn, who gives him a scarily accurate reading, and Chip. He's acting unofficially, so he can't just bust in, but eventually the crooks get nervous and start acting even more stupidly than before. Someone ends up at the bottom of an overgrown swimming pool.

Leonard is famous for his rules of writing, in which he basically says that he wants to avoid writing the part people tend to skip. That makes his books very short and almost entirely of dialogue, which he was famous for. Even his non-dialogue is structured in an active, speaking tone of voice, often missing elements of speech, which makes it seem like someone is telling you the star, probably over drinks at a bar.

For example, there's this sentence: "Not twenty feet from the table when he shot Tommy Bucks three times, Joyce watching it happen." The sentence is missing the important little thing called a subject, but it's implied, and gives it a forward motion that is eminently satisfying.

Leonard also spares the reader too much description--he rarely describes the physical appearance of characters. In Riding the Rap, for example, we know nothing of what Raylan looks like (I just pictured Timothy Olyphant, who plays him in Justified). Dawn gets a little description--she has a hippie look, hair parted in the middle, and is said to look like Marianne Faithful. I think Leonard had a soft spot for her.