Never use your own car

There’s​ a phenomenon, perhaps magnified in the internet era, of an otherwise serious artist earning enduring notoriety for the stupidest thing they ever did. Alec Guinness was embarrassed by his turn in Star Wars; Luciano Pavarotti is popularly identified with his smarmy easy-listening trio. Sometimes I fear that Elmore Leonard, the American crime writer with more than forty novels to his name, will end up being most powerfully associated with his ‘rules for writing’. Published as a slim book in 2007, they’re usually read in an abbreviated form excerpted in the Guardian. The rules don’t really tell you how to write a good book and have probably led to more than a few bad ones. They encourage a specific kind of minimalist approach (‘If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it’), and tend, in rarefied writing circles, to inspire indignant counter-examples rather than praise. They also give the incorrect impression that Leonard was a hack, the kind of writer you’d be happy to watch a film or television adaptation of, but wouldn’t waste time actually reading.

It used to be hard to avoid reading Leonard. In the 1980s, he was a staple of the supermarket checkout line and you could count on finding a few paperbacks at any holiday rental. I don’t think there’s anyone on today’s bestseller lists as accomplished on the page as he was; he had the extraordinary ability to evoke a place with the sparsest of descriptions and fill in a character with just a few lines of dialogue or a seemingly inconsequential gesture. He did more with less than any crime writer I can think of. In other words, though his ten rules aren’t particularly instructive if you aren’t him, they provide an insight into the creative process of a stylist who exhibited the kind of sentence-level mastery you rarely see paired with the nuts-and-bolts rudiments of plot and action.

Penguin recently added three of Leonard’s novels to their Modern Classics: Crime and Espionage series, with several others set to follow. The initial trio – Swag (1976), The Switch (1978) and Rum Punch (1992) – are all very enjoyable and give the uninitiated reader a taste of Leonard’s style, characters and preoccupations. I will complain about the covers, however. The simple elegance and familiar livery of Penguin’s paperbacks are meant, I’m sure, to reassure the doubtful reader that Important People have approved of these books – in this case, we get tasteful monochrome images of a gun, a martini and a sack of cash. But I miss the brash ugliness of Leonard’s US editions, particularly Delacorte Press’s offerings from the 1990s, with their gigantic dayglo text (Gill Sans Condensed Ultra Bold, baby!) that hints at the maximalist style and big talk of the characters within.

Swag is the earliest of these three novels and one of the first that Leonard set in contemporary America (most of his previous books were Westerns). A couple of ne’er-do-well playboys embark on a crime spree through greater Detroit and live high on the hog until a job goes wrong. Frank J. Ryan is a used-car salesman. Ernest Stickley is a petty criminal. They meet (or, more precisely, meet cute) when Stick tries to swipe a Camaro off Frank’s lot. A week later, Frank sees Stick again in a police line-up and decides he likes the cut of his jib. He tells the cops that Stick wasn’t the guy, and when Stick is freed they team up.

This plot summary makes Swag sound like a meat-and-potatoes series of crime capers, but it’s far better than that. The trick of the novel is that it’s as much romance as crime. Frank and Stick’s partnership is presented as a hasty marriage; we watch them fall for each other, commit hard and make alarming discoveries about each other from inside the extreme intimacy of a stick-up duo. Just a few pages into the book, the two are already reflecting on their meeting like impulsive newlyweds. It’s funny, Stick says, how sometimes you get lucky:

‘It is funny,’ Frank Ryan said. ‘You want to get a drink or something?’

‘I wouldn’t mind it. I was in that Wayne County jail six days and six nights … I guess that’s when you were deciding I wasn’t the guy after all.’

‘You were the guy,’ Frank said.

They get drunk and end up in a motel together. ‘Where’d you sleep?’ Frank asks in the bleary morning. Stick, Queequeg to Frank’s Ishmael, replies: ‘Right there in bed with you … but I swear I never touched you.’

Frank’s got a notion: when it comes to armed robbery, only fools get caught. Like his author, he has ten rules, and as long as he and Stick adhere to them, they’ll be golden: be polite, say as little as possible, never call your partner by name, dress well, never use your own car, never count the take in the car, never flash money, don’t go back to an old bar, don’t tell anyone your business, avoid associating with known criminals. For Frank and Stick, the rules are a recipe for riches; for the reader, they are a menu of mistakes the duo are inevitably going to make.

They rake in money by knocking over liquor stores and move into a hip apartment building populated by pretty, professional women. They spend their days hanging out by the pool, flirting and talking. After a while, they start to tinker with the rules, and a while after that, break them. Frank is the problem, for the most part; he’s a little hotheaded, a little overconfident and something of a misogynist. They nearly get caught robbing a supermarket and Stick calls him out for his recklessness. ‘But the nature of the business,’ Frank tells him, ‘you play it as you come to it. The rules are basically good, but what I’m saying, you can’t fit them into each and every situation.’ Stick wants to take a break. Frank wants to be more ambitious. In fact, he’s got a lead on something – a big job, which he’ll tell Stick all about when Frank thinks he’s ready. ‘I’m still not sure you are.’ They argue, threaten to break up, reconcile.

The big job turns out to be an elaborate heist at a department store. Frank has been seeing a woman who works there. She also frequents an old bar Stick is leery of revisiting. Meanwhile, Stick is getting close to one of the ladies from the building and tells her his business. As the rules bend, and the duo get more deeply involved with crew members from outside their ‘marriage’, disaster looms. The heist itself is rendered briskly and vividly in Leonard’s deft third-person limited, which alights strategically in the heads of different characters as events unfold.

Leonard is often praised as a virtuoso of naturalistic dialogue, its rhythms and characteristic illogic (my favourite bit in this book is a flirtatious yogism – Berra, not Buddha – of Stick’s: ‘You’re from somewhere, aren’t you? Let me guess’), but less is written about his mastery of free indirect style. The narrative voice is always distinctively his, but he borrows just enough of the syntactic peculiarity of his characters’ minds to allow the author to step aside and let each actor take the stage. His rendering of racial tension is interesting – the man bankrolling the heist is Black, as is the lover he shares with Frank. A white man who wrote almost exclusively about criminals isn’t who most readers would go to for a nuanced portrayal of Black Americans’ inner lives, but Leonard was expert at showing the way racial and cultural dynamics change the calculus of a complicated situation.

The Switch is the shortest of these three novels, and my favourite. It introduces the two Detroit criminals, slick Ordell Robbie and brooding Louis Gara, whom we’ll later see exiled to Florida in Rum Punch. Here they’re greenhorns, hapless petty criminals on the cusp of their first major caper, a kidnapping. A local businessman, Frank Dawson, is running a real-estate scam that involves renting apartments to pimps and sex workers. The tenants pay cash, and the money gets stashed in a bank in the Bahamas, where Frank keeps a mistress. Ordell, who has been supplying stolen appliances for the apartments, thinks he and Louis should kidnap Frank’s wife and demand a million bucks for her return. He recruits Richard, a Nazi with a gun collection, to help them out, and they snatch Mickey Dawson from her suburban home.

The most compelling parts of the book narrate Mickey’s thoughts as she gradually comes to understand what a terrible loser she’s married to and how much better off she’d be without him. Frank is a vile, belittling drunk and you can tell that Leonard enjoys inventing ways for him to suck. (‘It would never occur to him,’ Mickey thinks, ‘that his wife was more intelligent than he was.’) In the novel’s opening chapters, Mickey endures his abuse, tries to keep their son from taking after him and sleepwalks through her dull socialite’s life. But being kidnapped gives her time to think – especially when Frank is slow to respond to the ransom demand. It turns out he was about to file for divorce anyway. Why pay to get back the wife he doesn’t want?

While it’s always a pleasure to watch Leonard build his narratives, gun by gun, thief by thief, dollar by dollar, the real delight is in the details of their unravelling. Who could have imagined that Mickey would be stalked by an admiring dunce who gets in the way of the kidnappers and ends up bloodied in her bedroom closet? That Richard isn’t just a racist, but a pervert who drills a peephole in the bathroom door? That Frank’s mistress, Melanie, would want a piece of the action too? Leonard understands the dramatic satisfaction of coincidence and comeuppance and delivers them in unexpected ways, within a matrix of crossed wires and shifting allegiances.

The evolution of the crooks’ criminal consciousness is almost as intriguing as Mickey’s transformation. Leonard shows us the moments they slip from petty loserdom into budding psychopathy. Describing to Ordell how the million-dollar ask should go down, Louis is pulled up short: ‘[He] stopped, realising something. It was the first time he had said the word or had even thought the word and heard it in his mind. Kidnap. Christ, they had kidnapped a woman.’ Later, in the Bahamas, Melanie is ‘willing to co-operate’ to solve the problem of Frank’s non-compliance: ‘I was thinking something like – how about if you disappeared for a hundred grand? I think I could talk something around that figure and get him to think it’s his idea. For his peace of mind.’ It takes Ordell a minute to understand what she’s getting at: ‘You’re not saying disappear. You’re saying kill the man’s wife.’ No, of course not, Melanie tells him: ‘I’m not saying you have to do it. Isn’t there someone you could call?’ Ordell, surprised at first, accepts the new plan: ‘It was a different whole new deal now.’ He calls up Richard, who is guarding Mickey, and tells him she’s a Jew and needs to die.

She isn’t, and doesn’t, and ends up with some form of Stockholm syndrome, chatting up the surviving members of the criminal conspiracy in a Detroit apartment, finally awake to the possibilities of an autonomous life. The book’s dialogue is great, particularly Ordell’s, which is boastful, crass and sarcastic. At one point the white Louis earnestly asks: ‘How come coloured girls, their asses are so high?’ ‘Same way as a camel,’ Ordell shoots back, ‘for going without food and water when there was a famine, they stored up what they needed in their ass.’ Leonard’s superpower was to apprehend the broken syntax of real speech and translate it to the page so that it jumped straight from the eye to the ear, bypassing the inner grammarian. The Switch’s ending is a perfect punchline, a deft little trick of perspective – one that Rum Punch would undo fourteen years later, for reasons unclear to me.

Iunderstand​ why Penguin wanted to include Rum Punch in this initial set of reissues. It’s a pretty good book, probably Leonard’s most popular, and easy to market to new readers, who may have seen Quentin Tarantino’s reasonably faithful film adaptation. I say ‘reasonably’ because, although Tarantino’s streamlined version of the story follows the novel closely, it replaces Jackie Burke, the book’s white heroine, with Jackie Brown, memorably played by the Black actress Pam Grier. This change – as well as half a dozen subtly shifted details – rebalances the story for the better.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Jackie Burke is a middle-aged air hostess held back in her career by her attraction to bad men. When the book begins, she is making ends meet as a cash courier to a gunrunner who wants to get his money out of the Bahamas and into Florida, where he lives. It turns out that the gunrunner is our old friend Ordell, who keeps three mistresses in three apartments, Melanie among them. Before long he’s reunited with Louis, newly sprung from prison, and recruits him to help move some weapons and clear out his accounts so that he can retire.

Meanwhile, Jackie gets collared by a couple of detectives, who dangle leniency for her crime in exchange for assistance in catching Ordell. She won’t talk and is sent to prison; Ordell posts her bail through a bondsman, Max Cherry, intending to silence her for good. But when Max picks her up from jail, sparks fly. She swipes his sidearm and uses it to fend off the murderous Ordell. Now everyone involved wants the same thing: Ordell’s half a million.

The greatest strength of this book, especially if you like The Switch, is the spectacle of Louis and Ordell’s descent into nihilism; the goofy rascals of the earlier novel are gone. Ordell is now a ruthless killer, and Louis is drowning in some deep, unexamined rage, which will finally emerge in the most shocking moment of the book. The heist itself is fun and complicated and its resolution satisfying, but readers (especially those who have seen Jackie Brown) might find Jackie Burke a little anaemic on the page. It’s fun to watch her outwit the goons, but there’s little character development; she is preternaturally shrewd and skilful from the start. Rereading the novel, I kept thinking about Mickey’s transformation from naif to self-actualised cynic in The Switch and wished that Jackie had been given room to grow.

The early scene in which Jackie resists Ordell is particularly telling. We’ve already seen Ordell post bond for someone he wants to silence. We know what’s meant to happen when he knocks on Jackie’s door. But her deft moves with Max’s borrowed pistol aren’t those of a dewy-eyed career flight attendant, and she doesn’t make any false steps after that either. This is the main place where Tarantino’s movie improves on the source material. In the scene with Ordell, played with serpentine relish by Samuel L. Jackson, Grier performs as someone from Ordell’s world, a Black woman who knows how to deal with a Black man. When Robert Forster’s Max (white in both the book and the film) shows up later to collect his gun, Grier talks completely differently, code-switching as she’s accustomed to doing in the white world she’s been forced to navigate.

There are other small moments in the film that bring a little friction to Jackie’s character arc: a Black judge knocks her bond down to $10,000 from $25,000; one of the detectives makes a racist aside; Ordell complains about the cops ‘pitting Black against Black’. But it’s mostly the way Grier plays the character, gradually revealing the complexity of her world, that gives viewers the sense of movement that the novel lacks. Jackie’s romance with Max, consummated early in the book and assumed to continue beyond its final page, is less of a sure thing in the film; the tragedy of Grier’s Jackie is her alienation from both of the worlds in which she operates, and choosing one over the other would never work. Tarantino allows them a couple of lingering kisses before she drives off into the sunset, leaving Max and his lonesome work behind. It’s the right ending. Watching the film after reading the novel, you can’t help but think that, as good as Rum Punch is, Leonard left money on the table – something Frank and Stick would never do. Like them, maybe he could have used an eleventh rule.