Part I
1
Michael Scrivener
Some of Elmore Leonard's fictional heroes like Raymond Cruz (City Primeval 1980 in Leonard 2015) and Terry Dunn (Pagan Babies 2000) have identities fractured by nostalgia and inauthenticity, or what Jean‐Paul Sartre called bad faith (mauvaise foi). That Leonard was familiar with French existentialism, that he minored in philosophy at the University of Detroit and came to intellectual maturity when Sartre, Camus, and existentialism were influential in postwar educated circles, are well established (Rzepka 2013, pp. 39–40). I am not suggesting Leonard was a careful student of Sartre's work or that there are direct influences on the fiction from philosophical sources. Rather, Leonard's writing is often shaped by existentialist concerns, such as identity and freedom, the concept of the absurd, and the issue of autonomy and responsibility. People do grow intellectually as they get older, and some experience radical changes, but it is also true that the way people look at the world in their early twenties is both formative and in many respects enduring. I am not the only reader of Leonard's work who sees strong continuity between his 1950s westerns and his later crime fiction (Noçon 2013, pp. 117–119; Hynes 1991, p. 184).
Nostalgia, as I am using the concept, is a form of Sartrean bad faith in that one is lying not only to other people but also to oneself (Sartre 1965, pp. 137–140). The myth of the American West is an obvious example of cultural nostalgia, a way of avoiding historical reality in order to substitute a set of comforting lies about white supremacy and innocence for a painful and guilt‐laden understanding. Leonard's westerns, while remaining within the generic boundaries of the western, dismantle this myth with effectiveness and moral insight. A part of the western myth that has carried over into the twentieth century and our own era is the idealized figure of the rugged individualist who upholds a chivalric code of honor and masculine strength, protection of women and the weak, physical courage, and sexual power. While Leonard's fiction, early and late, exposes the delusions and immorality of white supremacy by representing with respect and honesty Hispanic, black, and Native American characters, it also shows how his conflicted white heroes struggle against ideological delusions.
Leonard's protagonists are not just flawed but occupy the role of hero only with considerable awkwardness. Raymond Cruz, who ordinarily follows the professional norms of police work, also models himself after the heroes of Hollywood westerns, and stages a confrontation with the mass murderer Clement Mansell that resembles an old western gunfight. Cruz is playing a mass‐mediated role attached to the nostalgic mythology of frontier justice, and that very artificial structure brings him close to what postwar existentialists like Sartre call inauthenticity, the inability to encounter reality without myths or lies or false assumptions. By contrast, in Pagan Babies, where Terry Dunn – thief, con man, alcoholic, and anything but sexually abstinent – also plays the role of Catholic priest in Rwanda during the genocide of 1994, the path to authenticity is, ironically, by way of a highly conventional nostalgia. The plot of the novel seems to be moving in a direction that would allow “Father” Dunn to exploit his role and his photographs of orphaned Tutsis to embezzle money for his own use, but the novel concludes with Dunn returning to Rwanda and his Tutsi girlfriend Chantelle, eager to help the people as if he were a real priest. If nostalgia made Terry want to please his uncle and mother by playing priest – which helped him avoid an indictment for cigarette smuggling – it also led to his confrontation with reality, the Hutu slaughter of his Tutsi congregation. Dunn's traumatized witnessing of the massacre and daily interaction with the survivors leads in a circuitous way to his authentic identity, someone who is priest‐like, if not a real priest.
The Oklahoma Wildman and the Gunfighter: City Primeval
One of Leonard's most memorable villains is Clement Mansell, the Oklahoma Wildman, a psychopathic killer who is insightful, charismatic, and clever. As Leonard explained in a 2000 interview, the bad guys are more fun to create (Taylor 2000, p. 134), and as one can also see there is a degree of self‐identification with his scoundrels, even the most murderous. Leonard, who as a boy lived briefly in Oklahoma before his family moved to Detroit when he was eight, reports that as a child he pretended he was one of the famous gangsters of the 1930s like Pretty Boy Floyd and Machine Gun Kelly (Taylor 2000, p. 138). By making Mansell hail from Oklahoma and by making his antagonist Raymond Cruz a Detroiter from the age of 10, Leonard seems to be infusing both characters with his own life experiences. As an author Leonard has an ability to get inside even the most despicable of characters, and as readers experience the world through the feelings and sensations of loathsome characters like Mansell, they understand more and judge less. With City Primeval Leonard presents the reader with spectacularly violent crime focalized through the character of a police detective in a city that by the late 1970s was internationally famous as a site of urban blight and decay, black crime, white flight, and postindustrial ruin (Herron 1993). The novel pushes against white fantasies of black criminality by depicting blacks as victims of violence rather than symbols of violent wildness.
Detroit is depicted as a kind of wilderness, if by that we mean an absence of civilized order. The novel opens with a report on Judge Alvin B. Gay, who is about to be removed from the bench for gross misconduct and corruption. He threatens to expose powerful people if the state supreme court acts against him (Leonard 2015, pp. 3–7). Judge Gay is modeled after the real Judge James Del Rio who was in fact removed from the bench (Dudar and Laitner 2018) and who played a prominent role in the racial politics of the 1970s in the era of Mayor Coleman A. Young. When in the very first chapter Mansell murders Judge Gay, the novel puts race and violence in the front of the reader's attention, but not in the way it was usually represented at the time, with whites fearing black violence – unreasonably, because most victims were African American. In the racially polarized atmosphere of the late 1970s, Leonard here decides to approach race a little off center, bracketing out the stereotypical divisions by pitting a racist white murderer against an Irish‐Hispanic policeman. Other than Judge Gay, who like most victims of violent crime in Detroit is African American, the black characters play a minor role in the novel. Race rather exists as a powerful imaginary construct, especially in the racist rhetoric and racist killings of Mansell. If Leonard's white readers thought that their preconceptions about urban black violence were going to be reinforced in City Primeval (CP), they must have been disappointed. In the essay Leonard wrote in 1978 for the Detroit News Sunday Magazine, “Impressions of Murder,” the sympathetic treatment of the Detroit police is joined with a compassionate if brutally honest depiction of blacks killing other black people (Leonard 2015, pp. 937–948).
The novel focuses rather on the phenomenon of wildness, something that in Leonard's treatment is either racialized as white racism or located in a mythical West. His novel thereby encourages a thoughtful angle on urban violence. Raymond Cruz's love interest is named, not accidentally, Carolyn Wilder, who is Mansell's defense attorney. Wildness in some form is something shared by the main characters; it is also something at the heart of what Leonard is imagining to be the essence of American rugged individualism.
By opening the novel with Judge Gay's flamboyant lack of professionalism and murder at Mansell's hands, Leonard dramatizes the relevance of Yeats's (1956) famous lines in “Second Coming” that “the centre cannot hold” (l. 3), that the rule of law that enables a civilized society to function nonviolently and legitimately has been severely compromised. Cruz himself is both a proud professional who upholds the rule of law and someone who ignores the law for a form of frontier or western or wilderness justice. Mansell, who even before killing Judge Gay has already killed eight people, most of them black (Leonard 2015, p. 80), kills Gay mostly because he's a black man with a pretty white woman. He has spent only a short time in prison for all his crimes, and he was able to escape punishment for murder on a technicality engineered by his lawyer, Carolyn Wilder. Early in the novel the police know with certainty that Mansell has killed Judge Gay, but they can't prosecute him for the crime unless they find the murder weapon; even then he might evade conviction if the evidence is equivocal. The rule of law doesn't seem to work, as the law seems indistinguishable from lawlessness.
Indeed, the novel sympathetically represents the Albanians who seek to kill Mansell after they discover he has victimized one of their own. The Albanians here seem like the Apaches in Leonard's westerns, a tribal culture deserving respect for its integrity (Devlin 1999, p. 71). What exactly then is the rule of law? the novel seems to be asking. The Albanian Toma speaks of killing Mansell while looking in his eyes (Leonard 2015, pp. 142–143), and in the climactic scene when Cruz kills Mansell he is looking him in the eyes (p. 204), thus connecting Toma and Cruz, even though the one is officially an Albanian criminal and the other a police detective. The question is whether the tribal system of justice is designed to contain or to initiate violence. The Albanians seem interested in containing violence, but the reader is uncertain what Cruz is doing.
Another uncertainty is the relationship between Carolyn Wilder and Cruz. The detective confronting and having sex with the successful woman attorney follows a pattern that could bolster stereotypes about professional women who really need the protection of a strong man. Leonard's depiction of this problematic relationship plays it both ways or, perhaps, creates an undecidable ambiguity. In chapter 16 Cruz challenges Wilder because she is supporting Mansell's alibi for the time period when he attempted to kill Cruz at his Palmer Park apartment. In the next chapter they have sex or, as Cruz would phrase it, “make love” or, after he is annoyed with her, “fuck” (Leonard 2015, pp. 101–113). In Cruz's eyes there is a point where he and Wilder seem to connect in an authentic way, giving rise to his saying “I know you” (p. 109), but shortly afterwards he thinks she's assuming the role of lawyer and he is disillusioned (Leonard 2015, p. 110). His “I know you” sounds like a moment of authenticity, or at least Cruz would like it to be, but he suspects that Carolyn only pretended to be needy and weak in order to seduce him:
He wondered what he felt about her beyond the fact he liked her eyes and her nose and her body. He wondered if he had been genuinely moved or if he had only wanted to mount and subdue the dignified, distinguished lady lawyer, or if it had been the other way around and it was Raymond Cruz who had been seduced.
(Leonard 2015, p. 111)
Because the reader has only Cruz's focalized consciousness to see through, we don't know for certain what is going on with Carolyn. Another way to look at their sexual encounter is that she wanted to cement the alliance between herself and Cruz to protect her from her dangerous client Mansell in case she had a difficult time controlling him, something she says several times she thinks she can do. Moreover, she can compromise a police detective, which will be helpful in her future legal work, while enjoying good sex. She has little to lose here. She can still defend her client if that is what she has to do. It turns out that she cannot control Mansell, although she has taken pride in thinking that she can indeed do so (Devlin 1999, p. 68); instead, Mansell physically abuses her, at which point she gives up trying to help him and collaborates wholly with Cruz. During Wilder's conversation with Cruz after Mansell has physically beaten her, she asks what Cruz meant when he said earlier that he “knew” her.
Well, it was like I saw you. Not what you do or who you believe you are, just you.
(Leonard 2015, p. 183)
Wilder does not say that she understands Cruz or experienced anything similar, leading the reader to infer that the authentic connection with Wilder was something Cruz wanted and imagined he had; she, however, seems noncommittal – indeed, noncommittal to the very end. Did they really connect as two human beings rather than as calculating social beings looking out for their own interests? Cruz seems to be playing a hypermasculine role, using the notion of a genuine connection as a form of domination. The day after they have had sex Cruz imagines retaliating against her for telling him their sex was “about what I expected” (Leonard 2015, p. 113); he wishes he had said something to her to “nail” her “to the antique headboard, her mouth open” (Leonard 2015, p. 114). By the novel's end the reader does not know exactly what Wilder feels for Cruz. After she is beaten up, she wants revenge for not being able to control Mansell; she tells Cruz that she wants Mansell killed (Leonard 2015, p. 182), knowing that Cruz might actually do it – and he eventually does. When things fall apart, and her strategy for containing Mansell's violence fails, she expresses no remorse or insight into the ethics of her professional conduct. In her own realm she is “wild,” exercising her power within a legal system without a moral “centre.”
The wildness of the Oklahoma Wildman encompasses the murder of nine people, but it is surprising to see the police detective Cruz achieve a connection with Mansell that seems stronger than his relationship with Carolyn Wilder. Early in the novel, with just a little evidence, Cruz figures out that Mansell is the murderer of Judge Gay. He recalls Mansell's role in a triple murder three years earlier at the drug house on St. Mary's where the Wildman used a Walther P38, which wends its way as a real and imaginary object through the plot like a traditional MacGuffin – the term popularized by Alfred Hitchcock to describe an arbitrary object that propels the plot. It is something more than that as well because it is the material object linking together Mansell and Cruz. Cruz speaks of Mansell with language inflected with sexual fantasy – “he's got very large balls” (Leonard 2015, p. 61) – and seems to admire his physical courage – “a daredevil, a death‐defier” (Leonard 2015, p. 61). The two of them do a dance, as Cruz makes the first move, then Mansell countermoves, then Cruz counters, and so on, up to the violent climax in the final chapter.
When they first meet face to face in the office of Carolyn Wilder, Mansell's lawyer, Cruz wants to dominate the Wildman physically – “Pick Clement up and throw him against the wall, hard enough to put him out” – (Leonard 2015, p. 67), but he also feels “a strange rapport with the man that excluded the woman lawyer, made her an outsider” (Leonard 2015, p. 68). Shortly after this encounter Cruz has Mansell arrested on minor traffic violations just in order to interrogate him tête à tête, and their exchange brings them remarkably close to one another. While Cruz conducts a factual interrogation trying to get Mansell to give information and confess, there is a subtext of sexual tension and sadomasochistic pleasure. Cruz speaks of “nailing” him, while Mansell remarks “you really want my ass, don't you?” Mansell remarks on the small size of Cruz's gun and asks if he is “good” with it (Leonard 2015, p. 81). They get to a point where they agree their conflict is “personal” – as Mansell says, “‘you just want me’” – and he continues to make insightful observations that Cruz has no “higher motive,” is playing a game for the sake of the game, not law, and “We got our own rules and words we use” (Leonard 2015, p. 79). When Cruz tries to take advantage of their intimacy by asking Mansell why he killed Judge Gay, Mansell is disappointed with Cruz because he had been hopeful of a genuine connection: “‘we been talking all this time, I [was beginning to] think we're getting some place’” (Leonard 2015, pp. 81–82).
Whereas the reader cannot know what Wilder really feels about Cruz, the reader has to accept the close connection between the detective and the murderer, who are in some ways doubles, Doppelgängerin (Rzepka 2013, p. 127). Mansell's wildness calls out to Cruz's wildness, which the novel suggests comprises western fantasies of rugged individualist masculinity. Cruz and Mansell recognize each other as anachronisms (Geherin 1989, p. 70), as Cruz likes fifties Hollywood westerns like Gregory Peck's The Gunfighter (1950) and Mansell hates contemporary music like Disco (Leonard 2015, p. 132). Mansell's racism is unleavened by any kind of restraint, as though he were still living in the Deep South before the Civil Rights Movement rather than in a black‐majority northern city in the late 1970s. Even his crimes are old school: stealing cars, robbing new immigrants of their hard‐earned money, and ripping off drug dealers. He disapproves of his girlfriend's pot smoking (Leonard 2015, p. 174), while Cruz disapproves of the single women who exercise their sexual freedom and independence – “girls who came with toothbrushes in their purses” (p. 64) to after‐work bars. Mansell is frustrated that Del Weems, in whose apartment he and his girlfriend Sandy are staying, does all his business via credit cards rather than cash, and the Wildman lacks the skills to exploit credit cards (p. 34). Mansell is a captive of the Old Economy, of which a once thriving Motor City is the perfect symbol, just as Cruz is nostalgic for a time when differences between men could be settled physically, without the mediation of law, bureaucracy, trials, and paperwork. They are both atavisms. It is ironically appropriate that Sandy, after she betrays Mansell and cooperates with the police, will be starting her new life with Del Weems, a consultant to business executives, away from Michigan.
Cruz and Mansell are victims of nostalgia. Mansell plays the cops and robbers game with Cruz expertly until the end, when he underestimates how far outside the law Cruz is willing to go. When Cruz arranges for a gun duel with Mansell as a way to settle their fight, Mansell does not believe Cruz is serious, and when Cruz shoots an unarmed Mansell, who has not touched his Walther P38, the murder weapon that Cruz planted in his apartment, Mansell is in disbelief that Cruz, a policeman, has not played fair. If Cruz's fantasy was to imitate a classic Wild West gunfight, he failed miserably, imitating rather the kind of unheroic violence practiced by Mansell. By the novel's end a violent criminal is “off the streets,” but Cruz has violated both his professional ethics as a policeman and his wilderness ethics as represented in figures like Gregory Peck in The Gunfighter or Gary Cooper in High Noon (1952). One assumes that if the novel were to continue Cruz would not get into legal trouble over killing Mansell (or locking him in Skender's basement to die slowly from starvation, evoking Poe's “Cask of Amontillado” [Hynes 1991, p. 185]). But the reader has to reckon with a character without a center, someone who has broken apart.
The ideals of both professionalism and the Hollywood western were supposed to restore order and protect the innocent citizens of Detroit against evil and violence, to keep out the wildness that threatened to destroy a civilized society. But in trying to contain the wildness both professionally and as an imaginary cowboy, Cruz merely became as wild as what he was fighting. The journalist Sylvia Marcus, whom Cruz hated for her probing questions about his cowboy role‐playing, turns out to be correct, that he has used the cowboy fantasy to keep him “detached from what makes him fully human” (Rzepka 2013, p. 130). After killing Mansell, Cruz will have a harder time lying to himself about his noble motives, but there is no suggestion that critical insight will prevail over blindness. The reader knows that Cruz experienced and acted out his wildness, which propelled him outside the orbit of civilized society, but Cruz also wants to think of himself as a good person: he helps Sandy leave town, perhaps not a difficult thing to do, but nevertheless it earns him some moral credit in his own eyes.
The novel, despite its violence, disturbing climax, and severely compromised hero, avoids being a completely grim fiction because even in Leonard's darkest narratives there is something that brings light. This light is difficult to identify but I will try. The dope‐smoking Sandy, Mansell's girlfriend and accomplice, has a peculiar charm that wins the reader's favor, but even Mansell has his lighter side. No character so completely deserves to be killed as the Wildman, which makes his boyish trust in the law and its supposed protection of defendants – probably his own sense of white privilege as well – seem comically incongruous. The really bad guy gets his just deserts in the end, so the reader feels a kind of poetic justice that is superficially satisfying, as dozens of vigilante and Dirty Harry type films illustrate. As for Cruz, his wildness is more dangerous to himself psychologically than to others physically, because without the provocation of a Mansell that wildness remains quiescent. Cruz's colleagues seem devoted to maintaining professional standards of conduct to uphold the rule of law, despite the temptations to do as Cruz did, so that provides a kind of counter to the bleakness of the novel. Nonetheless, the reader ends up recognizing Cruz's failure to achieve an authentic identity, as indicated by the bravado of paring his nails after the killing to imitate his Hollywood hero Gregory Peck. Cruz may be forced to confront the consequences of his own wildness, but he doesn't really find them too alarming.
A Machete and a Bag of Photographs: Pagan Babies
In what is probably his bleakest and grimmest novel because near its center is the Rwanda genocide of 1994, Pagan Babies also takes a new angle on Sartrean bad faith as the con man and fake priest Terry Dunn somehow stumbles his way into authenticity and takes responsibility for his freedom. This novel also has a great deal of humor to counter the pull of dark tragedy, as main character Debbie Dewey is a standup comic and Leonard stages numerous scenes that are incongruous and hilarious. One of the four novels Rzepka calls “the Catholic Books” (Rzepka 2013, p. 184),1 Pagan Babies explicitly thematizes the nostalgia for an earlier religious culture in American life, leading Terry to fake his training in a seminary and then fake his way to the priesthood in Rwanda, to please his mother and to escape prosecution for cigarette smuggling. His brother Francis, a personal injury lawyer who should be skeptical by instinct, overlooks the obvious signs of fakery to imagine Terry is actually what he says he is. Terry has a more difficult time maintaining the fakery with the three women in his life: his Rwandan Tutsi girlfriend Chantelle Nyamwase, his accomplice in crime and Michigan girlfriend Debbie Dewey, and Francis's wife, Mary Pat. Other than his mother, the women in Terry's life have too much at stake in the real world to be taken in for long by masculine posing. Chantelle is a victim of Hutu violence, Debbie is an ex‐con who tried to kill her swindler boyfriend, and Mary Pat is a protective mother of two young girls. All these women have to be alert to what really goes on in the world because so much of it poses a threat to them and those they love.
For most of his life Terry Dunn has been drifting along with things happening to him as he took the path of least resistance, pretending to be religious, going for what seemed like easy money in a cigarette smuggling operation, faking the priestly role when that seemed easier than doing anything else. In the language of existentialism, he is not recognizing his freedom and not taking responsibility for his choices (Sartre 1965, pp. 277–281). Then two things happen that shock him out of his characteristic passivity: he witnesses the slaughter of his Tutsi congregation of 47 in the sanctuary while he is saying mass, and he learns in confession that Bernard, one of the Hutu soldiers who carried out the massacre, is bragging about his exploits and promising more violence to come. The trauma of witnessing the slaughter only reinforced Terry's sense of helplessness and seemed to legitimate his overall passivity until he linked the trauma with knowing that the woman with whom he was intimate was likely to be killed in another round of violence by Bernard and his comrades. The tender feelings he has for Chantelle are connected with her own trauma, as one of her arms is only a stump, from a Hutu attack (Leonard 2000, p. 34). Before he leaves for Michigan for his mother's funeral, Terry decides to act against Bernard, first trying to get him arrested – an impossibility given the political realities at the time – then trying to provoke his remorse, which fails, and finally shooting him and three of his friends (p. 40).
The irony for Terry is that he is technically a mass murderer (although the chances of his ever being caught are slim to none, as the police are looking the other way), but in existentialist terms he has acted meaningfully by exercising his freedom. After shooting the four men he says, “Rest in peace, motherfuckers” (Leonard 2000, p. 40), a kind of Hollywood gangster thing to say at that point, so Leonard is directing our attention to Terry's mixed understanding of what he has done. The RIP seems sarcastic in a faux priestly way, and the “motherfuckers” seems vengeful and triumphant, but the affect is appropriate to the occasion, eliminating a threat of violence to people he cares about.
We rarely know what Terry is thinking from internal focalization, but we learn much about him, as in this case, from what he does and says. Leonard does not probe Terry's consciousness much, except to register his sensations and perceptions. The implication is that Terry does not practice much reflection about what he is doing, but rather acts in an improvisational way. He is, despite being a con man, honest with others when there is no reason to lie, so when Debbie asks him about the murders, he tells her, “It didn't seem to have anything to do with what happened in the church” (Leonard 2000, p. 76), a remarkable statement because the connection between the two events seems self‐evident and Terry offers no alternative explanation, refusing to tell Debbie precisely why he did it. Perhaps he is really not sure why he did it. Later in the novel Terry's sister‐in‐law inquires about the machete he brought with him from Rwanda and why he has kept it. He tells her it reminds him of the church massacre, “parts of the scene in detail that were like – what do you call it – tableaux, hideous moments caught in stop‐motion, silent, without the screams, the din of voices” (p. 184). The machete prompts his nearly photographic recall of the images. In his attempt to explain the machete – which is not precisely the same as his motives for killing the Tutsi soldiers – more questions are posed than answered: when he shot Bernard and the others, did he think that the action would save Chantelle from harm? Does he intend to return to Africa or cynically use the photographs of the Tutsi orphans as a scam to enrich himself? Are the murders a way to relieve his guilt over a lifetime of cynicism and indifference? If we recall the Sartrean maxim of existence preceding essence, then we can see how Terry will discover eventually why he did such a bold and reckless thing.
To compare Terry's action with similar deeds by other Leonard protagonists reveals existentialist themes. The hero of Valdez Is Coming (1970, in Leonard 2018), who kills close to a dozen men in his battle with the villain, has a specific reason why he is challenging the rancher, Frank Tanner, namely, to provide financial compensation for the Native wife of a black soldier that Valdez as sheriff killed, but only in self‐defense. Valdez tried to arrest the man only because Tanner, a virulent racist, had falsely accused the victim, Orlando Rincón, of killing a soldier. Thus, it is Tanner, not Valdez, who is ultimately responsible for the death of an innocent man. That also makes Tanner responsible for the reparations to the widow, a Lipan Apache, and Valdez is out to make Tanner pay, literally. One of the more thoroughly despicable villains in the Leonard canon, Tanner killed the soldier he accuses Rinćon of murdering and then set in motion the whole operation against Rincón in order to protect himself.
By any utilitarian calculus, Valdez's project to get Tanner to pay reparations to the Lipan widow is unwise because his efforts bring about the deaths of so many people, as well as horrible, nearly fatal pain and torture upon himself. It also contradicts the frontier code of honor, which would demand that Tanner, in turn, be killed in an act of eye‐for‐an‐eye vengeance. Valdez does not follow that path, for killing Tanner would not secure the widow her money. His eventual defeat of Tanner is thus enormously satisfying for the reader and illustrates an existentialist type of action, since it is meaningful only because Valdez is making it meaningful; his absurd pursuit of Tanner brings into the world a new sense of justice, that someone like the widow should be compensated, that someone like Rincón did not deserve to die. The reparations are also allegorically relevant in relation to America's white guilt over slavery. Valdez has decided what constitutes justice, which is his Sartrean “project” and which has little to do with the legal process.
Valdez's action and project are similar to what Terry Dunn does to the Tutsi murderers. Although Valdez's feats are more heroic and difficult, Dunn's murders are just as absurd, even if they are legitimate according to his own sense of what constitutes justice because they also bring into the world the judgment that genocidal violence is not acceptable. But Dunn's justification is on very shaky grounds, legally, politically, and even morally. For one thing, when Bernard's Hutu cohort learn about the murders, they are likely to inflict retaliatory violence on some innocent Tutsi, who would be the main suspect. Valdez, by contrast, even though he killed more people, kept his project of justice within publicly articulated goals, which he could and did defend.
Although it does not involve violence, except for the threat of violence, the late western story “The Tonto Woman” (1982) is a wonderful illustration of Leonard's playing with the dramatic possibilities of the absurd. A cattle thief, Ruben Vega, is distracted from cattle thieving by gazing at Sarah – the Tonto woman – from a distance. Her husband has banished her and kept her isolated because she had been a captive of several different Native tribes, and was returned to her husband after 12 years with the Tonto Apache. Her abjection as a slave within Native societies is literally written on her face, where the Mojave left an extensive tattoo, and she is now treated as an untouchable by both the white community and her white husband, John Isham. Vega first sees her bathing and, after staring from afar, he becomes intrigued and makes contact with her. Sarah is a living symbol, for her community and her husband, of the Native population's humiliation of white males, who were, in this case, unable to protect one of their women. That humiliation is publicly displayed on Sarah's tattooed face. Surprisingly, Vega's never fully articulated but nevertheless clearly erotic interest in Sarah leads not to a gunfight with the jealous and possessive husband but to a completely unexpected reconciliation between husband and wife. By treating Sarah as a desirable woman with worth and dignity, Vega restores her own self‐regard and arouses her husband John to care for her again. The outlaw Vega functions like an accidental marriage counselor and therapist, teaching the traumatized wife that “‘there's no one else in the world like you’” (Leonard 1998, p. 742).
The randomness of Vega's encounter with Sarah, the improvisational nature of his relationship with her, his decision to avoid a fight with the husband – while stealing his cattle – all take place outside the logic of law and ordinary, socially sanctioned morality. Terry Dunn's feelings for the traumatized Chantelle are also outside the norm for a middle‐class Midwesterner, especially as those feelings lead him to murder. There is also an improvisational quality like Vega's to Dunn's behavior when he returns to Michigan, but the improvisation is inspired not by a woman – Debbie Dewey is not truly the object of his desire, even if the reader thinks so until the end of the novel – but by a machete and a bag of photographs.
When Terry leaves Rwanda he pays for the burial of the 47 Tutsi parishioners who were slaughtered in his church, while carrying with him a machete that was used in the massacre, along with a bag of photographs of orphan survivors. These objects are more than MacGuffins for forwarding the plot: they are material objects that connect Terry with the Rwandan experience. They function meaningfully in terms of how Sartre understands the “past” as something provoking the exercise of freedom: “I alone in fact can decide at each moment the significance of the past” and “by projecting myself toward my ends, I preserve the past with me, and by action I decide its meaning” (Sartre 1965, pp. 270–271). The two objects have a distinctive, almost numinous reality for Terry. When Debbie asks him if he brought any mementos home from Rwanda, he says “only one, a machete” (Leonard 2000, p. 58). Although he also brings the photos, he does not refer to them as mementos, perhaps because the photos are not just emotionally evocative souvenirs but instruments to help him make money for the (apparently bogus) Orphans of Rwanda Fund. The photos have the power and ambiguity of artistic representations, images of reality rather than reality itself. The machete, however, is the very material instrument of death in the church, an event that he witnessed, and it is the weapon that mutilated Chantelle's arm. It is an uncanny object with meaning that cannot be quantified or normalized, an excess meaning that Dunn cannot integrate into his ordinary sense of the world and his place in it. It is also a potential weapon that Dunn uses to intimidate people he thinks might harm him, starting with Johnny, an ex‐con and former school friend to whom he owes money. He lifts it up in Mary Pat's kitchen, remarking on its heaviness (Leonard 2000, p. 94), and he later uses the machete to threaten Mutt, a dim‐witted ex‐con and bodyguard who intends to carry out a hit on him (pp. 208–209). Neither Johnny nor Mutt attempts to harm Dunn, in part because of the machete.
Mary Pat's domain is the kitchen, the classical American site of domesticity and middle‐class normality. Terry's sister‐in‐law and her young daughters have to deal somehow with the symbolic violence of Rwanda when Dunn leaves the machete and the canvas bag of photos in the kitchen, setting the scene for one of the novel's most powerful moments. The incongruity of the middle‐class girls in physical proximity with both the machete – “He told the little girls the knife was used to cut sugarcane and hack stalks of bananas” (Leonard 2000, p. 184) – and the Rwanda photos of traumatized children dramatize the grotesque contradictions in Terry's life and satirize Americans' inability to connect emotionally with suffering outside their narrow social circle. Terry's family has shown no interest in Rwanda the entire five years he has lived there, since, as the narrator remarks, “a full‐scale attempt at genocide … barely made the six o'clock news” (p. 6). As the girls go through the photos asking questions and making observations, they demonstrate almost no ability to make sense of what is represented, even to the point of not fully understanding what an orphan is. Katy brings out an atlas to help them visualize Rwanda, and the image on the map is no more helpful than the photos in bringing the girls to an even minimal understanding of what Rwanda means (pp. 184–186).
Dunn's nieces cannot imagine real suffering or physical trauma, something they have in common with the adult American public. When Katy talks about wanting to be a saint and speaks casually of being martyred like Saint Catherine of Alexandria, broken on a spiked wheel, and Saint Agatha, who had her breasts cut off and tossed in the fire, she clearly has no realistic conception of what these images and words signify (Leonard 2000, pp. 176–177). Moreover, this internet‐mediated information de‐realizes the physical body to make it impossible for her to understand the Rwanda photos. Leonard's wicked satirical feel for the false innocence of middle‐class suburban children is evident when Mary Pat has her young daughters watch MTV and its highly sexualized images while Mutt, ex‐con and hit man, is downstairs getting ready to kill their uncle and perhaps everyone else in the house (p. 191). Rwanda, MTV, and Internet saints – tortured and mutilated young women are Katy's favorites – make up the disturbing jumble of meanings so decontextualized as to be little more than background noise, incoherent and numbing.
When Terry Dunn finally extricates himself from Mutt's threatened hit, the Mafia's scam, and Debbie's betrayal, he finds himself with $250 000 without having had to exploit the Rwandan orphans. Not that he didn't try to do so. But by the novel's end he has achieved something close to an authentic identity. Asked by the policeman Laurent if he knew he was coming back to Rwanda, Dunn answers, “‘Not until I got here’” (Leonard 2000, p. 224). He discovers who he is by acting in the world and deriving his emotional intuition from the machete and the photos, those material objects of his past that somehow connect him to the trauma he witnessed. Far short of a saint, to be sure, Terry plans to play a priest‐like role: “‘I'll talk to people, try to help them. Even do it like Confession if they want’” (p. 223). When Terry realizes Debbie does not love him, he only then recognizes the truth: that he wants a loving relationship. He doesn't know that until he experiences its failure (p. 215). He doesn't know he will be staying in Rwanda and living with Chantelle until he actually gets there. If Terry Dunn resembles another literary character, it might be Thomas Fowler, the Catholic existentialist protagonist in Graham Greene's (1955) The Quiet American, which takes place in Vietnam in the 1950s. Like Dunn, Fowler repudiates the American style of innocence and takes responsibility for his freedom, incurring whatever guilt might go along with that.
Choices and Consequences
Leonard's fiction shows us that passivity and blindness have consequences – Francis Dunn and his family are good examples – and that characters become especially interesting when they become aware of their freedom and make choices that violate the conventional way of doing things. The broken convention, the circumvented law, and the ignored norm open up the fictional world to both murderous scoundrels and problematic heroes. When Mickey Dawson leaves her upper‐middle‐class suburban life and cheating husband in The Switch (1978), she accesses her inner Nora Helmer, as Devlin observes, referring to Henryk Ibsen's A Doll's House (Devlin 1999, p. 62). But the straightforward feminist script is troubled by Mickey's ultimate alliance with her one‐time kidnappers and her turning to what could be violent crime. Leonard is not a sentimentalist. His existentialist heroes are sometimes likeable, such as Valdez and Terry Dunn at the end of the novel, and sometimes not particularly admirable, like Cruz and Mickey. As a novelist and storywriter he shines a light on that zone of possibility and authenticity where the freedom to act and choose becomes something a character suddenly realizes, or misses entirely, whether for good or ill.
References
1. Devlin, J.E. (1999). Elmore Leonard. New York: Twayne Publishers.
2. Dudar, H. and Laitner, B. (2018). Former Detroit judge, activist James Del Rio dies at age 94. Detroit Free Press (12 April) https://www.freep.com/story/news/local/michigan/detroit/2018/04/12/detroit‐judge‐activist‐james‐del‐rio‐dies/509367002 (
3. Geherin, D. (1989). Elmore Leonard. New York: Continuum.
4. Greene, G. (1955). The Quiet American. New York: Vintage.
5. Herron, J. (1993). AfterCulture: Detroit and the Humiliation of History. Detroit: Wayne State University Press.
6. Hynes, J. (1991). ‘High noon in Detroit’: Elmore Leonard's career. Journal of Popular Culture 25 (3): 181–187.
7. Leonard, E. (1998). The Tonto Woman and Other Western Stories. New York: Dell.
8. Leonard, E. (2000). Pagan Babies, Kindle Edition. New York: Delacorte Press.
9. Leonard, E. (2015). Four Novels of the 1980s: City Primeval, LaBrava, Glitz, Freaky Deaky. New York: Library of America.
10. Leonard, E. (2018). Elmore Leonard's Westerns: Last Stand at Saber River, Hombre, Valdez Is Coming, Forty Lashes Less One, Stories (ed. T. Rafferty). New York: Library of America.
11. Noçon, P. (2013). A reading of Elmore Leonard's Hombre. Studies in the Western 21: 117–138.
12. Rzepka, C. (2013). Being Cool: The Work of Elmore Leonard, Kindle Edition. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
13. Sartre, J.‐P. (1965). The Philosophy of Jean‐Paul Sartre (ed. R.D. Cumming). New York: Vintage.
14. Taylor, K. (2000). Bad guys are more fun: an interview with Elmore Leonard. Witness 14 (2): 126–141.
15. Yeats, W.B. (1956). The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats. New York: Macmillan.
Note
1 The others are The Hunted (1977), Bandits (1987), and Touch (1987).