9
Rossitsa Terzieva‐Artemis
I like the idea of levels of things going on. To try and do that.
(Leonard 1991, p. 26)
A woman walks into a bar and asks the bartender for something new. The bartender offers her a rum punch. At the first taste, the woman understands. It is all in the layering of the ingredients. “One of sour, two of sweet, three of strong, four of weak,” says the bartender. The drink goes down smoothly, but the “shots” are so treacherously layered that the woman is surprised when the “punch” arrives. In Rum Punch (1992a) Elmore Leonard is mixing a cocktail to sweeten his reader's palate but also to give an elegant kick in the stomach through some sweet‐sour observations about a world long gone out of whack. He offers some fanciful musing on the nature of chance and moral luck, with unexpected layers of many “things going on” in an ordinary‐seeming cult crime novel about firearms, drugs, and money.
Leonard is concise yet deeply engaged in the crafting of twists in plot and idiosyncrasies in characters that repeatedly surprise us. Rum Punch is one of the 45 novels that he penned in his long writing career with a specific reader in mind: not just an avid reader of westerns or crime, but one who is attuned to the unexpected moral repercussions that any good novel is capable of producing. It is not difficult to feel conflicted about expectations, outcomes, and our responses to them in the morally dubious or let's simply call them “criminal” circumstances that Leonard concocts. Rum Punch does not depart from, but instead exemplifies an authorial norm. As Charles Rzepka observes: “In Leonard's work … heroes and heroines rarely conform to the standard patterns of virtue, and we can even be surprised by feelings of sympathy for the devil, often in his least appealing form” (Rzepka 2013, p. 2). The well‐known inclination to judge the moral behavior of literary characters, which the reading experience provokes in general, is conspicuously problematic in any reading of Rum Punch. That we are involved in some strange ways in the observation and the moral judgment of characters is connected to the overall sense that we care even though protagonists like Ordell Robie, Louis Gara, Max Cherry, Jackie Burke, Melanie, Ray Nicolet, and Faron Tyler display various degrees of morally bad behavior. Such a sense of involvement corresponds to what Leonard has said about his notorious, streetwise characters:
Well, there are people who are for the most part street people. People with a sense of irony. I don't know if they would realize that or not. The line is ironic but maybe the character doesn't realize that. Although he might know and think it's comic. I don't know. It's just a certain sound. But I have a feeling for the people, no matter who they are, and I try to bring out the human side of it. And that's another thing that you have to realize, the fact that I like them.
(Leonard 1991, p. 58)
Moral luck – the impact of random events and actions on our moral judgments – plays an important role in the formation of one's moral character and identity. Each instance of moral luck in life, and in literature for that matter, affects the self‐understanding of the individual in question as well as the moral judgment of the individual's behavior by others, who are judged by still others in turn. How we judge others is a part of our overall experience of life and it is difficult to point out areas that are immune to such judgment. Liking people does not preclude moral judgment, but it can certainly sharpen our sense of the vagaries of moral luck. Leonard's Rum Punch offers several exemplary cases of the wavering or partial suspension of moral judgment in the face of moral luck, in what otherwise could be considered a pretty straightforward story about the criminal world of Miami. As B.R. Myers aptly observes,
Leonard is such an original storyteller that one can find his world distasteful and still be drawn into it. Strange as it may seem, the challenge of finding a character not too unpleasant to care about, and of predicting what will bring everyone together, is a large part of what makes his opening chapters so irresistible. We seem to be watching real events develop of which the novelist himself knew nothing in advance.
(Myers 2005, p. 155)
Not only at the beginning, but throughout Rum Punch as well, reading turns out to require suspending or at least wavering in our moral judgment to the extent that moral luck plays a role in shaping it.
Moral luck is still one of the most widely discussed topics in moral philosophy. Ever since the initial publication of the eponymous papers of Bernard Williams and Thomas Nagel in 1976, in the Aristotelian Society Supplementary, and subsequent revisions in the early 1980s, moral luck and the issues it entails have fed ongoing debates, starting with the very definition of the concept. For example, Nagel (1993) defines moral luck as follows:
Where a significant aspect of what someone does depends on factors beyond his control, yet we continue to treat him in that respect as an object of moral judgement, it can be called moral luck. Such luck can be good or bad.
(p. 59)
Nagel goes on to outline the paradoxical nature of moral luck, pointing out that the notions of control and responsibility inherent in our common‐sense understanding of morality are to be blamed for such a paradox. In other words, where “luck” is involved, responsibility is usually diminished and morality made ambiguous. Thus, as he points out, a hypothetical officer in a concentration camp might have led a “quiet and harmless life if the Nazis had never come to power in Germany. And someone who led a quiet and harmless life in Argentina might have become an officer in a concentration camp if he had not left Germany for business reasons in 1930” (1993, p. 59). Both Nagel and Williams argue that in life we often judge actions and behavior on the basis of luck and circumstances beyond one's control. For Nagel, it is clear that we can and, quite frequently, do ascribe moral values on such a basis, while for Williams (1993), rational justification of behavior frequently refers to luck. In short, luck, despite what Immanuel Kant postulates in his Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785), plays a role in moral judgment even though it should not.1
A more flexible definition of moral luck, however, can be found in the work of Claudia Card, who does not acknowledge a paradox or a tension in the understanding of the concept. She claims, “Moral luck is luck that impacts either on character development or on one's ability to do morally good or right things in particular contexts” (1996, p. ix). Card's position as outlined in her book, The Unnatural Lottery: Character and Moral Luck, seems to emphasize the ways moral luck influences a person's character and her moral identity in a variety of situations where there is a clear choice between doing the right thing or not.
Some epistemic reductionists like Nicholas Rescher and Duncan Pritchard suggest that moral luck is illusory since it involves simply our acquisition of knowledge about the behavior of a person through some lucky coincidences and circumstances. In this way what we do not know automatically defines the agent in question as “lucky,” her final moral status hidden from us because we are gullible enough to believe, lacking evidence to the contrary, that she is better than she really is. Translated into the domain of fiction and especially into the world of Rum Punch, this focus on the ignorance of the person making moral judgments means that what we do not know about Leonard's characters, because of the author's narrative approach or master plan, automatically makes them morally lucky. If that were so, however, we would not care about what is typically called “poetic justice,” an outcome that seems to accord with what our moral judgment of that character determines as fitting, whether as reward or punishment. Our moral reactions to the grim outcomes for Melanie (shot by Louis), Louis (shot by Ordell), Ordell (shot by Ray), and Faron (shot by Cujo) are not identical even when what we don't know about these characters' behavior could cover a multitude of sins. Even for Max Cherry and Jackie Burke, the leading characters in the book, moral luck will seem quite cursory if interpreted in such reductionist terms as poetic justice: we know that they end up with the dirty money, but whether or not we think they deserve to depends to a large extent on the role of moral luck in determining that outcome.
Moral luck is a variety of luck in general, which Andrew Latus says “requires both chance and lack of control.” Thus,
the degree of luck involved in the occurrence of a particular event is proportional to the value of the event, inversely proportional to the chance of the event occurring, and inversely proportional to the degree of control one has over the event.
(Latus 2003, p. 467–468)
This is the triple knot that defines moral luck, as well: it is a result of the operation of chance (our everyday understanding of luck), control, and value.
Nagel (1993) subdivides moral luck into four types: luck that determines the kind of person one is, “where this is not a question of what you deliberately do, but of your inclinations, capacities, and temperament”; “luck that concerns “the kinds of problems and situations one faces”; luck as a function of how a person's choices appear to be “determined by antecedent circumstances” that are unrelated to the kind of person they are; and luck that affects “the way one's actions and projects turn out” (p. 60). Nagel calls the first two “constitutive” and “circumstantial” luck respectively (p. 60). Daniel Statman, in his “Introduction” (1993) to the volume of essays that includes Nagel's, labels the last two, which have to do with luck affecting causes and effects, “causal” and “resultant” luck (p. 11).
Here is an example from Rum Punch in which a deficiency in one of Latus's three elements of luck – control – diminishes the moral seriousness of a crime because it impinges on all four of Nagel's types: constitutive, circumstantial, causal, and resultant.
In Nagel's view, as in Latus's, “a clear absence of control, produced by involuntary movement, physical force, or ignorance of the circumstances, excuses what is done from moral judgment” (1993, p. 58). In chapter 21 of the novel, three illiterate jackboys try to interpret written and pictographic instructions in order to fire a bazooka at the police, whom they hear approaching the storage facility where this and other illegal weapons have been stashed: “See, here the instructions,” says one (Leonard 1992a, p. 406). First, the absence of control affects the jackboys' constitutive moral luck: like most of Leonard's bad guys, they simply are what they are, with “inclinations, capacities, and temperament[s]” shaped by choices made for rather than by them over the course of their sorry‐ass lives. (There are many exceptions to this rule in Leonard's fiction, such as the thoroughly nasty and inexcusable Alan Raimy, in 52 Pick‐Up, but the jackboys are not among them.) Second, lack of control affects the jackboys' circumstantial luck. The arrival of the police is entirely unexpected, confronting them with “problems and situations” for which they are unprepared and must improvise as best they can. Third, bad “causal luck” has set up a chain of antecedent events that requires them to read the weapons' instructions in order to interpret the pictographs correctly. (This is not the same as “constitutive luck”: illiteracy may indeed be considered a deficient “capacity” – an incapacity – but the jackboys' encounter with a situation requiring them to read is the result of causes beyond their control. With better constitutive luck, they might also have thought to use one of the many weapons in the storage unit that they knew how to fire, instead of going for the childish excitement of a “big bang.”) Not being able to read (or at least, read well), the jackboys waste so much time and are so focused on trying to master the bazooka that the police have little trouble sneaking up and disabling them with a concussion grenade. Fourth, the jackboys' moral culpability is diminished by their lack of control over the outcome of the situation: though they wish to kill the police, they are unable to fire the weapon. Thus, “resultant luck” comes into play. In Nagel's words, “when someone acts in such ways [that] he takes his life, or his moral position, into his hands, … how things turn out determines [the moral seriousness of] what he has done” (1993, p. 62). The words of Ray Nicolet, ATF agent, cover all four types of moral luck in this situation: “Couldn't read it, could you? [causal] You dumbfuck [constitutive] – we wondered what you were doing. See? [resultant] You should never've dropped out of school” [circumstantial] (p. 407).
The jackboys' constitutive, circumstantial, causal, and resultant good moral luck doesn't excuse their actions by a long shot, but it does help to make this scene more comic than tragic, encouraging us to suspend or waver in applying the teleological (based on intentions) norms that we might otherwise apply in arriving at a much more serious moral judgment. We laugh, but we also recognize the jackboys' culpability, and this mixed reaction is one of the things that makes Elmore Leonard's moral universe unique and intriguing. Moral good luck can make even the worst of Leonard's psychopaths funny as well as, rather than instead of, terrifying. Even if an epistemic reductionist thinks that Leonard has limited what we get to know about the jackboys, leaving room for doubt regarding the types of moral luck that we should take into account in our evaluation of these events, there is no other foundation on which to base our moral judgment than what Leonard has written. In fiction what is not stated is, literally, silence: an echo chamber for speculations shaped only by what we can derive from the text. There are no other mitigating factors that can ever come to light.
It is fun to read and reread Rum Punch for its typical Leonardian carousel of events and complex kaleidoscope of human behavior embodied in otherwise ordinary citizens, ordinary law enforcers, and, of course, ordinary career criminals. However, the reader is caught also in a fascinating process of witnessing raw violence and evil in the criminal underworld, and of passing moral judgment on characters whom she will get to know better in the course of the novel, but will, thankfully, never meet in real life. Writing about the destinies of Leonard's characters only in terms of their good or bad outcomes, Yearley (2001) aptly observes,
Leonard's protagonists evade or outwit their outrageous fortunes. Whatever mare's nests they fall into as a consequence of chance, bad luck, excessive greed, or cleverness, in the end, they sally forth into their futures avenged – or little the worse for the experience. To be sure, friends, lovers, and the wicked die violently as Leonard's stories unfold; the protagonists, however, cheat Fate. Leonard is true to the constraints of his specialty; consequently, for both the author and the reader an ordinary, plausible kind of justice is done.
(p. 392)
We might object to the image of protagonists “sallying forth into the future avenged” and accept the second part of this sentence, agreeing that they are “little the worse for the experience,” since it often stands for the kind of “ordinary, plausible kind of justice” that Leonard provides. What is interesting here is that this kind of justice is often problematic on a moral level for both reader and author alike because it involves moral luck of all four types.
One: Constitutive Luck
In Rum Punch, as in all his novels, Leonard delves into the issue of moral luck from several angles. Constitutive luck, namely the kind of person one is “where this is not a question of what you deliberately do, but of your inclinations, capacities, and temperament” according to Nagel (1993, p. 60), is critical in the novel. The talented evil protagonist, Ordell Robbie, seems to be cut out for the world of crime that he inhabits. The whole package – of inclinations, capacities, and temperament – have been working in his favor ever since his first appearance in an earlier novel, The Switch (1972). There, a much younger Ordell and his sidekick, Louis Gara, decide to score big by “upgrading” their previous (jail‐bound) experience in grand theft auto to kidnapping the wife of a wealthy Detroit developer and holding her for ransom. The tiny glitch, however, is that the husband refuses to pay the ransom because he hopes the criminals will free him from the burden of an unhappy marriage; in that way his new‐found idyll with the California “bunny,” Melanie (who is never given a last name), will be guaranteed. After a few surprises and a readjustment of alliances, the husband's “happily ever after” in the Bahamas becomes a “happily never after” for him, but, possibly, a very satisfying outcome for his wife back in Detroit.
Better than Louis, freshly released from prison, and even the forever sunbathing Melanie, Ordell has become a player who easily navigates the gun business and has crossed international borders already, moving weapons one way, importing money the other way. On first meeting Max Cherry, the low‐key bail bond agent, Ordell strikes a pose almost like a fashion model, projecting an image reminiscent of those flaunted by similar characters in Leonard's other books. After Odell leaves, Max reflects on his personality:
The kind of guy worked at being cool, but was dying to tell you things about himself. He knew the system, knew the main county lockup was called the Gun Club jail, after the road it was on. He'd served time, knew Louis Gara, and drove off in a Mercedes convertible. What else you want to know?
(Leonard 1992a, p. 243)
This passage hints at something special Ordell is good at: being cool, projecting the image of coolness as both a shield and a weapon in the shady world of crime. His coolness – as a dress code, language, and behavior – is not just an image, but a professional description, too. As Rzepka points out,
Perfecting your professional identity to the point of becoming not only good at it, but also, at times, completely lost in the fun and excitement of being good at it, is a recurrent theme throughout the author's work, something I call, drawing on the title of one of Leonard's novels, “being cool.”
(2014, p. 93)
However, even Ordell understands one crucial point: “It's not enough to have a gift – you've got to work at it” (Rzepka 2013, p. 135). And working at it can have unfortunate consequences for others. Beaumont, the laid‐back human calculator, will pay with his life one day, killed by Ordell as a preventive measure because he might have spoken to the ATF agent Nicolet; Cujo and Jackie almost get killed by Ordell too and only fate, or, rather, chance and their quick thinking, prevent him from executing them; and finally Louis, the trusted‐but‐not‐so‐much‐after‐all “colleague,” also gets shot by Ordell when the small issue of lost money pops up.
Another character working hard at being cool in Rum Punch, but with much less success than Ordell Robbie, is Louis Gara, “Louis was forty‐seven with a hard, weathered look to him, dark curly hair showing some gray; he had a pretty good build from working out with weights at FSP” (p. 266). From minor misdemeanors to grand theft auto to bank robbery to kidnapping, Louis's career arc is a familiar one to habitual readers of crime fiction. Louis is dark and menacing, too, but, unlike Ordell, he is also existentially disoriented. As the latter notes, “You don't know where in the fuck you're at, do you? Keep coming out of prison and starting over” (p. 233). Ordell contemplates the weakness of Louis from the position of his own achieved “coolness”:
He said, “You know what your trouble is, Louis? Why you ain't ever going to make it less you change?”
Like his father speaking to him from the car, Louis standing there.
“You think you're a good guy,” Ordell said, “and it messes you up.”
(p. 275)
As Max Cherry observes, “Louis Gara could sound like a decent guy, an ex‐con with possibilities” (p. 265), despite being, after all, a loser. In the world of crime, being a man with only possibilities falls in the category of being “a man without a future.” In Rum Punch, unlike in many of Leonard's novels, coolness and goodness do not mix, as Ordell has learned and actively preaches. Though negatively tainted, the “talent and inclinations” with which Nagel defines constitutive moral luck are at work in Ordell, but not so much in Louis. It is quite obvious that there is something that Louis lacks: “Cool is different, a resistance [to outside pressure] that is, ideally, unwilled, because it is either natural to begin with or a second nature born of deliberate habituation, sometimes in situations ostensibly unrelated to the crisis at hand” (Rzepka 2013, p. 9). Louis's unsuccessful attempt to rob a liquor store unarmed, and his hilarious second attempt, as well as his much riskier attack on the mansion of a white supremacist, all hint at his dismal prospects for a long‐term collaboration with Ordell and, most clearly, at his predictable end.
Two: Circumstantial Luck
It is clear that luck plays a decisive role in what we get to know about a person, just as much as it does in determining who one is or becomes in the long run. The distinction between who the person is and who others think she is can be quite thin, however, as both identities have perceptive grounding: on the one hand, the person perceives herself and acts (“is”) accordingly, while on the other hand, others perceive her and pass judgment that may or may not agree with her own. Particular circumstances serve as catalysts for the behavior that the person feels to be most appropriate in those circumstances, stimulating certain traits and dispositions of one's personality, and thus pushing them to the forefront, while other traits are stifled. In a crime novel like Rum Punch the plot is rife with situations and circumstances that demand action from the protagonists and, ultimately, our moral response to that action. What we see is how both chance and circumstances bring forward what has over time evolved deep in the character, or how the circumstances can shape her behavior in general. In this way the combination of inherent traits, volition, and circumstances produces a more precise picture of the circumstantial moral luck that defines our judgment of people.
Max Cherry is a prime example of the way circumstances affect our judgment of moral behavior. A former detective in the sheriff's office, this 57‐year‐old bail bondsman is dealing with life the way many other people do: drifting through it. The result is a marriage on the rocks, a seedy business in the shadow of a shadowy insurance company, and an overall sense of harassment, boredom, and weariness with a life that, as Ordell Robbie sees it when he first steps into Max's office, is going nowhere.
This looked more like the man's den than a bail bond office: a whole wall of shelves behind where Max Cherry sat with books on it, all kinds of books, some wood‐carved birds, some beer mugs. It was too neat and homey for this kind of scummy business. The man himself appeared neat, clean‐shaved, had his blue shirt open, no tie, good size shoulders on him. That dark, tough‐looking type of guy like Louis, dark hair, only Max Cherry was losing his on top.
(pp. 238–239)
That Max is smart and naturally cool is no secret, except to Ordell. In Yearley's view, Leonard specializes in the “fractured urban mythos of the interestingly bent antihero, warmly quixotic and chillingly cool at the same time” (2001, p. 390). From his very first encounter with Ordell, Max perceives the lurking danger in the smooth criminal, but, as a respectable professional, Max will do business with him just until the limits of business proper start getting blurry. A natural tendency to deep introspection, probably enhanced by years on the force and then in the bail bonds business, has taught Max some valuable lessons about criminals and people in general. It is his streetwise attitude, together with a supreme level of business skill, that make him an opponent worthy of Ordell, who is the antithesis of everything that Max stands for. Rzepka seems to have Max in mind when he describes Leonard's “most compelling hero‐protagonists,” who are
intelligent (but never intellectual), modest, and conscientious if not necessarily law‐abiding: while looking to make the big score or get revenge or just survive, they nevertheless try to hold onto their souls.
(Rzepka and Horsley 2010, p. 510)
Up until his fateful meeting with Jackie Burke, and even after that, Max demonstrates a reserved coolness that Ordell looks down on. Max's falling in love with Jackie, while idiosyncratic, is also characteristic of this trait: not a complete infatuation, but a cool admiration for her beauty, courage, and sharp mind: “This was a good‐looking woman. If he didn't know her age he'd say she was somewhere in her mid‐thirties. Nice figure in the uniform skirt, five five, one fifteen – he liked her type” (p. 285). This initial look at Jackie seals Max's fate but does not necessarily dictate his participation in her double‐trouble sting operation, in which she sets up Ordell and his pals, as well as ATF agents Ray Nicolet and Faron Tyler, cheating them all out of half a million dollars and a Mercedes convertible. What Nagel points out about circumstantial moral luck applies here:
The things we are called upon to do, the moral tests we face, are importantly determined by factors beyond our control. It may be true of someone that in a dangerous situation he would behave in a cowardly or heroic fashion, but if the situation never arises, he will never have the chance to distinguish or disgrace himself in this way, and his moral record will be different.
(1993, p. 168)
The situations in which Max finds himself entangled call for behavior of a particular kind: sharp, flexible, ultimately directed at survival in a jungle of violence and betrayal. Max is a survivor in the same way Jackie is; theirs is a special relationship that is forged under the pressure of physical threat. Without their having met, Max would, in all likelihood, never have encountered the unique circumstances that have drawn out these particular traits in his personality. Only after Jackie is safe does it dawn on him that her defensive maneuvers have involved him in a profitable sting as well.
Three: Causal Luck
Discussing Leonard's characters, Yearley (2001) observes, “Moreover, through Leonard's handling, in which all characters' motives and behaviors merit attention, his villains are distinct and authentic, however improbable they might seem. To paraphrase the author: in real life terrible things happen, without much in the way of warning” (p. 393). That Leonard's villains are distinct and authentic is indisputable. To discuss the causal circumstances, or the antecedents, that define a person's behavior is not to excuse her moral behavior. As in the other cases of moral luck, the person is free to act and hence carries some level of responsibility for her actions. Causal circumstances are seldom completely identical for different people and because of this we cannot expect identical responses to them; as mentioned before, circumstances have the fascinating ability to bring various character traits to the forefront or to stifle (temporarily) others. Once these circumstances become the person's “past,” they act as causal factors, even if dormant over a period of time.
The new temporal aspect that the notion of causal luck brings to bear on moral judgment by no means requires an author to provide a full history for each character in his work. As Leonard describes his method of writing, it “is based on character, the characters and the interplay of the characters and there is story that comes out of that. There is certainly more story in [my books] than in, say, what you would consider a serious novel” (Leonard 2012 [1978], p. 57). It is this amazing interplay of characters that somehow manages to fill in the blanks of the individual's past in lieu of long, descriptive paragraphs. The characters are the true vehicles for the plot, so that
Leonard, placing them under pressure, extracts the most from their inherent qualities. They are durable, resilient, brief of speech, and shrewd within the range of their experience. Whether homicide detectives, loan sharks, con artists, marshals, melon growers, or moonshiners, they like, or are accustomed to, what they do – and they do it rather well.
(Yearley 2001 , p. 394)
Louis Gara is the exception – anything but durable, resilient, or shrewd – that proves Yearley's rule that Leonard “extracts the most” from his characters by “placing them under pressure.” He's also a good example of how causal luck can affect, without fundamentally changing, our moral judgment of a character's behavior. Louis's criminal history comprises a series of causal events outlined initially in The Switch where his path crosses Ordell's for the second time, as we come to realize. Six years before the events in The Switch, Ordell and Louis were in Southern Ohio Correctional at the same time for grand theft auto. A moment of luck or destiny, humorously described by the narrator, and the uncanny affinity between the two men becomes obvious: “Ask ten girls which one they thought was better looking. It was close, but Louis would probably win six‐to‐four” (2012 [1978], p. 21). It will be a quick decision to cooperate hereafter, with Ordell leading on the promising, trustworthy criminal Louis, who seems to need a “gentle” push in the direction of obtaining desired results, aka, money, or more of it at any rate. While the muscle power is there in Louis, there are indications that some traces of decency have survived in him.
However, knowing the history that Ordell and Louis share at the outset of The Switch does not make us more understanding of Louis in that novel because, as readers, we have no access to an initial moment, or a trigger of conversion, that has transformed a regular, decent Louis into the criminal Louis we come to meet in The Switch. Moreover, even if we knew the history behind such a trigger, our general moral evaluation of his character is still going to be largely negative, though enriched with the knowledge about Louis's prior history. It is still rather interesting, though, to observe how the kidnapping of the wife of a rich Detroit developer can turn into a testing ground for Ordell's and Louis's moral characters, as well as their criminal alliance, for Louis ends up falling in love with their kidnapping victim, Margaret “Mickey” Dawson. Even the reconfiguration of (business) interests between Ordell, Louis, and Mickey – once Mickey has persuaded the other two that Melanie would make a much more effective ransom target, given Frank Dawson's attachment to her – is “tainted” by Louis's soft spots of character, and in particular, his attachment to Mickey herself.
Louis has lived through another brief stint in prison by the time we see him again in Rum Punch, 13 years later. Stuck with Louis as his “assistant” by the mobsters who've bought the insurance company that underwrites his business, Max observes realistically,
The three falls had only taken seven years out of his life, which Louis said didn't set him back too much. Actually six years and ten months. That sounded like a positive‐thinking guy, didn't it? Louis never complained or acted resentful.
It was his eyes that gave him away.
Max saw it. Those dull eyes that didn't seem to have life in them but didn't miss anything. Three falls, you don't come out, put on a new suit of clothes, and become a normal person again.
(p. 266)
Older, but not smarter it seems, Louis is getting entangled in yet another master scheme of Ordell's, this time in the armed robbery of weapons from a Nazi ringleader, and also getting involved in a series of other scams of various success. One of them is the almost comic attempt at robbing a liquor store by pretending to have a concealed weapon he does not have, then breaking into Max's office and stealing weapons in order to go back and rob the same liquor store, successfully this time; the sex fling with Melanie who has her own agenda and tries to recruit Louis to kill Ordell during the assault on the Nazi; his involvement in the elaborate bag swap organized by Jackie; and, finally, the loss of Ordell's money. And did we mention the taking of Melanie's life and losing his own life in the aftermath? Each of his bad decisions has a causal effect pushing Louis in the direction of worse decisions.
Toward the end of Rum Punch, Louis is, unfortunately, “under the influence,” literally and metaphorically: slightly drunk, probably slightly drugged too, and ultimately so confused that he ends up dead. Still, any role that causal luck may play in our moral judgment of Louis must be weighed against our – and his – sure anticipation of this outcome, knowing that Ordell has no second thoughts about getting rid of problematic business partners. No amount of causal luck can mitigate the fact that he should have known better. Louis has a criminal history and makes a series of bad choices, the last of which is killing Melanie. But in the end, as Nagel (1993) puts it,
Moral judgement of a person is judgement not of what happens to him, but of him. … We are not thinking just that it would be better if he were different, or did not exist, or had not done some of the things he has done. We are judging him, rather than his existence and characteristics.
(p. 67)
Judging Louis then, while indeed affected by the causal antecedents that have triggered the choices and behavior leading him to kill Melanie, does not, finally, exonerate him. In Leonard's world, after all is said and done, you are what you do.
Four: Resultant Luck
Resultant luck springs from the concept of agency and the fact that what we do has inevitable and morally impactful consequences, even if we cannot know what they will be. Having been put into a situation that requires action, a person will behave according to her moral standards and she will be morally judged for the result of that behavior. In Leonard's fiction, pretty much as in life, circumstance, action, and consequences are entwined in order to remind us of the power of character to pursue a line of behavior or to exploit moral luck to a desired level. Thus plot and personality, rather than abstractions and theoretical conceptualizations, play the leading roles in determining our moral judgment of Leonard's characters:
He doesn't work with themes – he works with character. He writes stories that are based on the vagaries of character and the places where those little hiccups of personality take his characters when they get into situations that are not clearly defined in their everyday lives. It's those grey areas that he likes so much (“Some things that my people do are illegal but not necessarily immoral”).
(May 2012, p. 11)
But what does this mean for a character like Jackie Burke in Rum Punch? Having seen her from several points of view, for instance, as a willing – and attractive – “mule” from the point of view of Ordell; as an articulate – and attractive – collaborator from the point of view of Louis; as an intelligent – and attractive – criminal from the point of view of Max; and as an easy – and attractive – informant from the point of view of Nicolet and Tyler, we perceive the necessity for Jackie's acting immorally to save herself. In the middle of a dense plot involving a vengeful weapons merchant and his entourage pitted against a couple of ambitious law enforcement officers, she survives a few tricky moments in the course of the novel, and we learn that these are not new experiences for her. Her previous life and unsuccessful marriages to a drug smuggler and a drunkard, plus the fact that she has spent seven million miles in the air as a flight attendant on a shuttle airline, can be interpreted as elements of a constitutive luck that led her to take advantage of others in an unethical way. On the level of causal luck, it is not a mere chance either that the plan to save herself from the messy crisscrossing of criminal and law‐enforcement agents is soon followed by the idea of stinging all of the participants. She even briefly entertains the idea of leaving Max behind and not splitting the spoils of the daring sting with him.
Jackie is not naïve enough to believe that she can step into such a situation and then get safely out of the dangerous mess without Max's help. The result that compounds the successful tricking of Ordell on the one hand and of Nicolet on the other, with the ultimately successful sting of half a million dollars intact, comes to illustrate what Yearley (2001) perceives as a special feature of Leonard's work, namely, that his “villains are eminently menacing, while his protagonists become surprisingly moral, even heroic” (p. 390). From the reader's point of view, Jackie's behavior is not inherently deserving of moral emulation or admiration. Her actions are simply a means of getting free from both Ordell and Nicolet and keeping the money. That outcome could be interpreted as her self‐appointed reward for surviving a trial of life and death and smartly outmaneuvering her bloodthirsty and power‐thirsty enemies. It is astonishing, then, that amid the complications of her plan and the number of unexpected turns it takes, there is time for her to “finally come to a decision about Max”:
That would be a tough one, because they were alike, she felt good with him and knew he was doing this for her, not the money.… And yet he was his own person, a very decent guy, even if he was a bail bondsman.
(p. 423)
What Jackie's decision is going to be has nothing to do with a romantic Technicolor sunset toward which the innocent hero and heroine are dashing. Quite the contrary, there is a black Mercedes involved and a bag full of beach towels and lots of greenbacks. Until the very end of Rum Punch, however, we think that maybe Jackie is going to leave Max behind in his drab office, trying to make a life for himself out of his shabby, dead‐end business: “Dealing with scum and trying to act respectable” (p. 450), as Max puts it, quoting Ordell. In short, we have the impression that, although she once had a use for him helping with her sting, and has exploited his affection for her to achieve her ends, she doesn't need him anymore. What redeems Jackie morally is not that her plan succeeds and she gets all the money and the Mercedes, but that, ultimately, she offers Max a chance to share the spoils if he makes the choice to leave with her. The resultant luck here – the implication that Max will take her up on her offer – makes us lower our negative moral judgment of Jackie's otherwise exploitative behavior. This is not the outcome she apparently anticipated, at least in the beginning of the novel; she didn't mean to feel any affection for Max, and the outcome is precipitated by pure chance, namely, Max's asking, in reply to her asking, “And you like it?” (your life here, in this dismal office), “Where would we go?” “I don't know, ” says, Jackie, “Does it matter?” (p. 451). It is as if Jackie were giving Max a last chance to say he wants to go with her. From her point of view, it is entirely a matter of luck whether or not he indicates he does. Although she could not have foreseen this outcome when she launched her scam with Max involved, it is the unanticipated result, and it affects how we judge all the cynical and exploitative moves she has made in their relationship up to this point. What is left hanging is whether or not Max follows through on Jackie's invitation to join her on the trip to “nowhere in particular.” But that remains Max's moral decision, not hers. Clearly moral luck can be good or bad; in this case, the resultant luck is extremely good for both Jackie and Max, or so it seems up to the point where the narrative ends.
Conclusion
Rum Punch traces circumstances and complications through the overt engagement of characters in a plot that at some points might look improbable. Such a method, however, produces a highly readable text, as Orr (2014) acknowledges: “It is a testament to [Leonard's] efforts that his books are very nearly effortless to read” (p. 39). It would not be improbable then to have three characters from The Switch up to no good in Rum Punch as well. It seems that no lessons were learned, no time span and no circumstances have made an impact on Ordell, Louis, and Melanie. Theirs is a world of rampant excess and dissipated existence fancifully papered over by money, sex, and violence. It would be extremely naïve to ask moral questions in relation to their lives, questions like the usual “How should I act in this particular situation?” rather than “What kind of person should I try to be in my daily encounter with others?” Leonard has no answer to the latter question but offers us the possibility to judge these characters morally and translate the ideas we get from our literary encounters to our own lives.
Sax (2008) rightly points out that, “[Leonard's] lasting contribution to world culture will certainly be his crime fiction in the distinctive Leonard style – reticent, understated prose and evocative but understated descriptions” (p. 1109). However, Leonard's works do not shy away from deep philosophical questions, either. Posing such philosophical questions happens in the same understated, reticent style. The reader's patience is very soon rewarded for that. In the world of Rum Punch, Leonard offers a variant of a moral universe that demands our engagement and moral judgment, maybe without a right or wrong response in all situations, and without a clear‐cut ending either. Because endings, more than beginnings, are tricky. As Chili Palmer puts it at the end of Get Shorty: “Fuckin endings, man, they weren't as easy as they looked” (Leonard 2016 [1992b], p. 228).
References
1. Card, C. (1996). The Unnatural Lottery: Character and Moral Luck. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
2. Latus, A. (2003). Constitutive luck. Metaphilosophy 34 (4): 460–475.
3. Leonard, E. (2012 [1991]). ‘Doing what I do’: an interview with Elmore Leonard. In: A. May. Good time crime: talking with Elmore Leonard. Contrapasso Magazine 2: 3–89.
4. Leonard, E. (2016 [1992a]). Rum Punch. In: Elmore Leonard: Four Later Novels (ed. G. Sutter), 229–451. New York: Library of America.
5. Leonard, E. (2016 [1992b]). Get Shorty. In: Elmore Leonard: Four Later Novels (ed. G. Sutter), 1–228. New York: Library of America.
6. Leonard, E. (2012 [1978]). The Switch. New York: William Morrow.
7. May, A. (2012). Good time crime: talking with Elmore Leonard. Contrapasso Magazine (2): 3–89.
8. Myers, B.R. (2005). The prisoner of cool. The Atlantic: 153–159.
9. Nagel, T. (1993). Moral luck. In: Moral Luck (ed. D. Statman), 57–71. Albany: State University of New York Press.
10. Orr, C. (2014). The Elmore Leonard paradox. The Atlantic: 38–41.
11. Rzepka, C.J. (2013). Being Cool: The Work of Elmore Leonard. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
12. Rzepka, C.J. (2014). Bouncing big: Elmore Leonard's primal scene. Clues: A Journal of Detection 33 (1): 92–100.
13. Rzepka, C.J. and Horsley, L. (2010). A Companion to Crime Fiction. Chichester, UK: Wiley.
14. Sax, R. (2008). Elmore Leonard. In: Critical Survey of Mystery and Detective Fiction, 1e (ed. C. Rollyson), 1107–1110. Pasadena: Salem Press.
15. Statman, D. (1993). Introduction. In: Moral Luck (ed. D. Statman), 1–34. Albany: State University of New York Press.
16. Timmermann, J. (ed.) (2009). Kant's Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals: A Critical Guide. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
17. Williams, B. (1993). Moral luck. In: Moral Luck, 1e (ed. D. Statman), 35–55. Albany: State University of New York Press.
18. Yearley, C. (2001). Elmore Leonard. In: 100 Masters of Mystery and Detective Fiction, 1e (ed. F. Kelleghan), 390–395. Pasadena: Salem Press.
Note
1 One of Kant's arguments is that a given action's moral “rightness” is connected to the principle of “common human understanding.” He also postulates the concept of the so-called “categorical imperative,” which means that individuals should follow universal moral laws whenever they take actions, constantly aspiring toward an ideal humanity. As long as we act because of intentions that can become universalized, we are considered moral. Thus, the morality of an action does not depend on the consequences of that action, nor on the events leading up to it or the circumstances in which it is performed. The morality of an action depends only on whether or not we act for the right reason or from good will. See, for example, Kant's Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals: A Critical Guide edited by Jens Timmermann (2009).