5
Kris Mecholsky
Westerns and crime fiction, Elmore Leonard's chosen genres, are known to be conventional and formulaic, meant to please mass audiences. Indeed, the term “genre fiction” has come to describe such mass‐market fiction, including romance, science fiction, and fantasy. But formulaic, conventional features that can reliably please a mass audience have been endemic to art since mass audiences first arrived with modernity. Arguably, the first modern audiences to inspire the creation of a new art form in fact created a kind of musical “genre fiction” – opera (Grout and Williams 2003).
If, “like the modern…murder mystery, late eighteenth‐century opera buffa is a thoroughly conventional genre,” as John Platoff writes (1990, p. 99), then Elmore Leonard and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart are generic kin. However, Platoff also indicates that “conventional” does not necessarily mean “formulaic” and that use of conventions does not preclude invention. By the end of Leonard's joke‐filled Swag (1972), for instance, the main protagonist (Ernest “Stick” Stickley, Jr.) realizes with some surprise that the four people he has murdered have all been black. This fact, in conjunction with Stick's recurring racist views of African Americans, injects an unsettling, turgid undercurrent into what otherwise seems a relatively laid‐back, episodic, and humorous crime caper that ends with the hero besting his criminal antagonists and the cop on his trail, but going to jail nonetheless – unconventional, but still comical. Similarly, within the first five minutes of Mozart's 1787 Don Giovanni, the audience is quickly shuttled from listening to a bumbling, stock‐comic servant complaining about his vexing, womanizing master to watching the eponymous serial sexual predator kill his latest lover's father in a happenstance duel. Light banter follows. Mozart himself categorized his work as an opera buffa – that is, an eighteenth‐century Italian comical opera with everyday characters in a contemporary setting – and it was billed at the time as a dramma giocoso (literally, a drama with jokes), but by any designation, audiences expected something far lighter than Mozart's overture‐opening D‐minor chord and abrupt murder scene.
In fact, generic, conventional art never really remains so. The very rules it establishes for itself seem formulated in part to be twisted, inverted, or rejected. Crime fiction and opera (even one particular type of opera) are both far more varied than they may appear to the casual or even discerning audience, just as species of birds can confuse the casual backyard watcher, serious birders, and ornithologists alike.
As it happens, opera supplies literature and crime fiction – and noir specifically – with a useful model for navigating the complexity of genre evolution, particularly by suggesting a way to understand Elmore Leonard's transformative place in the history of crime fiction by way of opera buffa. Through comparison with the formation of one subgenre (opera buffa) partly as a response to another (opera seria), Leonard's version of noir can be better understood as it relates to the tradition he operated both within and against. Specifically, I argue that the genre juxtaposition of opera seria and opera buffa in the eighteenth century resembles in occasion and reception the juxtaposition of hard‐boiled noir (what I could call “noir seria”) and the “noir buffa” that succeeded it, as typified by Elmore Leonard and writers like Charles Willeford, Carl Hiaasen, and Vicki Hendricks. Like opera buffa in reaction to opera seria, a strong subset of Leonard's works thematically and tonally opposes the self‐serious noir of writers like James M. Cain or Cornell Woolrich, which by the 1970s had become too predictable, clichéd, and unrealistic to fulfill its original generic function as a response to the perceived excesses of the Golden Age of detective fiction, as epitomized by the unlikely puzzle plots of Agatha Christie, John Dickson Carr, and Dorothy Sayers.
At first glance, of course, opera seria and noir seem near opposites. Opera is a sung drama largely based upon a balance between arias (closed lyrical pieces wherein a character or characters expand upon an emotion, idea, or theme) and recitative (a talking style of singing that quickly advances plot points to get to the next aria). Opera's loose structure seems fundamentally opposed to plot‐intensive noir since opera privileges reflection through aria. Thus, the dramatic plot in opera seria grinds to a halt while the protagonists stop and sing at length on one aspect of their emotional response to the plot, often dwelling on one particular word or even part of a word at length. Noir, however, particularly in its original hard‐boiled mode, is often hyperfocused on plot. The opening lines of Cain's debut novel, The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934), famously introduces a character who is already in desperate straits (he is riding in the back of a hay truck) and is heading into worse (he is thrown off). In relating his story, Frank Chambers also relates his circumstances in colorless and relatively unemotional terms. Even in “soft‐boiled noir,” like Faulkner's Snopes trilogy, where more narrative space is given to backstory and description, noir tends to rely on plot development to reveal character, whereas opera tends to give characters room outside of the action to dwell on its ramifications and implications. Thus, whereas opera tends to open up narrative space for excessive meditation, noir tends to close it down, discarding psychological explanations in favor of reinforcing the fact that an individual's actions in the world stand in stark isolation from it, regardless of their feelings about it.
In fact, however, opera seria and noir are mirror inverses of each other. Originating from similar impulses but exploring dialectically opposed spheres of social life, they betray striking similarities. Both are intentional esthetic innovations created out of a desire to be “more authentic” subgenres of their traditions, though neither had a definite label at the time. Noir arose from a desire to make crime fiction more realistic, gritty, and philosophically and thematically relevant – to take crime seriously again. Hard‐boiled noir suggests that crime fiction ought to be decorous in the Aristotelian sense: the style ought to match the subject. Opera seria was distinctly and intentionally created to rid Italian opera of elements some considered either “immoral” or unrealistic.
Indeed, the whole history of opera is largely a history of intentional esthetic revolts and popular upheavals. Opera as it's understood today was essentially invented in Italy around 1600 during the Renaissance, when all manner of Greek and Roman culture was being resurrected and celebrated (Sacher 1997). From its very specific and intentional origins, opera was a humanistic endeavor and particularly sought to approximate the classic Greek and Roman tragedies, which were then erroneously thought to be entirely sung (Grout and Williams 2003). Opera seria took shape during the first two decades of the eighteenth century as part of a literary reform led by the Arcadian Academy of Rome in response to the “undisciplined, irrational, and often licentious librettos” of some popular Italian operas (McClymonds and Heartz 2001).1 The Arcadian reforms sought to keep drama and comedy separate, distill society into abstract representations of its “noblest” aspects, and largely avoid the use of supernatural events (Weiss 1982). Plots were to be more intense and integrated, with fewer arias and fewer characters, and stories were to be more realistic and written in simple verse, with subject matter from ancient history instead of fable or myth (McClymonds and Heartz 2001). It is not much of an exaggeration to call the result “hard‐boiled” opera.
Hard‐boiled though it was, opera seria's tone was intended to be morally uplifting. Noir, of course, sought to shake readers up and confront them with existential truths in an amoral universe. Nonetheless, both genres sought verisimilitude and realism, if for different purposes. In a photo negative way, as I detail later, classic noir has traditionally and steadfastly ignored happier endings for the morally ambiguous and troubling, yet it shares with opera seria a moral seriousness, if not a didactic aim.
In short, opera seria, like noir, sought to refine and distill its traditions down to the simplest elements that could shift it closer to what certain esthetic reformers thought was more “true” and “real,” with a clear sense of what the ending should communicate to the audience. Opera seria eliminated extravagant plot development, unrealistic scenarios, excessive spectacle, extraneous and unsuitable characters, and irrelevant arias, all in order to ennoble opera audiences with a clear and imitable vision of the best of society. In a mirror‐reversed way, noir eliminated extravagant plot development, unrealistic scenarios, excessive spectacle, extraneous and unsuitable characters, and irrelevant narrative digressions, all in order to confront crime fiction readers with a cold, brutal vision of the worst of society.
In the case of both opera seria and noir, outliers persist – some opera seria contain comic elements, and supernatural events occasionally occur (e.g. Jommelli and Verazi's Enea nel Lazio or Pelope); some noir likewise contains improbable scenarios, extravagant plot developments, or unrealistic motives (e.g. Double Indemnity and Dark Passage). Nevertheless, the craze for both subgenres inspired artists to simplify their features, sometimes into heavy stylization. For instance, the Arcadian reforms encouraged “harsh lines of demarcation between action (recitative) and reflection (aria)” (McClymonds and Heartz 2001), which composers like Christophe Willibald Gluck would resist, seeking to bring greater unity between music and drama. Similarly, in 1950s noir, after disillusionment with the detective figure of hard‐boiled fiction prompted new directions in crime fiction (Whalan 1998) and the mass‐market fiction of the paperback industry blended imperceptibly with traditional publishing rhythms, innovators such as Jim Thompson and Patricia Highsmith would eschew conventionalized detective noir to focus more on the interior lives of criminals, offering more ambiguous conflicts and endings and elongating the stylistic staccato of the hard‐boiled genre. The action in Cain's The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934), for instance, is squeezed into the simplest of clauses and entire evenings are summarized in a paragraph, whereas Highsmith will stretch out the suspense and intensity of simple scenes, like Mr. Greenleaf meeting Ripley to inquire about his son, over the course of an entire chapter.
As all self‐serious art forms do, opera seria and noir generated their own reactionary responses. Opera seria inspired major reforms and the overpowering popularity of opera buffa – to which I will turn in a moment – while the intense self‐seriousness of writers like Cain and Chandler prompted the correcting influence of writers like Highsmith and then reinvention through writers like Elmore Leonard, who managed to express similar thematic concerns, specifically regarding distrust of social systems and an existential outlook, but in comic rather than tragic terms, revealing the individual's confrontation with an indifferent but humorously capricious universe.
As Andrew Pepper (2010, p. 60) rightly notes, any grouping that attempts to “shoehorn writers as diverse as McCoy, Cain, Goodis, Charles Willeford, Thompson and Patricia Highsmith into the same descriptive straitjacket is surely bound to fail.” Noir, of course, is notoriously frustrating to define, so it is not immediately evident that Elmore Leonard writes in its tradition, nor that it can be compared to opera very easily. Much of this ambiguity has to do with disagreements about how to define and partition genre. As numerous theorists have pointed out, the terms that suffuse genre theory can be amorphous, permeable, and multivalent. But as Alastair Fowler (1982, p. 55) points out in his landmark survey of genre theory, “without distinguishing … categories of genre, criticism must sink into incoherent confusion.” Following guidelines set by evolutionary biologists, which many theorists have likewise followed, Fowler (1982) proposes a series of subsidiary words umbrellaed under “genre” that serve extremely well to further differentiate types and categories, and which have been continued by recent critics like John Frow (2006). They include “kind” (such as the tragicomedies of Shakespeare or the epics of Homer and Milton), “mode” (suggesting a thematic focus), “subgenre” (subdivisions by subject or motif), and “constructional type” (structural forms such as “theme and variation,” “sequence,” “framing,” and so on).
At a minimum, literary noir describes American crime fiction that first appeared between the 1930s and the 1950s with a fuzzy set of social and philosophical outlooks and thematic tendencies that critics like Pepper and Lee Horsley have sufficiently categorized and articulated. Pepper (2010, p. 60) suggests that noir is hallmarked by “the corrosive effects of money, the meaninglessness and absurdity of existence, anxieties about masculinity and the bureaucratization of public life, a fascination with the grotesque and a flirtation with, and rejection of, Freudian psychoanalysis,” while Horsley (2001) proposes that it is an exploration of guilt with no clear distinction between guilt and innocence. Characters are doomed to isolation and marginalization in an ill‐fated relationship with society, suffering from failures of agency or loss of community. The forces shaping their lives are a manifestation of the world's randomness and absurdity. Horsley concludes that “it is in the nature of noir that guilt never disappears, and any resolution will be coloured by the ‘cynical, existentially bitter’ attitude that is generally taken to be one of the hallmarks of noir” (Horsley 2001, p. 12). Most definitions of literary noir suggest it is bound to America and to a particular time (cf. Marling 1995 and Pepper 2010). Some critics, chiefly Horsley (2001), have proposed a broader use of the term, reaching even into Europe as far back as the beginning of the twentieth century. I hold a fused position, that the hard‐boiled crime fiction that followed the successes of Ernest Hemingway, Dashiell Hammett, and James M. Cain was a necessary spark for noir's origin and – following Horsley's suggestion – that it operates separately as a philosophical and thematic mode that infuses other genres, always related to crime fiction and its historic origins. Leonard's work is representative of this mingling.
If noir is a floating modal subgenre, how does it relate to opera seria and opera buffa? The latter two each approximate very specific kinds and subgenres, with nearly unwavering modes. That is to say, they are at once both kinds and subgenres (i.e. specific historical kinds that also have relatively definite themes, motifs, and topics) whose modal inflections remain entwined largely in their generic characteristics. As sets of subgenres, then, opera seria and buffa and noir seria and buffa, while not exactly analogous in name, have left roughly similar footprints in literary taxonomies.
Two important features continually resurface in definitions of noir: one is a bleak expression of existentialism and the other is the self‐conscious origins of “the hard‐boiled school” as a reaction against the post‐Doyle Golden Age of detective fiction. These two features – seriousness of critical purpose and reaction to the perceived frivolity of what came before – find their counterparts in opera seria. But there is a less serious, even comic version of existentialism that has come to distinguish noir buffa from its predecessor, noir seria, just as a more comic and morally less serious view of the world came to distinguish opera buffa from opera seria.
Definitions of existentialism are as confused and ambiguous as those of noir. In attempting to tie together the numerous philosophers associated with the movement in Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre, Walter Kaufmann (1975, p. 12) suggests that ultimately it's “the refusal to belong to any school of thought, the repudiation of the adequacy of any body of beliefs whatever, opposition to philosophic systems, and a marked dissatisfaction with traditional philosophy as superficial, academic, and remote from life” that set existentialist philosophers apart from others. As a consequence, though, the philosophy itself has long been confused with the most popular pessimistic expressions of it. Nevertheless, Kaufmann (1975, p. 21) continues, although a “striking preoccupation with failure, dread, and death” appears an essential characteristic of existentialism that “all but determines…[its] popular image,” central philosophers of the movement like Friedrich Nietzsche and Jean‐Paul Sartre stress “joy and exultation that says Yes to life not in a mood of dogged resolution…but with love and laughter.” This lighter, more positive version of existentialism, with its emphasis on freedom instead of constraint and laughter rather than tears at the absurdity of the universe, distinguishes noir buffa from noir seria.
Although existentialism as an intellectual theme has always been a part of human history and entered modern culture through the writings of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, the term itself was used explicitly and most popularly by Sartre to describe his literature and philosophy. Sartre's adoption and popularization of the term made his philosophy an international sensation. Indeed, part of his international celebrity came from a 1945 lecture he delivered to defend himself from criticisms that his philosophy was too pessimistic (Cohen‐Solal 2007). “Existentialism is a Humanism,” read at the Club Maintenant, was a postwar intellectual phenomenon. Just one year later, Elmore Leonard was at the University of Detroit minoring in philosophy and soaking up Sartre's ideas (Rzepka 2013). If his crime fiction is any indication, it was Sartre's comic version of existentialism that most influenced him.
Despite the terms Sartre introduced to describe the existentialist experience – anguish, alienation, anxiety, meaninglessness – existentialism is fundamentally valueless, arguing merely that because existence precedes essence, no essence can define humanity. The “anguish” Sartre describes is the reaction to absolute freedom of individuals who feel circumscribed and bound to act in ways other than they would choose for themselves. Existential anxiety is the recurring realization that humanity can only rely on itself for meaning, which happens when individuals make choices for themselves. While negative feelings might accompany this realization, Solomon (2007) and others have argued that existentialism's affirmation that individuals are ultimately responsible for their actions and for the meaning they find in their lives is, on the whole, more hopeful than any alternative. Sartre (2007, p. 38) even suggests that since humankind is “nothing but a series of enterprises, and … the sum, organization, and aggregate of the relations that constitute such enterprises … what people reproach us for is not essentially our pessimism, but the sternness of our optimism.”
Even prior to its natural generic evolution, noir, like existentialism, contained surprising variety. Plots involve star‐crossed lovers, love triangles, individuals on the run, detectives investigating crime, detectives involving themselves in crime, heists, cons, and more. While existential truths confront noir protagonists and much feels fatalistic, the pyrrhic or tragic endings tend to run their course in surprising and individualized ways. For instance, while the ill‐fated lovers of Edward Anderson's Thieves Like Us (1937) meet an undeserving, violent death and suffer the ignominy of media defamation, the unrestrained and ruthless lovers‐on‐the‐run in Jim Thompson's Getaway (1958) actually do escape, if only to a hellish criminal “paradise” where the two discover they are trying to double‐cross each other in order to survive and will indeed both die. The fatalism in each book is different, however. While Bowie and Keechie in Thieves Like Us are forced by circumstance into running and hiding and are relentlessly and wrongfully beset by the law and their own confederates, Doc and Carol in The Getaway connive and follow their own murderous path to freedom with resolve and will die trying to do what they do best: surviving. Indeed, in the neo‐noir film version, Sam Peckinpah's Getaway (1972), the lovers escape.
Individuals in noir likewise experience their encounters with an apparently hostile universe in a variety of ways. For example, the psychopathic but disturbingly charismatic sheriff Lou Ford in Thompson's The Killer Inside Me (1952) slowly reveals himself to everyone in his life until they corner him and he is shot to death, tricked and surrounded by the rest of the town's law enforcers. Patricia Highsmith's Tom Ripley, however, in his first outing (1955), continually manages to cover his tracks as he inserts himself into every facet of Dickie Greenleaf's life, even impersonating Dickie and rewriting his will after Tom has spontaneously murdered him. By the end of the book, Dickie's estranged girlfriend and father have accepted that Dickie must have killed himself and leave everything he owned to Tom. The charismatic psychopath walks away (physically) unscathed with (nearly) everything he wanted. And despite the realization of somber truths and disappointing deceptions, many detective noirs end with criminals caught and the investigator's life intact: Chandler's Marlowe novels, Hammett's Continental Op and Spade novels, Macdonald's Archer novels, all end, if not happily, then at least with the criminals getting their just desserts.
Whatever the particulars of noir, its conclusion seems to bend to the same situation: humankind confronting an absurdly free, externally meaningless universe that is the bedrock of existentialism (Sartre 1956; Camus 1991). In literary noir, protagonists are only “fated” to discover how adrift and uncharted they are in an uncaring universe and that they are consigned to freedom, which is often constrained by the chains society and individuals forge for themselves. But the pessimism or fatalism that sometimes accompanies these confrontations is not necessary or inevitable, as Leonard's work indicates.
Despite the overwhelming popular consensus of Leonard's “greatness,” critical estimation of him has been thin, less due to the quality of critical writing about him than to the fact that the analytical work has necessarily remained either in the shallows, collecting and sorting basic motifs and themes, or following relatively isolated theoretical interpretations. A major exception to this trend was Charles Rzepka's Being Cool: The Work of Elmore Leonard (2013), which fully explored the defining characteristic of Leonard's protagonists, their “cool” – that is, their existential tendency to perfect what they do best and leave others to do what they do best. Rzepka's in‐depth work marks a clear dividing line in Leonard scholarship, separating the early period from the current state of Leonard criticism, including the present volume, wherein Leonard's work is explored more fully and expansively and situated more firmly in the work of writers that came before.
Among the early critical biographies predating Rzepka's book, David Geherin's (1989) stands out as the pioneer in its field, followed by James Devlin's (1999) a decade later. However, each biographer was more or less compelled to provide comprehensive overviews with little room for sustained analysis of particular works that would have prompted engagement with other essays. Also, Leonard kept publishing right up to 2013, the year of his death. The smattering of essays on Leonard's crime work that were published in these early years, mostly from the late 1980s and early 1990s, stand in theoretical isolation from one another. With each intervention, Leonard's output was better articulated and critically situated, but with the exception of Robert Sandels's (1989) essay for Armchair Detective, Leonard's place and influence with respect to the evolution of noir as a genre was essentially untouched. The present essay follows Sandels, and Mark Whalan (1998) to a lesser degree, in their efforts to articulate Leonard's position in the development of the genre of crime fiction. Sandels (1989) argues that Leonard infuses elements of the western in his crime fiction and transforms it into farce and then details a few recurring themes and concerns in Leonard's work.
My approach intersects with but deviates from Sandels's in a few ways. While Sandels (1989) rightly argues that Leonard infused western tropes into his crime writing, specifically those closer to the police procedural, my analysis of Leonard's play with genre gravitates instead toward his criminal heroes, indicating how Leonard himself followed the maturing trend in noir exemplified by Thompson, Highsmith, and others. With a philosophic conclusion that anticipates my own, Sandels (1989) claims that the confrontation between the criminal and the police indicates that the figure of justice challenges the antagonistic criminal's self‐image. For instance, in Glitz, the murderous Teddy Magyk has “substituted for the real world the norms of his own fantasies” and is incensed at cop Vincent Mora's apparent ability to “bring a little reality into people's lives” (1989, p. 19) as Sandels suggests most Leonard heroes do. He is claiming, in fact, that the Leonard hero presents an existential challenge to the criminal's illusory world.
Leonard's crime novels that do not incorporate features of the traditional western, as traced by Sandels (1989), typically follow a particular noir model: individuals making their way in an indifferent world, caught up in a love affair that challenges their worldview and encourages them to make a decision about their lives. But instead of the assailed and frequently doomed protagonists of noir seria, Leonard depicts characters who realize that happenstance has given them a reason to make a conscious choice to bring meaning into their lives. Indeed, they often make light of their situation. Although noir's recognizable predicaments still shadow them, Leonard's protagonists refuse to take their problems too seriously, as most noir seria protagonists do. As Rzepka (2013, p. 10) argues, this existential confrontation, struggling to “keep things ‘fun’ when circumstances conspire to make them ‘serious’ … is what takes the place of moral struggle in Leonard's fiction.”
In fact, existential Leonard characters use satire and wit, as Devlin (1999, p. 102) suggests, to point out “the disparity between what is and what should be without calling attention to…[their] efforts.” Leonard's protagonists and antagonists are funny in the same way opera buffa is funny in reaction to opera seria's condescending moralizing. When, in Swag, Stick sleeps with a nameless woman he calls “Mona” due to her proclivity for loud sex and tries to make conversation with her, he soon deduces she's a prostitute. Stick, however, wants the experience to be as real as it can be. When Mona begins her characteristic calling out, he says, “Hey, don't do that, okay? Unless you really mean it” (Leonard 2014, p. 265). Nothing is so villainous or heroic in Leonard's writing that it is not first and foremost human. In Stick (1998, p. 8), the sequel to Swag, one of Stick's antagonists, Chucky, has a strange penchant for changing his hat and walking around in it whenever he needs to make a specific kind of decision (e.g. wearing a hard hat when he needs to make a hard decision). The psychological basis for this quirk apparently stems from his childhood. In Chucky, Leonard undercuts the apparent seriousness of a psychological explanation for a character's odd behavior by creating a character trait with a laughable, almost slapstick idiosyncrasy that indicates how equally peculiar, individual, and absurd all humans are.
While Leonard's characters deploy humor to relieve the seriousness of their situations, Leonard himself readily molds his novels into comic trajectories through plotting and style for similar reasons. When the stakes are as high as life itself, Leonard keeps his description of the situation from sinking into maudlin sentimentality, promoting “the defeat of the sentimental by being satiric,” as Devlin (1999, p. 129) describes it. In Leonard's worldview, there is no good reason that any one mishap or turn of bad luck should trap a person in tragic circumstances, as happens in traditional noir. For a Leonard protagonist, the tightening of a novel's conflict is no more serious than the general absurdity of human existence anyway, so humor is always an appropriate option. Sure, as happens in Swag (1974), two former criminal conspirators might be plotting to murder you, but when can you ever trust your closest confidants and what might prevent you from getting shot in some other unlucky scenario?
Leonard's protagonists wear and wield humor in defense against the world's whims, but they are also often willing to make deliberate decisions to open themselves to those whims in a stab at making their own meaning in the world. In a mature noir like Highsmith's The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955), the main character may be willing to do what he needs to do to create the life he craves. Despite society's confinement of his desire, Tom Ripley plays the civilization game well enough to achieve the life of comfort he covets. Nevertheless, he remains haunted and hunted at novel's end. He has had to destroy Dickie, the man he envied, who seemed to see through his projected, illusory self to the person Ripley feared he really was. Dickie, for all his faults, can tell Ripley is inauthentic in the existentialist sense: he is role‐playing in “bad faith,” deceiving himself and the world that he is one kind of person that he inwardly knows he is not.2 Ripley's inauthenticity doesn't go away by the novel's end despite – or because of – his getting away with murder and taking over another man's life.
In Leonard's Swag (published in 1976), by contrast, Stick is making a successful living robbing grocery stores with a new accomplice, Frank Ryan, who as a witness spared Stick from an arrest for car theft so he could team up with him in a return to a life of crime. But Stick finds that his life of money and round‐the‐clock hedonism leaves him feeling hollow. “All right,” he says to himself, “but what do you want to do with your life?” (Leonard 2014, p. 233). After a series of increasingly dangerous and blighted criminal endeavors, Stick finds that he is growing more attracted to Arlene Downey (one of the “career ladies” at the apartment complex where he and Frank comprise the social center) and that he is growing less enchanted with his income source and his and his partner's daily parties. Frank is surprised that Stick isn't happy and asks him if he ever had it better. Stick hasn't, but he remains uncomfortable and ill at ease with who he “is” – that is, with what he does every day. The central conflict of the book, established by the end of the third chapter, is whether Stick is actually happy doing what he is good at.
Ernest “Stick” Stickley's earnest relationship with the model, Arlene Downey, rather than the ostensible main plot involving Frank's unreliable gangster friends, Leon and Sportree, thus sets the tone for the second half of the novel. Indeed, it drives Stick's ultimate machinations. As Stick realizes his days as a criminal are numbered – he knows legal forces are closing in and that the gangsters who betrayed him and Frank are conspiring to kill them – he begins to spend more time with Arlene, seeking a deeper connection and contemplating how exactly he does want to spend the rest of his life. As a result of coming to trust her, Stick involves Arlene in his plan to take his and Frank's “rightfully” stolen money and escape to live a legitimate life in Miami. His mistake, akin to so many similar mistakes in noir, is that he genuinely does love Arlene and trusts her. And, again, as in classic noir, the woman he trusts lets him down, but gently. The resemblance stops there, however, because Stick is noir buffa.
In classic noir, the male protagonist's love and trust are usually misplaced in a conniving femme fatale, which leads to his downfall and demise. Indeed, even when he places trust and faith in a good woman, the male noir seria protagonist, doing so too late, usually dies anyway (cf. Double Indemnity). In Build My Gallows High, Daniel Mainwaring, writing as Geoffrey Homes, summarizes this fundamental classic noir trajectory for the male protagonist in love: “When a man had it bad, there was no hope for him” (1946, p. 54).
Leonard's Swag comically inverts noir convention, however. Arlene really is “a good one” (Leonard 2014, p. 373) as Stick tells Frank, and, ironically influenced by Stick's newly found commitment to living an authentic life as happily as he can, she decides to pursue her own passion: modeling for the automobile industry. She abandons Stick and Frank's bag of money at the airport with a note indicating that the bag is theirs and then hops a flight to Los Angeles for an annual modeling convention. Like Stick, Arlene is faced with mortality (“she thought of her age, twenty‐six. In a month, twenty‐seven. Why'd she think of that?”) and is inspired by the person she loves to make a commitment to an authentic life for herself (Leonard 2014, p. 380). A further irony is that Arlene's note – reminiscent of the note in Postman that Cora has left for Frank confessing their crime – gives the detective and prosecutor the one piece of evidence they need to arrest Frank and Stick when the two otherwise would have escaped capture. As in Cain's Postman, pure chance often negates free action. In noir seria, this often comes across as fate punishing the wicked: the postman rings again, with bad news the second time around. In Leonard's work, bad luck is reminding the protagonist of the universe's comic indifference. No cosmic justice is at play. Stick is not mad at Arlene, and tells Frank as much, and Arlene presumably goes on to live a fulfilled life. In Stick (1983), the next novel where he appears, Stick is a well‐adjusted, happier man with clear goals.
Although Frank frequently plays comic relief to Stick's laconic, serious role in Swag, he, too, seems to be aching for some human connection from within the shell of his hedonism. Clumsily hitting on Mary Kay, one of the “career ladies,” Frank finally breaks down a little, explaining the sincerity behind his pick‐up line, telling her “no matter what kind of deals you've been handed, you have to go on trusting and believing … in yourself, in your own right to … have a good time and enjoy life. People need people” (Leonard 2014, p. 303). She's not entirely convinced, and Frank doesn't seem too terribly convinced himself, either, but his exhaustion and vulnerability in this scene, more apparent than at almost any other point in the novel, finally presses a completely “frank” and honest sentence out of him: “You should do what you feel like doing.” As is frequently true in Leonard's fiction, it is this naked sincerity that actually wins Mary Kay over. Even though Frank does not strive to be as existentially authentic as Stick does, the simplicity with which the two pursue their lives is what Leonard suggests is admirable.
Despite Arlene's importance at the conclusion, Swag focuses more specifically on the individual Leonard protagonist. Cat Chaser (1982), though, more clearly illustrates how Leonard's buffa approach to noir transforms the lovers‐plot tradition from which it springs. The novel's setup sounds like any of a number of early noirs, and the ur‐Cain story provides the simplest and most compelling model to describe it: a drifter falls for the wife of a powerful immigrant and they conspire to take his money and kill him. But Leonard drags this tired situation from the hardscrabble Depression into the middle and upper classes of a post‐Vietnam America. Now the drifter (George Moran) is a divorced veteran of the US intervention in the Dominican Civil War of 1965 who has kept (from his divorce) a modest Florida motel from which he scrapes a living. Moran does not appear to be a drifter at first, but in many ways he is Cain's Frank Chambers some 10 years down the road, supposing Frank had finally settled down with a rich girl who initially dumped him.
Moran feels his defining life feature is its “seven‐year cycles” because every seven years something drastic shifts his life in a new direction. First, he stumbled into the Marines, then seven years later into a job working for a cement company in Miami (far from his hometown of Detroit), then, after another seven years, into marriage to a developer's daughter and joining her dad's business, and finally into her divorcing him because he wouldn't fit in with her lifestyle. Thus, from the novel's beginning, we already have an understanding that Moran is not satisfied with the life that seems to keep happening to him, but he's not willing to do anything about it, either. At 38, he figures he is soon due for another “turn” in his cycle at 42, but he gets an unshakable feeling that something is about to change before that.
From there on, bucking the cycle, Moran's life takes a number of sudden and drastic turns and he is forced to assume conscious control of it. Leonard takes the wanderlust loner of noir and imagines him a decade in the future, divorced and still unsatisfied, and gives him a chance to take back control of his life. In Cat Chaser, as in Swag, traditional noir plots are comically upturned. In Swag, the one‐last‐score routine actually works, and even though the “femme fatale” character who “double‐crosses” the protagonist lands him in jail, he has helped her realize her own happiness, as well as his. By the end of the novel's eponymous sequel, Stick is making an earnest attempt to legitimate his life and reconnect with his estranged daughter. In Cat Chaser, the lovers had known each other as children growing up in Detroit, gone their separate ways, and later encountered each other by chance while on vacation in the Dominican Republic, Moran divorced, Mary de Boya wanting to be. Mary insists that she is sleeping with Moran only because she has already decided that she wants to divorce her husband, Andres de Boya, properly. Unlike Cora Papadakis, she doesn't need to kill him in order to be free. Mary just wants to confront de Boya with the fact of their loveless marriage. Moreover, de Boya is no bumbling, greedy immigrant of xenophobic noir seria, like Nick Papadakis in Postman, but rather a murderous, abusive former military crony of the assassinated dictator Rafael Trujillo (El Jefe). Finally, in sharp contrast to their counterparts in Cain's Postman and Double Indemnity, Moran and Mary only want to take Mary's share of de Boya's money, despite his having robbed her of all of it.
Like Swag, Cat Chaser has a complicated plot with a wide array of memorable and engaging characters that can distract readers from Leonard's thematic core. Ostensibly about an alcoholic PI, a hired gun, and the lovers cross‐conspiring to steal money from and possibly kill Andres de Boya, Cat Chaser actually examines two individuals who finally decided in their thirties to start making conscious choices that reflect the actualization of their own happiness. Mary is transformed from a woman trapped in an affluent but loveless and controlling marriage into a woman of independent means and an equal marital partner. Moran starts out accepting the many events that happen to him, such as his wife divorcing him and his motel being given to him as a part of the settlement. His rudderless, beleaguered existence is epitomized by his obsession over the teenaged girl who sniped at his company in the Dominican conflict and whom he talked to but never met. With both the Dominican sniper and Mary when she was married, Moran simply yearned for more interaction but felt trapped and incapable of acting freely.
As is true for Stick in Swag, from nearly the outset of the novel, Moran begins to address his existential crisis. For him, this means acting proactively, spurred on by his growing love for Mary. In Leonard's noir buffa, which yet retains noir's sense that things may not work out for lovers against the odds, the central characters' encounter with a random, largely meaningless world finally encourages them to choose their way freely into making their own meaning, despite the dangers. External threats to this classic noir love triangle predict tragedy, including Mary's violent confrontation with her husband and a final standoff with a merciless hired gun who always seems to hold the upper hand. Despite these threats, Moran and Mary choose to live authentically, accepting the negative consequences that may accompany their actions. Most devastatingly, Mary stands up to her controlling husband, even though she knows he could be violent toward her. When he brutally rapes her and robs her of the money remaining from the divorce agreement, her ordeal strengthens rather than weakens her resolve to obtain what de Boya originally promised. “A deal was a deal,” she tells herself as she picks herself up (Leonard 2012, p. 272). When Moran realizes he needs to kill Jiggs Scully, de Boya's hired gun, he accepts the necessity.
In Leonard's crime novels, the odds are often stacked spectacularly high against the protagonists. The endings to both Swag and Cat Chaser demonstrate this point as both Stick and the two lovers face direct threats to their safety from multiple sides and must work to fend them off simultaneously. But Leonard's heroes, as Rzepka (2013) argues, enjoy living authentically, acting with simplicity and directness: being cool. They recognize that they are what they do, and thus they strive to do what they do to the best of their ability. Unlike the frustrated protagonists of noir seria, Leonard's noir buffa characters will face a difficult circumstance and, quite simply, make it work, if at all possible. Stick's plan to kill Leon and Sportree relies entirely on a good bet regarding how they will react when they see Stick and Frank. He is not overconfident but plays the odds, so he is neither surprised nor unsurprised when his plan works. It was simply what was going to work best for him in that situation. If it didn't work, he would be dead, and that would be that (Leonard 2014). And Moran more often than not simply marches into a dangerous situation and acts with all of the confidence he can muster. When he discovers that de Boya's men have been following him and Mary and likely know he is sleeping with her, rather than run and hide he walks right into de Boya's house. As Jiggs says, “If you don't have a pair of the biggest ones in town, come right to the man's house there, I don't know who does” (Leonard 2012, p. 164). If some action is the best thing the Leonard protagonist can do, it is the right thing for the Leonard protagonist to do.
As I have already indicated, although noir was maturing throughout the 1950s and 1960s, Leonard's work was of a kind that revealed a new strain of the noir tradition. Similarly, opera seria had undergone its own reforms, mainly under the influence of Gluck and his most influential follower, Mozart. Gluck's reforms, which moved to blend recitative and aria further and create greater musical and dramatic unity, were also reflected in the growing popularity of opera buffa. As the term suggests, opera buffa developed out of a comic tradition, specifically a movement inspired by the Neapolitan bourgeoisie. While opera seria was already interlaced with some comedy, opera buffa sought to break away from opera seria's stringent guidelines and reinject levity, sophistication, and contemporaneity into opera, positioning itself “squarely between ‘art’ and ‘entertainment’” (Hunter and Webster 1997, p. 5).
Ultimately, opera buffa's major contribution to opera and the reason for its great popularity is its lighthearted, more naturalistic “observation of human foibles” in the audience's society (Weiss and Budden 2001). Instead of opera seria's self‐serious moralizing through tales from ancient Greece and Rome, Italian audiences in eighteenth‐century Parma, Rome, Venice, and Naples could enjoy humorous satire of the “middle‐class” lives in those very cities. Enlightenment critics like Rousseau and Diderot praised opera buffa for its naturalness and simplicity, even in recitative, as the singers counteracted the bombastic singing of opera seria (Campana 2012). By the end of the eighteenth century, opera buffa had completely replaced opera seria in the hearts of opera's audiences and was marching “inexorably towards respectability” (Hunter and Webster 1997, p. 6).
Opera buffa is an historical esthetic template for Leonard's noir buffa. Both subgenres emerged with noticeable ties to the genres they sought to oppose, seeking to correct their extremes by returning to a different notion of “reality,” a different kind of verisimilitude that focused on the middle classes and their “everyday” problems. Opera buffa remained similar in pattern to opera seria with a similar end and a similar esthetic revolt: realism in style to critique contemporary society. Likewise, noir buffa sought to get even more realistic than hard‐boiled noir had, depicting protagonists the reader might actually recognize while they wrestle with familiar (if not exactly “realistic”) situations. Whereas noir seria tends to depict deranged and damaged criminals with moral seriousness, noir buffa focuses on mundane, ordinary people who sometimes stumble into their plots and who often cannot explain the dumb luck that either plagued or benefited them. Indeed, in many cases, when Leonard's characters hope to bring about an outcome based on their choices, they instead find that dumb luck has orchestrated a way in which their best intentions instead turn out to harm them, almost mockingly. But they are rarely distraught or offended by this turn of events because they recognize how capricious and random it all is. The choice was to go for victory, regardless of the outcome. As model Sartrean, which is to say comic, existentialists, once Leonard's protagonists have decided to make choices for themselves as authentically as they can, they have given themselves meaning in an otherwise absurd world, whether or not they get away with everything they wanted; and in several cases, they don't (e.g. LaBrava [1983] and Out of Sight [1996]).
Invariably, though, Leonard's central conflict is over identity and the only thing that matters in the end is how well protagonists have come to terms with the absurdity of their world in good faith by undertaking authentic action oriented toward self‐made meaning. Increasingly, Leonard appears as the Dionysian spirit of noir, emerging with an ethos that makes “much less of dread and death than of man's … immorality that struts around masked as morality,” as Kaufmann (1975, p. 21) says of Nietzsche. In celebrating individuals who strive to be comfortable in their own skin, acting in accordance with how they know they should act, Leonard shapes a noir that pits characters against the hypocrisy, corruption, isolation, and bleak cynicism of their society and offers them an opportunity to be cool with it, getting in touch with their natural abilities and perfecting them to the point of carving meaning out of chaos.
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Notes
1 See Ellen Rosand's (1991) Opera in Seventeenth-Century Venice: The Creation of a Genre for more detail about the moral shifts in opera from its origins to the end of the seventeenth century.
2 I am leaving aside the harder questions of being and essence that existentialists usually tackle. Existentially, no one “is” anything; what they do defines them. This has a lot to do with how Sartre characterizes bad faith, though: individuals in bad faith believe they are some Thing determined by outside forces, when in fact they are human agents capable of making meaning out of free action.