Elmore Leonard Returns With ‘Raylan’
By OLEN STEINHAUER
The New York Times Book Review
http://www.nytimes.com/pages/books/index.html
February 5, 2012
In an essay that appeared in The New York Times in 2001, “Easy on the Adverbs, Exclamation Points and Especially Hooptedoodle,” Elmore Leonard listed his 10 rules of writing. The final one — No. 11, actually — the “most important rule . . . that sums up the 10,” is “If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.” It’s a terrific rule. In fact, I liked it so much that I passed it on to a creative-writing class I once taught. However, there’s more to it, which I didn’t pass on: “Or, if proper usage gets in the way, it may have to go. I can’t allow what we learned in English composition to disrupt the sound and rhythm of the narrative.”
Jazzy prose that occasionally lets go of “proper usage” is Leonard’s trademark. He’s a stylist of forward motion, placing narrative acceleration above inconveniences like pronouns and helping verbs. While this creates in most readers a heightened sense of excitement, newcomers may find the transition from complete sentences daunting; it may take a little time to accept Leonard’s prose before you allow it to do its work on you. I’ll admit to having to make such an adjustment when beginning “Raylan.” At the same time, I’m also a novelist who lives in fear of my copy editor; being such a coward, I can’t help respecting Leonard’s grammatical bravery.
While relatively new to Leonard’s novels, I’m not new to the subject matter here. The titular character, Raylan Givens, is also the protagonist of an excellent FX television series, “Justified,” which is based on Leonard’s novella “Fire in the Hole,” originally published as an e-book in 2000. Givens appeared in two earlier books — “Pronto” and “Riding the Rap” — but the success of “Justified” has prompted Leonard to put him back on the job.
For those still unfamiliar with Raylan Givens, he’s a United States marshal known for his ever-present cowboy hat and his quick draw. He also has good manners, is deferential toward women and demonstrates a certain reticence about speaking any more than is necessary. “I haven’t thought of anything worth saying,” he tells one character, who replies: “You just did it again. You make one-line declarations. You sort of mope around, so to speak, while your mind is flicking lines at you.”
While working in Miami, Givens once gave a mafia enforcer 24 hours to get out of town. When the clock wound down, Givens shot him dead. As penance, he was demoted back to his hometown in mountainous Harlan County, Ky., where feuding backwoods families, pot farmers and a heavy-handed mining company rule the land.
This attitude lends a natural feeling to Leonard’s stories. Characters roll from scene to scene, urged on by self-interest and greed, bumping against one another and building up steam until they’re smashing together in orgies of violence. In “Raylan,” organ trafficking, strip mining, gambling and bank robberies motivate criminals to perform even more heinous acts, while Givens himself moves straight to the center, as close to a moral force as you’re likely to find in Leonard’s universe.
“Raylan” follows Givens through three assignments. In the first, he discovers a dope dealer in a bathtub, missing his kidneys — which the organ traffickers offer to sell back to the victim for $100,000. This case ends as it began, with a bathtub, but with two more corpses added to the mix. Next Givens is brought on as security for an ethically challenged mining company executive, a woman from West Virginia named Carol Conlan. The trouble is, Conlan and her driver were on hand for the shooting of an angry ex-miner, a murder Givens is also looking into.
The kidney business is wrapped up in a bloody climax, and the second story line starts cold, so the reader could be forgiven for assuming that “Raylan” is less a novel than a collection of novellas in disguise. While the second story contains echoes of the first, these feel more like casual references than threads tying everything tighter together. However, as Carol Conlan’s story fades out inconclusively and the third assignment begins — the search for a missing university student, Jackie Nevada, who’s also a suspect in a series of bank robberies — it becomes clear that Leonard is having fun with the structure of the crime novel, tossing aside the rules of cohesion in favor of keeping his narrative light on its feet, so it can run in unexpected directions. It’s a joy to watch characters from the earlier assignments come back into play, wrapping up loose ends and bringing Givens and Jackie Nevada together with an unexpected and beautifully minimalist tenderness amid all the blood and killing.
Our best crime writers are sometimes our most astute social novelists, concerned as much with our country’s ills as they are with sensational homicides, and even in the midst of his rat-a-tat narrative Leonard doesn’t forget this. Conlan’s story allows for extensive dialogues that document the environmental effects of mountaintop-removal mining and the mining company’s economic hold over the local population — though to call them dialogues would be stretching things a bit, since only Conlan, wicked from the moment of her entrance, gets to argue the company’s side.
A second theme is revealed when you notice that the three primary antagonists are female. This might be what “Raylan” is really about. Not gambling, mining or organ trafficking: It’s about women, and one marshal’s relationship to them. Whether they’re the puppet masters or the innocents, the killers or the victims, the women are often the smartest characters in the room, despite the fact that each of Raylan Givens’s three antagonists is more than a little hung up on him. But who wouldn’t be? A morally astute sharpshooter with nice Southern manners, a sense of humor and a clean cowboy hat — you don’t find men like him every day.
Olen Steinhauer’s latest novel, “An American Spy,” will be released in March.
