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Michael Sinowitz
Let's start by imagining a plot. Our story begins with one character confronting another who appears to be stealing something from the place where the first character works. The thief notices that the employee is “nice looking” and the employee thinks literally the same about the thief. The employee calls the cops on the thief, but on the witness stand a few pages later, he abruptly declares he does not recognize the thief. The two meet again on the steps of the courthouse, after which the thief reluctantly accompanies the employee to a bar, where the thief receives a proposition. We cut to the following morning, the employee waking up next to the thief, who reveals the couple had spent the night in the same bed.
What do we have here? It could certainly be the start of a screwball romantic comedy of the thirties, with a nearly ludicrous meet‐cute and initial tension – the fact that the characters claim not to have sex makes that possible, or perhaps this is a later period sex comedy or a modern take on the romantic comedy? Ostensibly, however, it is none of these, as what I have described to you is the opening to Elmore Leonard's 1976 novel, Swag. Now, I have left out some key details like the fact that both characters are men, the employee works on a used car lot where the thief was about to drive away with some merchandise, and that the proposition did not have to do with sex or even romance, but armed robbery. However, I have not stretched things too far. In fact, James E. Devlin (1999) calls the relationship between auto thief Ernest “Stick” Stickley, Jr., and used car salesman Frank Ryan “marriagelike” (p. 56). I could have begun this essay with a much more obvious example, the wonderful episode of Jack Foley and US Marshall Karen Sisco sharing a cramped ride in a car trunk at the start of Leonard's Out of Sight (1996), but I went for this more muted example because it shows more dramatically the ways in which elements of what I will call romantic comedy pervade much of Leonard's work even if he is simply playing variations on them. (It strikes me as no coincidence that Frank will later accuse Stick of being a nagging wife, when their relationship begins to cool.)
Before I proceed, let me offer a few clarifications about this essay and a few caveats. While working on another project, I spent nearly a year reading Leonard's work. I suppose like many readers of Leonard's novels, I came to them looking for distraction, but I found them holding my attention in ways that I had not expected. In particular, I found myself much more wrapped up in his characters' romantic entanglements than I expected, and I came to realize that a great many of Leonard's novels featured some kind of romance plot or romantic comedy element – even if that plot appeared to be minor compared to plots involving crimes of various sorts. The appearance of these elements can seem even more surprising in someone like Leonard, as Charles Rzepka explains, because he has a clear “preference for popular masculinized genres,” which is represented in both his fascination with things like guns (Rzepka 2013, p. 27) and his preference for hard‐boiled prose (p. 31). Nevertheless, the romantic generic patterns recur again and again in Leonard's books. What I propose to do, then, is to provide some tentative answers to questions that arise from this observation: what role do these romance plots play in some of his novels? How do they work in relation to the more common elements of Leonard's work, usually featuring criminals trying to beat the American system through a crime scheme or detectives or their stand‐ins working to stop such criminals? Lastly, what might Leonard be saying either about or through these elements of romantic comedy? There simply is no way for me to cover all of Leonard's work in the space available here, so I am going to admittedly cherry‐pick the novels upon which I focus. For instance, I am not going to touch on Leonard's westerns, his historical novels, or his disguised westerns or “eastern westerns,” like the Raylan Givens novels, although the latter, Pronto (1993), Riding the Rap (1995), and Raylan (2012), certainly feature romantic comedy elements.
My thinking about both genre and the romantic comedy in particular are strongly indebted to a book by Celestino Deleyto (2009) titled The Secret Life of Romantic Comedy. Although he does not mention Leonard or even the film Out of Sight to any large extent, he begins his own study with the film adaptation of this particular novel as an example of how often films that do not get considered romantic comedies feature elements critics associate with romantic comedies. While his book focuses on film, much of what he says can be readily applied to literature. Deleyto argues that our thinking about genre and romantic comedies has been strongly hampered by the tendency of critics to focus discussions of genre on what he calls “belonging.” That is, critics tend to see genre as a means of grouping, of putting like and like together, and that often leads to a focus on what makes texts belong to a genre and drawing lines to leave texts out. Even though Welleck and Warren (1956) arguably endorsed a view of genre that Deleyto opposes, they, too, remind us that “the good writer partly conforms to the genre as it exists, partly stretches it” (p. 235).
Few nonpoetic genres have been easier to define than the romantic comedy. Its most basic form, as outlined by David Shumway, follows the loose outline of “boy meets, loses, regains girl” (paraphrased in McDonald 2007, p. 12). In fact, when teaching narrative structure to students, I find they can easily generate the rough outlines of how such texts operate: they begin with a meet‐cute where two characters meet under unusual circumstances (like a robbery); the two characters don't get along initially (e.g. because one calls the cops on the other); they grow to like each other (perhaps because one gets the other off the hook); and then circumstances intervene to complicate or distance the couple, often in the form of competing lovers (in Swag, the model, Arlene Downey) and then they ultimately get back together for the clinching happy ending. (Okay, so Swag ends with an arrest and Stick asking Frank if he would just “shut the fuck up?” (Leonard 2014b, p. 383), but still….)
The romantic comedy's very simplicity, thus leads in Deleyto's view, to its similarly monotonous critical assessment. As he summarizes, “not only is the romantic comedy about love and marriage but it always says the same thing about it, it invariably conveys the same conservative message: if the most important convention of the genre is the happy ending and this happy ending usually consists in the consolidation … of a monogamous (and hence patriarchal) heterosexual couple, then it follows that the genre as a whole is conservative because it naturalizes, celebrates and reinforces marriage, monogamy, and heterosexuality” despite the sense of “crisis” surrounding these elements in “contemporary society” (p. 25). While I do not have space to get into all the intricacies of this debate, let me just say that Deleyto comes to dismiss this critical consensus and instead sees the romantic comedy as “a narrative that articulates historically and culturally specific views of love, desire, sexuality, and gender relationships; a space of transformation and fantasy which influences the narrative articulation of those discourses; and humour as the specific perspective from which the fictional characters, their relationships, and the spectator's response to them are constructed as embodiments of those discourses” (p. 46). Deleyto concedes his new definition is quite broad, but it importantly moves romantic comedy away from a tightly fixed set of elements – such as the requirement of a happy ending – and from an equally limited and thus somewhat uninteresting set of meanings. Lastly, a key element from Deleyto's book for our discussion is his attempt, derived from Derrida's “The Law of Genre,” to see genre not in terms of belonging, but in terms of participation. Because genres, for Deleyto, are “abstract systems which are articulated in various ways in the actual texts, which do not belong [to] but participate in various genres, an immediate consequence is that there are no specific conventions that a given film must have in order to participate in a genre, since membership is not necessary” (p. 23).1
The key shift of participating instead of belonging helps us think about what may be going on in Leonard's texts because, under the old system of belonging, it would be hard to say – simply from Swag's challenge to the happy ending alone – that Leonard is writing a romantic comedy here (although critics like Tamar Jeffers McDonald [2007] provide more wiggle room, noting that the plot “almost always [leads to] a successful conclusion” [p. 9]). However, the examples I explore here show that the romantic comedy surfaces in many of Leonard's works, along with other genres, and that his novel's participation in these genres comes to demand a great deal of the author's energy and interest.
As a way of considering the variety of approaches and uses of the romantic comedy in Leonard's work, I would like to begin by putting a few of his texts into relation with one another. Although the romantic comedy began, arguably, with William Shakespeare's play, Much Ado about Nothing, and continued through Jane Austen's development of the marriage plot in all of her novels, the genre fully found a home in film in the twentieth and twenty‐first centuries. In the case of a novelist like Leonard, whose work is based in large part on popular movies, romantic comedy's relationship with film only serves to make the connections to his novels more likely. As the introduction to George Grella's (1998) essay, “Film in Fiction: The Real and the Reel in Elmore Leonard” makes clear, Leonard is invested in film in profound ways, for film “is a guiding principle of composition, a rich source of devices and methods of plot, characterization, and narration” (p. 34). If we consider Leonard from Grella's perspective, his reliance on film elements can seem not surprising but almost inevitable.
When Leonard critics focus on the relation between his novels and film, they often begin with his most explicitly cinematic and self‐reflective novel, Get Shorty. Therefore, we might consider how the romantic comedy – or what gets called the “love angle” among other things – is discussed in this particular text. At the very least, this novel features the working out of three plots: one is the movie idea that main character Chili Palmer first pitches to producer Harry Zimm, an idea that is essentially a subplot of the novel itself regarding the character Leo's initial scamming of the airlines. There is also the plot of Harry's pet project, Lovejoy, and then, of course, there is Leonard's main plot in Get Shorty, which has to do with Chili's attempts to get his movie idea, Get Leo, produced. What all three plots “need,” in the words of Bo Catlett, Chili's competition, “are a strong woman part, get some love into it” (Leonard 2016a, p. 105). Because of the self‐conscious way this need gets discussed and since some of the supporters of this point of view, like the actor Michael Weir, are clearly objects of satire, it is hard to know exactly how to feel about the gradual inclusion of love plots in all three stories.
In Politics, Desire and the Hollywood Novel, Chip Rhodes (2008) argues that Get Shorty “relegates matters of the private realm like romance and sex to a relative afterthought” (p. 154). However, the novel's – that is, Leonard's – main plot brings Chili Palmer and Karen Flores together in part because of Chili's doubts about Karen's distance, her watching, during their sexual encounter. In fact, the sex scene emphasizes both her physical investment in the moment and her self‐awareness: “like she was riding a bike with no hands to look at something she was holding, doing two different things at once: her body turned on and having a good time, but her mind still working on its own” (p. 266). At least from Chili's point of view, however, orgasm translates to Karen having “no time to think or do anything but ride it out” (p. 266). So, while this can appear to resemble the scene in Annie Hall where Annie seems to leave her body while having sex, it is not quite the same in degree. Although Rhodes's analysis emphasizes that the novel explores postmodern concerns about identity and the inability to distinguish the real from the fake (such as in Michael Weir's recurring confusions of his private self with his movie roles) – concerns mildly addressed by the romance plot – I would argue that one of the most powerful expressions of the book's postmodernism takes place during the culmination of the Chili and Karen plot, as Chili worries that Karen is not quite there when they have sex because she is more concerned by how she appears in the moment than she is engaged in the physical act, as the above passages indicate. Discussion of the “love angle,” as Catlett calls it, seems to function as a reminder from Leonard that we cannot simply slip into any of these plots as if they are natural and not the deliberate devices of an author. Brian McHale (1987) defines the tone of postmodern fiction as “half‐joking” about what the reader does not quite know. Leonard seems at his most postmodern in Bo's and Chili's self‐reflexive discussion, and at his most humorous. After all, as David Geherin (2017) suggests in Funny Thing About Murder, Leonard is quite able to get miles of humor from the criminals that form the main concern of so many of his novels.
Although Get Shorty draws direct attention to the romance elements in its own story, I would like to focus on comparing two different pairs of novels where the romance elements are more subtly delineated. The first two have much more muted but still visible romantic comedy elements, whereas the latter two have arguably the most pronounced such elements in Leonard's work. Let's begin with the muted pair, the relatively early novel Fifty‐Two Pickup (1974; in Leonard 2014a) and the later novel, Killshot (Leonard 1989). The Shakespeare critic Catherine Bates has used the term “courtship stories” to describe traditional romantic comedies like Much Ado about Nothing because they focus exclusively on the process leading to marriage rather than marriage itself (quoted in Deleyto 2009, p. 28). Leonard almost always complicates this problem because in most of his novels the romantic leads have been divorced or separated at least once or in the case of these two novels are married when the novels begin. In these terms, Fifty‐Two Pickup and Killshot have a lot in common: they feature a long‐married couple with grown‐up kids who have left the nest, and the couple experience a serious threat to and tension in their marriage before a reconciliation. Though the earlier novel begins with Harry Mitchell's affair – one that he can hardly find words to explain – and Wayne and Carmen remain faithful throughout the later book, both marriages begin to show strain, especially as the couples come under attack from outside forces.
Neither novel exactly functions like the divorce romantic comedies of the late 30s and 40s, such as The Awful Truth and Philadelphia Story, but they both share some recognizable elements of that film genre. In the middle of Harry's struggle to deal with extortionists, in particular the psychopathic former accountant Alan Raimy, he and Barbara reconcile and rekindle their sex life. Though it is certainly not the main concern of the novel, Leonard takes time to explore the ways in which romance ebbs and flows in marriage as well as the shifting sexual mores of his time. (Harry and Barbara even endure a hardcore movie together – a very 1970s touch.) For instance, early in the novel, Barbara tells Harry, “You don't talk anymore” (p. 13), highlighting the ways in which he has grown apart from her. Later, after describing how he fell in love with Cini, a pornographic movie star, Harry will confess that “Barbara's better in bed” (p. 19). It becomes apparent, as the novel progresses, that this sexual connection is key to a return of the romance between the couple, since after Barbara and Harry have sex for the first time after the revelation of the affair, the novel spends time away from the revenge plot on Alan for Harry to process his attraction to his wife (p. 95). Devlin's (1999) assessment of Leonard's ideal, then, becomes equally relevant to any of his books involving a romance plot: “Leonard insists that male‐female relationships flourish best under conditions of equality and good sex. But equality comes first” (p. 77).
It seems that Harry and Barbara lose the equality as Harry becomes more and more obsessed with himself and his business, but that it returns to some degree through their sexual relationship. In some ways the portrait of marriage in Killshot is even more affecting. Early in the novel, we revisit the courtship between Wayne and Carmen Colson from Carmen's perspective and, after a kiss, Carmen thinks, “Twenty years and it was still good” (p. 44). However, it seems no coincidence that Wayne's visit to the real estate office where Carmen works – a visit she promotes as part of her plot to get him to change jobs and join her there so that they can be together more – becomes the site of their confrontation with Armand Degas, the hitman, and Richie Nix, Degas's outlaw sidekick, which sets the whole novel's larger plot in motion. Nevertheless, after some tensions, Wayne and Carmen head similarly toward reconciliation as the book concludes. Devlin (1999) suggests that the plot has echoes of Bobbi Ann Mason's short story, “Shiloh” (p. 76). The fact that in both “Shiloh” and Killshot the partners grow apart as their relationship to work changes, makes the comparison apt. However, the characters in Leonard's novel never grow as distant as those in Mason's story, and the novel offers a reunion, no matter how unsettling the circumstances.
Let's focus now on the endings. Both these novels have conclusions that complicate these stories. In Fifty‐Two Pickup, Harry's story begins to resemble that of Orson Welles' Touch of Evil, as he gets so caught up in revenging himself upon his persecutors that he leaves his wife in danger. When he finally rescues her and indeed blows up Alan with a bomb‐rigged briefcase, this victory is undercut by the reader's knowledge that Barbara has been sexually assaulted by Alan while kidnapped. A similar trauma hangs over the abrupt ending of Killshot: Carmen is held hostage by Armand and Richie, made to strip down to her underwear and perform a grotesque version of housewifely duty. However, in the midst of this nightmare, she experiences something like the magically transformative power of romantic comedy as she imaginatively comes into contact with Wayne and finds the gun he had left behind in their house, which allows her to save herself. In effect, she is able to stay calm, find the gun, and act by seeming to communicate with Wayne in her mind, something that seems even remotely credible only because of the long and intense romantic connection between the two of them. Yet, at the end of the novel, after Armand has shot and killed Richie and Carmen has shot and killed Armand, Wayne arrives and falls into his usual habit of going on about his day, proposing she take up deer hunting so that they can find “something we could do together” (p. 287), and we never hear her get a chance to give voice to the horrors of what she has just lived through. In short, the novels end with doubts hanging over whether it will be possible for these couples to return to the romantic comedy relationship whose elements surface elsewhere in the novel.
The second pairing I would like to trace fits much more neatly into patterns of romantic comedy. In most of these Leonard novels, we have almost two spheres in operation that come into contact with one another – the worlds inhabited by what Northrop Frye once called the blocking characters and those of our romantic leads. In Leonard's world, as opposed to traditional romantic comedies or the related genre of comic stories, in which the blocking characters are obviously comical, Leonard's are killers and rapists. In Fifty‐Two Pickup and Killshot, these characters invade the world of the romantic leads and leave traumatic traces. In much of Leonard's writing, however, such criminal characters are also the source of humor in the texts. As Geherin claims, “Nobody's characters are better at delivering funny lines in a deadpan manner than Leonard's” (p. 65). While this is to some extent true of the figures in Fifty‐Two Pickup and Killshot, they veer more toward sociopathy than humor. We laugh, but we are more likely to be uncomfortable finding humor in psychopaths like Alan and Richie Nix in particular (one a pedophile and rapist, the other a racist murderer who aspires to rape). In a way that is sometimes difficult to define – especially as the killers do kill in Get Shorty, Rum Punch, and Out of Sight – novels like these create an atmosphere that allows the lovers to enjoy a greater sense of safety, despite imminent threats, than in Fifty‐Two Pickup or Killshot. To conclude, let's consider Leonard's complicated handling of the romantic comedy elements in Out of Sight and Rum Punch.
As I have suggested, no Leonard novel has moments that more explicitly resemble a romantic comedy than Out of Sight. It begins with an ultimate meet‐cute, Jack Foley and Karen Sisco forced to share a ride in the trunk of a car, where they find themselves having a conversation that touches on their pasts, possibly their futures, and their shared love of movies, leading Jack to remark, “You're easy to talk to. I wonder – say we met under different circumstances and got to talking – I wonder what would happen” (Leonard 2016b, p. 481). In this way, the two share a set of cinematic templates and cultural references. Later, Jack will explain that, with Karen, “there isn't any bullshit” (p. 481). Although Leonard has been rightly called a master at dialogue, his characters don't quite bounce lines off each other like Shakespeare's original bickering couple, Beatrice and Benedick; however, it's clear that Leonard does see this ability to talk as a key component of romance. As in films like His Girl Friday, the ability to share dialogue becomes an indicator of equality. Max Cherry, in Rum Punch, knew his marriage was in decline when he and his wife ran out of things to talk about. The other key here is the fact that Karen does not put on a performance for Jack. For a writer fascinated with film and acting, Leonard seems suspicious of romantic partners who act out a preconceived role or force the other character to feel like he or she is acting. Karen Flores of Get Shorty likes Chili Palmer because he's “not a movie tough guy” but “a real one” (p. 195). In LaBrava, Joe LaBrava can never seem to trust former movie actress Jean Shaw because he always wonders if something she says is really from a movie in which she starred.
The problem with the romantic comedy formula in Out of Sight, however, is not that the romantic leads don't trust each other or are acting out phony roles, but that, having made the choices they've made – Karen to become a federal marshal and Jack to become a bank robber – they cannot have a life together in the real world: Jack's initial wistful wondering will thus haunt the novel's plot to the very end. However, the story does not at all play out like the inverse of romantic comedy – a tragedy of lost or doomed love. Instead, Jack and Karen continue to obsess about each other, take unnecessary risks to see one another, even as they continue to inhabit something of a traditional cops and robbers plot line.
Of all Leonard's novels, Out of Sight most fully includes what Deleyto calls the “comic, protective, erotically‐charged space,” which is “the space of romantic comedy” (p. 18) – a space that also allows characters “to be freer from social and psychological inhibitions” (pp. 33–34). Northrop Frye first noted this “space,” which in “The Argument of Comedy” he called the “green world.” The classic example would be the magical Forest of Arden in A Midsummer's Night's Dream. The traditional “green world” is a place lovers enter to be “reborn” in nature until they must, eventually, make the painful transition back into the normative real world to make their romance known (usually convincing the girl's father to accept the man as her husband, according to Frye's analysis). As Deleyto's rewriting of this concept suggests, the “green world” has persisted in romantic comedies even though that seemingly enchanted space is not always a part of nature, but rather, and emphatically, of its opposite.
No Leonard novel has a more modern version of the “green world” than Out of Sight. In the bar atop the Renaissance Center hotel in Detroit, Jack and Karen most fully enter into this space – in fact they start finishing each other's sentences – as he tells her their relationship “doesn't have to” make sense (p. 595). Thus, in perhaps the most romantic sequence of Leonard's career, Karen and Jack retire to her room to make love, talk movies, and bond over whiskey, but that charmed encounter is also walled off and complicated by other forces in the book. Karen feels uncertainty about the future: “I want to know what's going to happen,” she tells Jack, and Jack responds with a dark fatalism when he responds, “You know” (p. 611). Intercut with their flirtation in the bar and their sexual encounter in Karen's room is one of the more violent and harrowing sections of the novel in which ex‐prizefighter Maurice “Snoopy” Miller and his crew lead Glenn Michaels, one of Foley's ex‐partners, into a gruesome and harrowing home invasion, thus revealing that the blocking characters in this book, as in Fifty‐Two Pickup and Killshot, are killers, too. The novel's conclusion is a wonderful paradox of the intermingling of these storylines. Jack's fatalistic decision to accompany the second home invasion after Glenn heads for the hills leads him to kill Snoopy in order to prevent sexual violence to an innocent victim of the break‐in, as well as to save himself, but it also leads to the death of Buddy Bragg, his closest friend. Buddy's death is ironic in light of Jack's ultimate fate. Because he has spent most of his adult life behind bars for robbing banks before his escape from prison at the beginning of the novel, he would rather die, like Buddy, than return to jail, as he's told Buddy and Karen both. A minute or two later, Karen arrives on the scene, gun in hand, and Jack challenges her to kill him. Her decision to shoot him in the leg instead forecloses the possibility of either a magically romantic happy ending or a completely tragic one. Jack will return to prison and Karen to her day job as a federal marshal as the real world finally shatters, rather than accommodates, the fragile glass globe of their impossible romance.
In some ways, although it lacks any of the spectacularly romantic moments of Out of Sight, Rum Punch, written a few years earlier, even more closely adheres to elements of the romantic comedy. Perhaps as evidence of Leonard's claims in his interview with Martin Amis (Amis 1998) that his characters create or alter the plot rather than follow a preexisting one, the novel takes some time for the leads, Jackie Burke and Max Cherry, to meet in Rum Punch. In another inventive version of the meet cute, Max is Jackie's bail bondsman. While this novel lacks a designated space that resembles the “green world,” it becomes clear that, as Jackie and Max's relationship develops – as he begins to become involved in her attempts to cheat both the federal agents and her gunrunner employer, Ordell – Max is undergoing a transformation. He finally develops the nerve and motivation to leave his job (whether or not he ultimately backs out of that decision is left hanging) and to divorce his long‐separated wife. Max also seems to develop a kind of confidence that allows the reader to feel that, despite the very real violence meted out to other criminal blocking characters, Jackie will not experience the kind of trauma that, say, Carmen or Barbara does. However, though Max clearly is falling in love, having been taken in by “that gleam in her eyes,” Max and Jackie's story is haunted by the ambivalence in the two meanings Max ascribes to Jackie's “gleam”: “We could have fun” or “I could use you” (Leonard 2016c, p. 300). Stuck in the rut of infatuation early on, Max finds them both, oddly enough, “a turn‐on” (p. 300). Max would rather be “used” than ignored.
What ultimately sets Rum Punch apart from many other Leonard novels with romantic comedy elements is the ending. The novel cuts from a quick wrap‐up of the criminal plot to let us know that Max has returned to his job after his earlier resolution to quit. Prior to this, Jackie had found herself, as someone who had had three failed marriages, unsure of whether to pursue a future with Max. When Jackie shows up at Max's office at the beginning of the last chapter to say goodbye, it seems as though the couple's romantic future had been closed off between chapters. However, the novel concludes ambiguously with Jackie proposing that they take off together and the prose stopping before we hear Max's reply, so the traditional happy ending persists as a possibility.
If we can accept that many of Leonard's novels do participate in the romantic comedy genre, what then are we to make of the significance of that participation? Let me conclude by offering a few answers to the questions I posed at the start of this essay. One might be tempted, following the cynical discussions of the love plot in Get Shorty, to read Leonard's inclusion of these romantic comedy elements as his attempt to manipulate his audience, using the romance plot as a mechanical device, as in a Marx Brothers movie, simply to give it someplace to hang all of those comedic set pieces. However, as I hope I've shown here, Leonard's novels integrate those stories more centrally to the main criminal plot. Yet, it is also clear that Leonard never writes a romantic comedy that genre critics who emphasize “belonging” over “participation” would ever label as such.
Although Leonard's novels never fully resemble traditional romantic comedies in their entirety, they do bear a strong resemblance to a subgenre called the “radical romantic comedy,” which Tamara Jeffers McDonald (2007) identifies in her book, Romantic Comedy: Boy Meets Girl Meets Genre. McDonald sees this subgenre flourishing in the 1970s and claims it has three key components: “self‐reflexivity about the romantic relationship and the importance of sex to both genders”; “self‐reflexivity as a film text in a tradition of other film texts”; “self‐reflex[ivity] as a modern and more realistic form of romantic comedy in contrast to other texts” (p. 67). This subgenre is also much more likely to fail to bring the couple together at the end. All of these elements seem to apply pretty broadly to Leonard's handling of romantic comedy. His texts see sex as central to relationships, they treat romance plots with a far greater realism than we typically expect, and his novels are often self‐reflexive about their own status as texts and their relationship to earlier texts. So what perhaps these romantic stories do – structurally at least – is complicate and enrich the worlds Leonard creates. In terms of what Leonard may be trying to convey, I would argue that certainly his alteration or complications of the romantic comedy as it participates in his text lead to a critique of and skepticism toward some of the typically accepted notions of, in Deleyto's terms, the “current discourses on love, sex, and marriage” that are “multiple and contradictory” (p. 28). This calling into question many of the underlying ideological impulses of traditional romance plots also makes his novels akin to the “radical romantic comedies,” like Annie Hall (1977), of the decade in which they begin to appear. Like the “radical romantic comedy,” Leonard's work seems to show a real sympathy for characters who seek out romantic bonds and pursue “true love,” but also a wide‐ranging skepticism of the kind of myths of romance that our society subscribes to and the kinds of values those myths perpetuate.
References
1. Amis, M. (1998). Martin Amis interviews Elmore Leonard. The Martin Amis Web (23 January) http://martinamisweb.com/interviews_files/amis_int_leonard.pdf (accessed 17 August 2019).
2. Deleyto, C. (2009). The Secret Life of the Romantic Comedy. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
3. Derrida, J. and Ronnell, A. (1980). The law of genre. Critical Inquiry 7 (1): 55–81.
4. Devlin, J.E. (1999). Elmore Leonard. New York: Twayne.
5. Geherin, D. (2017). Funny Thing about Murder: Modes of Humor in Crime Fiction and Films. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company.
6. Grella, G. (1998). Film in fiction: the real and the reel in Elmore Leonard. In: The Detective in American Fiction, Film, and Television (eds. J.H. Delamater and R. Prigozy), 35–44. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.
7. Leonard, E. (1989). Killshot. New York: HarperCollins.
8. Leonard, E. (2014a). Fifty‐Two Pickup. Four Novels of the 1970s (ed. G. Sutter), 1–191. New York: Library of America.
9. Leonard, E. (2014b). Swag. Four Novels of the 1970s (ed. G. Sutter), 193–383. New York: Library of America.
10. Leonard, E. (2016a). Get Shorty. Four Later Novels (ed. G. Sutter), 1–228. New York: Library of America.
11. Leonard, E. (2016b). Out of Sight. Four Later Novels (ed. G. Sutter), 453–652. New York: Library of America.
12. Leonard, E. (2016c). Rum Punch. Four Later Novels (ed. G. Sutter), 229–451. New York: Library of America.
13. McDonald, T.J. (2007). Romantic Comedy: Boy Meets Genre. New York: Columbia University Press.
14. McHale, B. (1987). Postmodernist Fiction. New York: Routledge.
15. Rhodes, C. (2008). Politics, Desire, and the Hollywood Novel. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press.
16. Rzepka, C.J. (2013). Being Cool: The Work of Elmore Leonard. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
17. Welleck, R. and Warren, A. (1956). Theory of Literature, 3e. New York: Harcourt Brace.
Note
1 Derrida's central hypothesis, upon which Deleyto builds his theoretical approach, appears roughly midway through “The Law of Genre”: “Every text participates in one of several genres, there is no genreless text; there is always genre and genres, yet such participation never amounts to belonging” (Derrida and Ronnell, 1980, p. 65). The essay begins with a typically Derridian technique of repeating the phrase, “I will not mix genres” (p. 55) only to eventually show that in fact genres are in some sense always and already mixed. Deleyto's (2009) refinement, developed in an analysis of the film Rio Bravo, is to say, “Genres are not groups of films but abstract systems formed by elements taken from many films” (pp. 12–13).