Being Cool: The Work of Elmore Leonard

1. Being Cool: Learning Authenticity

ONE being cool learning authenticity No Wasted Motions: What Cool Is If you’ve heard the name Elmore Leonard, chances are you’ve also heard him described as “the Dickens of Detroit.” At one point in his career, this honorific appeared in the publicity pages of nearly every new paperback edition of an Elmore Leonard book and in the columns of nearly every fresh review. Anyone who’s read Leonard can see why, even in its original, diminished form—“A Dickens from Detroit”—the epithet would have appealed to the Time editor who coined it in 1984 for the title of J. D. Reed’s essay of appreciation. It certainly appealed to British novelist Martin Amis, who used it to introduce Leonard during an interview at the Writer’s Guild Theater of Beverly Hills in January 1998. Amis said he considered Leonard “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 1).1 The title of Reed’s article comes from his description of Leonard’s colorful characters, “a crowded Dickensian canvas where social strata collide, and the gravedigger waits by the charnel house” (100). As a mirror of society, Leonard’s world (whether we enter it through Detroit or Miami or Hollywood or Atlantic City or his birthplace, New Orleans) is indeed Dickensian, as is his eye for grotesques . It is populated by a well-trained ensemble of gangbangers, dopedealers , bookies, and grifters and an intriguing assortment of psychopaths; by financial advisors, talent agents, shady attorneys, and their nouveau-riche clients ; by female professionals ranging from hookers to singers to models to airline attendants to embassy personnel; by honest cops hampered by legal niceties and crooked cops on the take, Hollywood phonies and Delta mobsters, 2 Being Cool hanging judges and hit men, and dozens of eccentric blue-collar, beer-drinking extras. Academics, politicians, and old-money nabobs never wander into Leonard ’s fictional world, and with rare exceptions his novels unfold in a universe devoid of children. That said, the wide range of our nation’s types and antitypes is well represented, as Reed and Amis suggest. But if Leonard’s reach from the top to the bottom of contemporary American society generally matches Dickens’s with respect to Victorian England, the differences are more striking. For one thing, Dickens’s universe is ruled by poetic justice: vice is punished, virtue rewarded, and repentant sinners saved. These are usually venial sinners, soft hypocrites like Pip or redeemable misers like Scrooge. The moral signposts in Dickens’s London are clearly pointing up or down, and there are few characters about whose vertical direction we are ever in doubt. In Leonard’s work, by contrast, heroes and heroines rarely conform to standard patterns of virtue, and we can even be surprised by feelings of sympathy for the devil, often in his least appealing form. Unlike Pip or Scrooge, he has not seen the error of his ways or experienced remorse, although, like the Artful Dodger, he may have made us laugh despite ourselves. Typically, we sympathize because the devil suddenly finds he no longer enjoys what he’s good at or he’s no longer good at what he enjoys. It’s not that he feels disgust, or revulsion, or an epiphanic commitment to self-improvement. It’s just that, out of nowhere, he realizes he’s not as attuned to what he does as he used to be. He has to think about it, he gets distracted, he’s not “into” it. The innocence he has lost is not moral or ethical but kinetic or technical or procedural. It’s the innocence of active oblivion, absorption in the task at hand. Here, for example, is Frank Renda from Mr. Majestyk (1974), a mob higher-up handling day-to-day business transactions , reflecting on his salad days as a professional killer: Five years ago it had been better, simpler. Get a name, do a study on the guy, learn his habits, walk up to him at the right time, and pull the trigger. It was done. [ . . . ] Now it was business all the time. The boring meetings, discussions, planning , all the fucking papers to sign and talking on the phone. He used to have one phone. It would ring, he’d say hello, and a voice would give him a name. That was it. He didn’t even have...