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David Geherin
The action in every novel has to take place somewhere, but the importance attached to the place chosen and the way it's described vary from author to author. In some instances, setting plays a minimal role or is largely generic – a country home, a remote island, an anonymous big city. In Murder on the Orient Express, for example, Agatha Christie comes up with an unusual setting for a murder: a compartment on the Orient Express train traveling from Istanbul to Paris that is stranded by an avalanche. Nobody can get on or off, so the killer must still be on board. But the same scenario could just as easily have taken place in a remote house. In each case, the setting simply provides a confined space.
There are also multiple ways by which an author can create a sense of place: it can be evoked by its topography, its population, or even by its mentality, i.e. the way people who live there think. Some writers are masters of lush descriptive prose, as this portrait of New Orleans by James Lee Burke in Dixie City Jam during an outing at the Jazz and Heritage Festival illustrates:
The music rose into the sky until it seemed to fuse with the gentle and pervasive light spreading far beyond the racetrack, over oak‐lined streets, paintless wood houses with galleries and green window shutters, elevated highways, the Superdome, the streetcars and palm‐dotted neutral ground of Canal, the scrolled iron balconies, colonnades, and brick chimneys in the Quarter, Jackson Square and the spires of St. Louis Cathedral, the Café du Monde, the wide, mud‐churned sweep of the Mississippi, the shining vastness of the wetlands to the south, and eventually the Gulf of Mexico, where later the moon would rise like an enormous pearl that had been dipped in a glass of burgundy.
(Burke 1994, p. 494)
However, there are minimalist writers like Belgian crime novelist Georges Simenon who achieve a powerful sense of place using more economical methods. Author of some 75 novels and 28 short stories featuring Paris policeman Jules Maigret, Simenon was no fan of fancy figurative writing: “If it rains, I write ‘It rains’,” he insisted. “You will not find in my books drops of weather that transform themselves into pearls or I don't know what” (Bresler 1983, p. 2). Nor did he like lengthy descriptions. Instead, he scattered sensory details and brief passages throughout the series that combine to form a vivid mosaic of the city of Paris.
Though there's no evidence that Leonard ever read the Maigret novels, his economic approach to the challenge of creating a sense of place closely resembles Simenon's. There is, however, one writer he read who definitely did make an indelible impression on his writing and that was George V. Higgins, whose The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1970) he called the best crime novel ever written. Among the valuable lessons he learned from reading Higgins was, as Charles Rzepka noted, “what could be done with a sense of place that is taken for granted, continuously implied but rarely named or described in much detail” (Rzepka 2013, p.100).
Unlike most crime writers, Leonard didn't write a continuing series and thus didn't enjoy the benefit of a single location he could amplify over dozens of books. And while he does set a number of novels in Detroit, his hometown, and in Florida, which he visited often, in many cases he employs a setting only once. He also had an aversion to lengthy description. Rule No. 9 in his famous “10 Rules of Writing” goes like this: “Don't go into great detail describing places and things” (Leonard 2001). Despite these limitations, in his portrayal of various settings, especially Detroit, he succeeds in creating “a real‐world milieu with a specific geographical ethos, or character, that emerges gradually rather than in lengthy, explicit passages of narrative description” (Rzepka 2013, p. 100).
Leonard served his literary apprenticeship as a writer of western novels and short stories. He loved western movies and knew there was a ready market for his stories in the pulp magazines that were popular in the 1950s. But what did he know about the Old West? Not much. So he educated himself by reading books on the subject and subscribing to Arizona Highways magazine for photographs of what the landscape looked like. From the beginning he understood the importance of using accurate details to establish authenticity of place and, as P. D. James once observed, “If we can believe in the place we can believe in the characters” (James 2009, p. 133).
Leonard's western settings are largely generic: he counts on the presence of cowboys, Indians, a few horses, some cacti, and the sight of distant mountains to set the scene. In the few actual descriptions he wrote he simply stuck to the physical details:
Hours later, toward evening, they were traveling northeast and now began a winding, gradual, climb into timber, scrub oak at first then cedar and sycamores and finally, when they were up high, pines. They crossed a meadow of coarse sabaneta grass and as they approached the heights on the west side, the sun barely showed over the rim‐rock.
(Leonard 2013, p. 97)
Even when he sometimes lapsed into flowery language – “In the distance, the hills took up again, but more rugged – tumbling into each other, spewed with rock and brush, forming a thousand fantastic shapes” (Leonard 2013, p. 109) – he resisted the temptation to turn anything into a metaphor or a simile.
Between “Trail of the Apache” in 1951 and Hombre a decade later, Leonard published two dozen western short stories and five novels. But the advent of television in the late 1950s killed the pulp market for westerns, forcing Leonard to switch to stories set in the present. He now began to focus on novels about crime.
As he began writing Fifty‐Two Pickup (1974), the first of five crime novels set in Detroit that appeared between 1974 and 1980, Leonard came to an important realization. While writing a scene in which a character was coming out of an X‐rated movie theater on Woodward Avenue around Six Mile Road, he suddenly thought, “My God, there are a lot of people that have been here and they know what it looks like and what it feels like” (Beckman 1986, p. 14). This was never a problem in his westerns: “You get away with a lot in a western because nobody's been there,” he said. “It's not there any more, you know, and you can describe the town as you want it, make up whatever town you want. Now, all of a sudden, I'm setting something in Detroit, and I've got to be not only accurate but interesting in the way I describe it” (Wilner 1985, p. G9).
As a writer committed to realism, Leonard strove to make every detail as accurate as possible. As he once explained to Pete Hamill, “If I wrote a scene in New York, and had traffic going the wrong way down a certain street, nobody'd believe the rest of it” (Hamill 1985, p. 11). But when it came to descriptions, the problem was: (i) he didn't particularly like them; and (ii) he wasn't especially good at writing them. “If I set a story on the Southeast coast of Florida,” he once said, “I may take two shots of the ocean and that's it – I'm out of ocean descriptions. I know exactly what I can do” (Ferrigno 1987, p.75).
He solved his problem by turning the job of description over to his characters. “I started to realize that the way to describe anywhere, anywhere, was to do it from someone's point of view and leave me out of it. I'm not gonna get poetic about this street. That's not what I do” (Beckman 1986, p. 14). Though he never employed first‐person narration, with the exception of his prizewinning western, Hombre (1961), Leonard made his characters, either through dialogue or the free indirect discourse method of narration he used to reveal a character's thoughts, the primary source of most of the description in his novels
This has several advantages. For one thing, Leonard insisted that this gave his descriptions a “special kind of clarity…more so than if I tried to describe with that tendency to show off that so many writers have” (Skinner 1987, p. 45); it allowed him to be economical in his language since the reader wouldn't expect his characters to describe anything at great length; it was an effective way to reveal aspects of the character who is doing the describing; and finally, if he should happen to make a factual error – as he did in Fifty‐Two Pickup where he got the height of the “Spirit of Detroit” statue in downtown Detroit wrong – he could claim the error was his character's fault, not his.
Early in Fifty‐Two Pickup Leonard hit upon an effective way of introducing one of his bad guys while at the same providing a description of Detroit from two very different perspectives. The scene takes place on a sightseeing bus taking visitors to Detroit on a tour of the downtown area. The driver begins pointing out several important landmarks as they pass by. Suddenly a black passenger on the bus dressed in a light‐gray business suit pulls out a gun and grabs the driver's microphone. “As we continue this sightseeing tour of the dynamic Motor City,” he announces, “my assistant is going to pass up the aisle for your contributions” (Leonard 2014a, p. 29). As he explains, “Feel free to give my assistant your wallets, billfolds, money belts, watches, jewelry. I mean don't hold back, ’cause we robbing the stagecoach, friends, taking everything you got” (p. 29).
As the bus heads toward a black neighborhood, the robber offers the passengers an alternative sightseeing narrative of the city: “On the left coming up, past the hockshop and the poolhall, is the world‐famous K.O.'s Bar‐b‐que y'all heard so much about. Past two A.M. you can get a drink in there with your ribs. Any kind you want, comes in a Co'Cola can” (Leonard 2014a, p. 29). He even interjects some important recent Detroit history. “Those places you see boarded up? Historic remains of the riot we had a few years ago. Got me a fine hi‐fi set and a 'lectric toothbrush…color TV for my mama” (p. 29).
Swag (1976) includes multiple references to familiar local places like churches, bars, clubs, and restaurants, but the main business that figures in the novel is the J. L. Hudson Department store on Woodward Avenue in the heart of downtown Detroit. Following a string of 31 successful robberies of liquor stores, supermarkets, and party stores, a pair of local guys named Frank Ryan and Ernest Stickley decide to go big time. The target they select was at the time the tallest department store in the world and its toy department on the fourteenth floor, the actual site of the robbery, was a place dear to the hearts of generations of Detroiters who fondly remember sitting on Santa Claus's knee for the very first time there.
Chastened by a review of Swag that complained that his description of Detroit was “so lackluster that it could be any city in any state” and that the novel “reveals none of the essence that makes Detroit unique” (Thomas 1976, p. G7), Leonard vowed to do a better job in the future of making his hometown come alive. His next novel, The Switch (1978), offers a far more detailed picture that captures the reality of the city that exists behind the surface stereotypes.
Ordell Robbie is taking his buddy Louis Gara, who has just returned after an absence of several years, on a welcome‐home tour of the Motor City. He begins by showing him the shiny new Renaissance Center, which has just opened on the riverfront in downtown Detroit. Known locally as the RenCen, the impressive structure – a 73‐story hotel surrounded by four 39‐story office towers – was aimed at revitalizing the struggling local economy. Louis says, “Wow….It's big.” Ordell shoots back, “That's all you can say? It's big?” “It's really big,” Louis says. “If it fell over you could walk across it to Canada” (Leonard 2014c, p. 614).
As they head north along Woodward Avenue, Detroit's main street, Louis asks about all the stores with boarded‐up windows and the lack of people on the street. People are afraid to come downtown because of crime, Ordell explains, but notes, “there's no crime here. You see any crime in the streets?” (Leonard 2014c, p. 615). Then he adds, “Coleman's got to fix this city up,” referring to Coleman Young, Detroit's mayor at the time. “They build all the glass shit and convention centers and domes along the river? That's for the postcard pictures – hey, shit, look at Detroit, man – if you never seen it before. Then you drive out this big wide street, what do you see? What does anybody want to come here for? Pick up some ribs and leave the motor running” (p. 615).
In City Primeval (1980), Leonard introduces a feature he will often use to reinforce the authenticity of his chosen setting. The action begins with a fender bender involving two cars leaving the Hazel Park Raceway just north of the city of Detroit late one night. Clement Mansell, the driver of the car that was struck, begins chasing after the car that hit his. What follows reads like a set of GPS directions: south on Dequindre, right onto Nine Mile Road, left at John R to Eight Mile (the Detroit City limits), left onto Woodward, and then a sharp left turn into a parking lot where Mansell pulls out a gun and shoots the driver, whose car initially collided with his, five times through the windshield. The detailed directions of the chase add a real‐life, you‐are‐there documentary feel to the entire scene.
Leonard later uses Mansell, a violent killer originally from Oklahoma who is visiting Detroit, to provide an extensive panoramic view of the city from the 25th floor of a luxury apartment complex:
The Detroit River looked like any big‐city river with worn‐out industrial works and warehouses lining the frontage, ore boats and freighters passing by, a view of Windsor across the way that looked as much fun as Moline, Illinois, except for the giant illuminated Canadian Club sign over the distillery.
But then, all of a sudden – as Clement Mansell edged his gaze to the right a little – there were the massive dark‐glass tubes of the Renaissance Center, five towers, the tallest one seven hundred feet high, standing like a Buck Rogers monument over downtown….
Clement would swivel his gaze then over downtown and come around north…past Greektown tucked in down there – he could almost smell the garlic – past the nine‐story Detroit Police headquarters, big and ugly, a glimpse of the top floors of the Wayne County jail beyond the police building and on to the slender rise of the Frank Murphy Hall of Justice, where they had tried to nail Clement's ass one time and failed.
(Leonard 2015c, p. 35)
This may lack the poetry of one of Raymond Chandler's neon‐lit evocations of L.A. at night, but it reveals what a hardened criminal like Clement Mansell would be likely to notice – police headquarters, the jail, the courthouse.
All of Leonard's Detroit novels (which also include such later works set wholly or in part in Detroit as Split Images (1981), Freaky Deaky (1988), Killshot (1989), Out of Sight (1996), Pagan Babies (2000), and Mr. Paradise (2004)) are liberally sprinkled with references to specific locations in the city – buildings, businesses, factories, bars, clubs, restaurants. Leonard also frequently set scenes in real locations like Detroit Police Headquarters at 1300 Beaubien Avenue, Mark Ridley's Comedy Castle, the Diego Rivera Court at the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Kronk gym (home to such renowned Detroit boxers as Thomas “Hitman” Hearns), and Lily's bar in Hamtramck. Even when he created a fictional restaurant, as he did in Pagan Babies, he placed a real person – popular Detroit TV anchorman Bill Bonds – at the bar sipping a ginger ale.
Despite Detroit's immense size (138 mi2), Leonard still managed to evoke its small‐town atmosphere by having his characters regularly identify themselves when they first meet by the parish grammar school they attended or the auto factory where they or their fathers once worked. They also all drink the same local beer (Stroh's), the same soft drink (Vernors ginger ale), and whenever anyone mentions Aretha or Stevie, no one has to add the last name of Franklin or Wonder.
Leonard knew that Detroit wasn't the easiest city to write about:
There are cities that get by on their good looks, offer climate and scenery, views of mountains or oceans, rockbound or with palm trees; and there are cities like Detroit that have to work for a living, whose reason for being might be geographical but whose growth is based on industry jobs. Detroit has its natural attractions: Lakes all over the place, an abundance of trees and four distinct seasons for those who like variety in their weather, everything but hurricanes and earthquakes. But it's never been the kind of city people visit and fall in love with because of its charm or think, gee, wouldn't this be a nice place to live.
(Leonard 1987, p. 25)
Despite these limitations, Leonard succeeded in painting a vibrant picture of a shot‐and‐a‐beer, blue‐collar town that challenges the popular stereotype that Detroit was saddled with as a run‐down murder capital. That said, he never shrinks from depicting the city's less attractive features. For example, in Split Images (1981) he adopts the unusual approach of devoting an entire page to a listing of 20 senseless murders like this one – “Larry Young, sixteen, pulled a toy gun on his friend and said, boom; his friend, twenty‐three, pulled a real gun and killed him” – that ends with this chilling statement: “There were approximately six hundred seventy additional homicides, not unlike these, that had taken place in the Detroit area during the past year” (Leonard 1981, p. 185).
At the same time, Leonard pays tribute to lesser‐known but no less important aspects of the city he once described as “a metropolitan area made up of ethnic communities, neighborhoods with old‐country identities, traditions, accordions playing polkas in Dom Polski Hall. While down the street you hear another beat that's part of Detroit's image, a unique blend of soul and street hip, black rhythm and blues, called the Motown sound” (Leonard 1987, p. 27).
Leonard's portrayal of his hometown earned him acclaim as the “Dickens of Detroit” (Amis 1998) and “the dean of the Detroit school of realistic fiction” (Sutter 1980, p. 54). But by the end of the 1970s he felt he needed a break, and Florida was a natural choice for a new location. He had always liked the state, which he had been visiting yearly since the late 1940s. As James Devlin noted, “Florida's sun‐splashed canvas, more fluid society, and Caribbean ambience – not to mention its drug culture – offered Leonard new inspiration” (Devlin 1999, p. 78). It was this “technicolor diversity of south Florida,” says Steve Glassman, “that makes some of his best work shimmer” (Glassman 1997, p. 15). Gold Coast (1980), Leonard's first Florida novel, was published two months after City Primeval, Leonard's fifth Detroit novel, though it was written prior to that book. Then four more Florida novels followed in quick succession: Split Images (1981), whose settings are split equally between Miami and Detroit, Cat Chaser (1982), Stick (1983), and LaBrava (1983).
Though he continued to live in Michigan, Leonard could draw upon his own knowledge and impressions in writing his Florida novels. He had additional input from Bill Marshall, a classmate from the University of Detroit, whose stories about the cases he worked as a private investigator in Coral Gables gave Leonard plenty of colorful material. He also subscribed to the Miami Herald where articles on the Florida drug trade by investigative reporter Carl Hiaasen (before he, too, became a novelist) proved to be very useful.
Florida's Gold Coast appealed to Leonard for a variety of reasons. It was a place of ongoing cultural transformation, fueled mainly by two waves of Cuban immigrants, the first after the Bay of Pigs in 1960, the second the Mariel boatlift in 1980. Thanks to a thriving drug trade, it was also a place where gun violence was a brutal fact of life. As bail‐bondsman Max Cherry observed in Rum Punch (1992), “We're living in the arms capital of America, South Florida. You can buy an assault rifle here in less time than it takes to get a library card” (Leonard 1992, p. 83). And the Florida air isn't perfumed only with gentle ocean breezes and tropical flowers; the heady scent of easy money also fills the air. “There's got to be more greed in Miami than anywhere,” Leonard noted happily, which is especially useful for a crime writer (Grobel 2001, p. 277). As Bill Marshall said of his old friend, “[He] loves the beauty of Palm Beach and Fort Lauderdale, but he knows that those people on their yachts didn't all pay for them with the savings from their tire dealerships in Des Moines” (Geherin 1989, p. 93).
The locations in Leonard's Florida novels run the gamut from upscale mansions in Palm Beach to rundown shacks in Belle Glade, which at one time had the second highest violent crime rate in the United States. Stick's (1993) eponymous hero, Ernest “Stick” Stickley, Jr., provides eyewitness evidence of this contrast while riding in a Rolls Royce to a tropical mansion with a four‐car garage in upscale Miami Beach – “Florida postcardland, surf and sunny sky, lush tropical greenery….a maintained tropical park of white walls and high trimmed hedges, palm trees against the sky, all kinds of flowering plants” (Leonard 1983, p. 82). Later, Stick visits his ex‐wife who lives in Pompano Beach “on a street of cement ranch bungalows, bikes and toys on front lawns, where no Rolls had ever been before” (Leonard 1983, p.179).
Stick is also our source of information about another contrast, this one between the population of elderly retirees from the north and the growing number of new arrivals from the Caribbean, especially Cuba and Haiti. He sits on the porch of a South Beach hotel listening to “elderly people with New York Jewish accents complain about high prices, about Medicare and how Reagan had betrayed them” and then walks across the street to the beach where he sees Cuban families cooking over charcoal, eating at the picnic tables, and hears voices speaking in Spanish that “sounded like they were arguing but looked like they were having fun. Try and figure out Cubans” (Leonard 1983, p. 58).
Eighty‐year‐old Maurice Zola in LaBrava (1983) is a former bookmaker who now owns a South Beach hotel. He has lived in Florida since the 1920s and can still rattle off the names of every stop the Florida East Coast Railway made on its way from Jacksonville to Key Largo. He's our guide to how different Florida is from what it once was:
Little Maurice Zola, born here before there were roads other than a few dirt tracks and the Florida East Coast Railway. Natty little guy staring at this illuminated interstate highway – giant lit‐up green signs every few miles telling where you were – and not too impressed. He had seen swamps become cities, a bridge extended to a strip of mangrove in the Atlantic Ocean and Miami Beach was born.
(Leonard 2015a, p. 217)
He's also happy to share his views on the changes taking place in South Beach, which in his opinion has gone to hell since the old days:
Picciolo's and Joe's Stone Crab were the only places left on the sound end, the neighborhood taken over by junkies, muggers, cutthroats, queers, you name it. Cubans off the boat‐lift, Haitians who had swum ashore when their boats broke to pieces, old‐time New York Jews once the backbone, eyeing each other with nothing remotely in common, not even the English language. The vampires came out at night and the old people triple‐locked their doors and waited for morning. Ass‐end of Miami Beach down here.
(Leonard 2015a, p. 256)
A place can also be defined by its racist attitudes. In the Detroit novels, it is the black population that is the primary target of white ethnic putdowns. In Miami, it's the influx of Latin immigrants that provokes common complaints like this: “If they're not coming from Cuba it's Haiti now, we don't have enough Latins here, we got all this extra welfare money laying around.” And it isn't bad enough that there are 200 000 Cubans in Miami already, now there are 125 000 boat people coming, “half of them out of the Havana jails and insane asylums. They send 'em here for us to take care of” (Leonard 1982, p. 155).
As is the case with his portrait of Detroit, the picture Leonard paints of Florida isn't fixed in time. He usually describes a specific place, but as time passes, the picture changes. For example, 10 years after Maurice Zola's commentary on South Beach, Harry Arno in Pronto (1993) provides this update on the changes he observes during his morning jog in Lummus Park: “Most of the old retired people were gone, the old Jewish ladies with their sun hats and nose shields, and the new inhabitants of South Beach, the trendies down from New York, the dress designers and models, the actors, the stylish gays, didn't appear on the street before noon” (Leonard 1993, p. 4).
One feature Florida and Detroit share in common is the scourge of gun violence, in both cases largely due to the drug trade. Leonard emphasizes the fear many residents of South Florida live with by having one of his characters note in passing that in certain neighborhoods the houses all have bars on the windows and that many drivers always lock their doors whenever they drive through Little Havana. In Split Images, Walter Kouza says he knows a guy who sells $500 000 worth of handguns a month in his three Miami gun shops. “He's teaching all these housewives come in how to fire three‐fifty‐sevens, forty‐fives…Can you see it? Broad's making cookies, she's got this big fucking Mag stuck in her apron. But that's what it's coming to” (Leonard 1981, p. 22).
When Leonard began thinking about setting a novel in Atlantic City, a location he knew little about, he called upon the assistance of a researcher named Gregg Sutter. Sutter was an enthusiastic early fan of Leonard's who especially liked seeing his hometown of Detroit portrayed so realistically in his novels. One day he phoned Leonard in hopes of writing a profile of him for a noir newsletter he and a friend were putting together. This led to a fruitful relationship that resulted in Sutter publishing a profile of Leonard for Monthly Detroit in August 1980. A few months later Leonard offered him a job as his researcher.
Sutter's initial efforts mainly involved library research, but with Glitz (1985) his role expanded to include among other things taking scores of location photographs. These provided Leonard with a feel for the city before he actually visited it, making the five days he spent there much more productive. But while his preparation for writing this and later novels necessarily differed from what was required for his previous work, the way he used the material in his novel remained unchanged: he still had his characters do the work of description.
Leonard loves contrasts, which is evident in the initial view we get of two Atlantic Cities, the old and the new, through the eyes of first‐time visitor Vincent Mora, a Miami cop who has come to the city to investigate the death of a young woman he had recently befriended in Puerto Rico:
Vincent looked at the Inlet neighborhood through venetian blinds, at old frame houses and empty lots, telephone poles standing alone on streets named after states and oceans. He saw homes that looked like barns with bay windows and dormers stuck on, built in a time when tourists came here in the summer and the Inlet offered rooms only a few blocks from the ocean….To Vincent the area looked as though it had been fought over in a war, house to house, and half the people had packed up and left.
(Leonard 2015b, p. 499)
Off in the distance he sees towering shapes against the gray sky, the casinos that are in the process of displacing what remains of the old neighborhood. “Nine, ten, eleven, twelve now, they were coming this way. The invasion of the casino monsters, Vincent thought” (Leonard 2015b, p. 500).
Once inside the casinos, Vincent is awed by all the tawdry glitz and glitter. He rides a gold elevator up to a dining room with crystal chandeliers, scenes of Versailles on the walls, and gold linen and candlelight on the tables. The suite he's staying in makes him feel like he's “in a hotel in Star Trek….It's so modern you don't know how to open anything or turn the lights on” (Leonard 2015b, p. 592). The absurdity of the place is highlighted by the note he spots in his room reminding him to turn off the lights when he leaves to save energy. This in a casino with a thousand lights burning 24 hours a day.
Vincent is also an acute observer of the darker reality behind all the glitz:
It amazed him, held his attention, to see an old seaside resort being done over in Las Vegas plastic, given that speedline look gamblers were supposed to love. Here you are in wonderland, it told the working people getting off the tour buses, all those serious faces coming to have a good time. That was something else that didn't make sense, nobody smiled.
(Leonard 2015b, p. 557)
Nothing, however, nails the essence of Atlantic City more succinctly than the comment a drunken man makes to Vincent the night an assailant tries to shoot him while he's sleeping in his hotel room. Vincent surprises the gunman and chases after him down the stairs and out into the street before he gets away, whereupon the drunk, seeing Vincent standing there at 3 a.m. dressed only in his jockey shorts, offers this helpful advice: “You should a bet your underwear. You never know when your luck'll change” (Leonard 2015b, p. 592).
Aside from Detroit and South Florida, the other location Leonard knew best was Hollywood. A lover of movies, writer of screenplays, and author whose novels were regularly made into films, he understood the inner workings of Hollywood quite well, though he wasn't especially fond of much of what he witnessed. Get Shorty (1990) is his revenge on Tinseltown, a satiric exposé of what he liked least about the movie business.
With the exception of a short drive down Sunset Strip that gives a longtime Hollywood producer the opportunity to rattle off the names of all the famous establishments that are no longer there – the Trocadero, Schwab's drugstore, Ciro's, and The Garden of Allah – and a brief observation by a newcomer to L.A. that, “Here, wherever you look it's something different. There homes'll knock your eyes out, but there's a lot of cheap shit, too” (Leonard 2016 [1990], p. 127), Leonard spends little time describing what Hollywood looks like. His primary interest is exposing the Hollywood mentality, the thinking (or lack of it) that dominates the place. Get Shorty is, like his other books, very funny. The difference is that this time Leonard uses humor as an instrument of ridicule in a satiric takedown of Hollywood hypocrisy, venality, and phoniness.
Chili Palmer is a Miami loan shark who is hired by a Las Vegas casino to confront Harry Zimm, a Hollywood producer of shlock movies like Slime Creatures and Grotesque, Part Two, about a $150 000 debt he owes the casino. Instead, the two of them end up discussing films, and before long Chili is pitching a story idea based on one of his cases. The pair then decide to co‐produce a movie.
When Chili later calls a Miami friend to tell him he has become a producer, the friend responds, “How you gonna do that? You don't know shit about making movies.” “I don't think the producer has to do much,” Chili explains. “There aren't any rules – you know, anybody saying this's how you have to do it….The movie business, you can do any fuckin thing you want 'cause there's nobody in charge” (Leonard 2016 [1990], p. 127). Besides, he figures his experience as a “shylock” will be a plus: “I'll find out what you have to do outside of have an idea and raise the money. That doesn't sound too hard. I was in the money business and I get ideas all the time” (p. 145). About the only difference Chili sees between his old and new jobs is the language: “There were a lot of terms you had to learn,” he says, “as opposed to the shylock business where all you had to know how to say was ‘Give me the fuckin money’” (p. 230). When a friend warns Harry Zimm that his new partner is a crook, Zimm's response sums up Hollywood: “So? This town he should fit right in” (p. 76).
In Leonard's jaundiced view, anyone can get into the movie business because, as noted screenwriter William Goldman famously observed, in Hollywood “nobody knows anything.” This is made abundantly clear in a scene in which Chili and a drug trafficker named Bo Catlett, who has been laundering drug money by investing in Harry Zimm's films, meet for the first time. They end up critiquing the script for the movie Chili and Harry are hoping to make, even though Chili confesses to having read only one page of it. As Catlett tells Chili, “You and me, we could do it. It's our kind of shit we talking about here” (Leonard 2016 [1990], p. 142). Chili asks Catlett if he knows how to write a script. His answer is priceless:
You asking me…do I know how to write down words on a piece of paper? That's what you do, man, you put down one word after the other as it comes in your head. It isn't like having to learn how to play the piano, like you have to learn notes. You already learned in school how to write, didn't you. I hope so. You have the idea and you put down what you want to say. Then you get somebody to add in the commas and shit where they belong, if you aren't positive yourself. Maybe fix up the spelling where you have some tricky words. There people do that for you….You come to the last page you write in “Fade out” and that's the end, you're done.
(Leonard 2016 [1990], p. 143)
Leonard also skewers pretentious actors like Michael Weir, who makes up in ego what he lacks in height. Thanks to his box‐office success, he pretty much tries to run every film he agrees to appear in. As one character puts it, “He turns the story around to suit himself and then walks away” (Leonard 2016 [1990], p. 266). (This is Leonard's revenge on Dustin Hoffman who, after demanding multiple revisions to the screenplay of LaBrava, which Leonard was writing for him, finally approved the script and then abruptly pulled out of the project.) Weir may be a talented actor but he's a pretentious blowhard, especially when discussing one of his own movies: “Take a look at The Cyclone again, the way a visual fabric is maintained even while the metaphor plays on different levels, with the priest, with the mother…so that you never lose sight of the picture's thematic intent” (p. 182).
Although Leonard is often thought of as a Detroit or a Florida writer, the fact is he featured an impressive array of settings in his novels: Kentucky (The Moonshine War), New Orleans (Bandits), Tunica, Mississippi (Tishomingo Blues), Italy (Pronto), Rwanda (Pagan Babies), Israel (The Hunted), Cuba (Cuba Libre), and Somalia (Djibouti). In each case, he included enough well‐chosen details to express the look, feel, and mood of the place.
Leonard's descriptions will never stop anyone dead in his or her tracks to savor his lyrical prose nor will they likely inspire a reader to hop on the next flight to the place being described. They do, however, help to establish the authentic backgrounds against which his colorful cast of crooks, grifters, and conmen carry out their often harebrained schemes.
References
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