Manyebook

Four Later Novels: Get Shorty / Rum Punch / Out of Sight / Tishomingo Blues

Widely hailed as the greatest crime novelist of his era, Elmore Leonard was a master of popular entertainments of the highest order. Library of America caps its three-volume edition of Leonard’s crime novels — prepared in consultation with the author before his death in 2013 and edited by his longtime researcher, Gregg Sutter — with this final installment gathering four wickedly funny and wildly inventive books from the 1990s and early 2000s, the period when his novels were discovered by some of Hollywood’s leading filmmakers. These later works explore new terrain (including Hollywood itself), and enliven Leonard’s fictional universe with a succession of vividly imagined denizens, a tumultuous and expressive crew whom he delights in setting on intricate collision courses.

In Get Shorty (1990), a Miami loan shark hits on a way to break into Hollywood as a producer. Drawing on his long history in the film industry, Leonard offers up a sharp-edged satiric tour of the studios, gleefully demonstrating a professional criminal’s natural affinity for the scams of show business. Perhaps the funniest of Leonard’s novels, Get Shorty was memorably filmed with John Travolta and Gene Hackman.

Rum Punch (1992) fields a complex story involving drug dealers, Federal agents, and an airline stewardess under pressure. Its bittersweet center is Max Cherry, a West Palm Beach bail bondsman with heart and integrity who, in a way he could not have anticipated, is challenged to start over again in middle age. The source for Quentin Tarantino’s Jackie Brown, Rum Punch is both a superb caper and a wry and melancholy meditation on the hazards of staying honest and the stresses of getting older.

A real-life prison break provided the impetus for Out of Sight (1996). In this high-risk fusion of violent adventure and unlikely romance, Jack Foley, a career bank robber, and Karen Sisco, a deputy U.S. marshal, are flung together under unusual circumstances and embark on a manhunt that leads through Florida and back to Leonard’s original literary haunt, Detroit. Included as a special feature is “Karen Makes Out,” the story in which Leonard first introduced Sisco.

Inspired by the subculture of Civil War reenactments, Leonard made it the background for Tishomingo Blues (2002), an exuberant tale in which a young high-diving daredevil, a washed-up ballplayer, and an assortment of heavies and tricksters both local and from out of town come together in Tunica — “the Las Vegas of the South” — to relive the Battle of Brice’s Cross Roads.

This volume contains a newly researched chronology of Leonard’s life making use of materials in his personal archive, detailed annotations, and an account by editor Gregg Sutter of the research that went into the writing of these novels. A Detroit native, Sutter first met Elmore Leonard in 1979 and began working for him in 1981. He is currently at work on a biography of Leonard, from his unique perspective as his full-time researcher for more than thirty years.

  • Format
  • hardcover
  • Pages
  • 1000
  • Language
  • english
  • ISBN
  • 9781598534924
  • Genres
  • fiction, crime
  • Release date
  • 2016