8
Charles J. Rzepka
Baby, everything is all right, uptight, out of sight.
Stevie Wonder, “Uptight” (1965)
Elmore Leonard is famous for his pop‐cultural references, and the title of his 1996 novel, Out of Sight, is no exception. Originally conceived as the title for his previous book, Riding the Rap (1995)1, where psychic Dawn Navarro prominently displays her (putative) ability to read other people's minds, the phrase struck Leonard as more appropriate for a story about a clandestine affair between a law officer and a prison fugitive. But whether Leonard was alluding to James Brown's “Out of Sight” (1964) or Stevie Wonder's (2019b) career‐transformative “Uptight” (1965), with its “out of sight” tag, is an open question. Of the two, Wonder's seems a better fit. It tells the story of a “poor man's son, from across the railroad tracks” who wins the heart of a “pearl of a girl” from “the right side of the tracks” (Wonder), which is also the story of the Odd Couple affair between good‐ole‐boy bank robber Jack Foley, who buys his suits at secondhand clothing barns, and classy, upscale, fashion‐conscious US Marshall Karen Sisco.
In many respects, the relevance of the phrase “out of sight” to the plot of Leonard's best‐seller is obvious even without referring to Wonder's hit song. On the most superficial level, the one‐night stand between Jack and Karen is both inconceivably gratifying to the two of them – immeasurably “out of sight,” as if it represented an erotic variation on Kant's mathematical sublime – and at the same time, by necessity, pursued and consummated in secret. The two lovers have to keep their mutual crush hidden from the police authorities generally, and specifically from the two people closest to them: Jack's disapproving partner, Orren “Buddy” Bragg, and Karen's equally disapproving father, a semiretired private investigator.
Once we begin attending to things left hovering in our peripheral vision, however, we begin to realize that Out of Sight is almost relentless in creating moments of occlusion, disguise, vanishing, and invisibility, moments that allude to the craft of writing itself as a kind of legerdemain directed at keeping its author “out of sight,” which is to say, out of his reader's imaginary field of awareness. Writing, for Leonard, was a kind of ventriloquism designed to make the reader look away from him, a means of throwing his voice through the magic of free indirect discourse (Rzepka 2013, pp. 13–24). “For the most part,” he told Robert E. Skinner in 1987, “I'm copying a sound of speech, so that my ‘sound’ or style or attitude is the sound of the characters. You never hear me” (Skinner, p. 41: see also, LaMay 1995, p. 149). He tacked an eleventh rule to this effect onto his “10 Rules of Good Writing,” originally published as “Easy on the Adverbs: Exclamation Points and Especially Hooptedoodle,” in the New York Times in 2001: “If it sounds like writing, I re‐write it” (Leonard 2001). The sound of writing is the sound of a writer whose “misdirection,” to use the language of magicians (“Stage illusions” 2019), has failed. It's the voice of the ventriloquist who makes you look at him, not his dummy. Disguising his voice was, for Leonard, a form of stylistic transparency tantamount to hiding in plain sight. In his introduction to the 10 Rules, he says they were “picked up along the way to help [him] remain invisible when writing a book” (2001). Using free indirect discourse, which gives the illusion of a first‐person interior monologue while maintaining the grammatical third person, Leonard magically disappeared into his characters without surrendering to them the duties of narration, as writing in the first person would have required.2
Leonard's obsession with transforming himself into his characters is deliberately reprised at several points in Out of Sight, beginning with its opening event, Jack Foley's escape from Florida's Glades Correctional Institution, which requires his vanishing through an underground tunnel and reappearing on the other side of the barbed wire as someone else, a prison guard in hot pursuit of the other escapees. It's more pertinently, if less prominently, displayed in the plot thread involving Foley's ex‐wife, Adele Delisi, a professional magician's assistant, who along with Buddy helps Jack in his vanishing act. When asked “how” magicians do their tricks, Adele answers, “It's the way it's done, that's what it's all about. How isn't that interesting” (Leonard 2016a, p. 538). These words also apply to Leonard's “10 Rules”: as a “how‐to” guide for beginning writers they are about as useful as a mail‐order book of parlor tricks pitched at fourth‐graders. Follow the directions and you, too, can learn “how it's done.” But the rules are incapable of helping a neophyte master the seamless “way” that Leonard, or Jack Foley, for that matter, achieves his “illusions,” as professional magicians like to call them: “It's not a trick,” says Adele of sawing a woman in half, “it's an illusion” (Leonard 2016a, p. 537).
In the parlance of the trade, a “trick” is parlor magic or table magic intended for small audiences or even a single spectator. “Illusion” is short for “stage illusion,” which is intended “for large audiences, typically within a theatre or auditorium” and “distinguished by large‐scale props, the use of assistants and often exotic animals such as elephants and tigers” (“Magic” 2019). Illusions are closer than mere “tricks” to what Leonard is doing because he is performing for an audience of thousands, not just family and friends, and employing a large cast of “assistants,” his characters. Among the best‐known stage illusions are making large things (animals, persons) vanish from one place and reappear in another (“box jumping”), sawing someone in half, and transforming a woman into a tiger (“The Lady and the Tiger”) (“Stage illusions” 2019), all of which Leonard highlights as part of Adele's repertoire and all of which, in one way or another, enter his own repertoire of writing illusions, including the importance of timing. All require not just knowing how to do something, but mastering a particular way of doing it. That is, they require a skill, but only as the foundation for perfecting a particular style.
Techne and Style
For Leonard, writing was a techne, not a praxis. That is, unlike morality or civic virtue or military strategy, it did not come with a purpose or end attached, such as doing good or the preservation of the state or the winning of a war (Rzepka 2013, pp. 11–12, 40–42). Writing was a skill – a tactic – that could be applied to any number of purposes. Leonard's primary purpose in writing was entertaining his readers. He was fond of analogies to jazz performance, where techne was achieved through years of practicing fingerings, scales, arpeggios, riffs, and phrases, all for the purpose of saying something with one's instrument or voice. As he saw it, the point was to get people to listen to what the performer was saying and pay less attention to the celebrity musician saying it. Nonetheless, he had an acute awareness of the importance of what he called “attitude,” something close to personality in its registration of an individual's values, and something he used in close connection to the word “style.” For instance, when asked why, early in his career, he came to prefer the writing of the little‐known author Richard Bissell to that of the famous Ernest Hemingway, he replied, “I could learn through Hemingway exercises to keep my prose lean, but I didn't share his attitude about heroics” (Leonard 1998, p. 156). “Exercises” were to Leonard, as a neophyte writer, what an etude would be to a child prodigy. He preferred Bissell's “easygoing attitude, his eye for absurdity, his acceptance of the way people are, his low‐key style” (p. 159). In particular, Leonard was drawn to Bissell's sense of humor (Geherin 1989, p. 5).
Bank robbery, Jack Foley's special skill, involves a techne that needs to be mastered, like a writer's “exercises” or a concert pianist's etudes or a magician's palming moves, to the point of becoming second nature, unthinking and automatic, before it can become an instrument for the expression of an “attitude.” The same is true of hitting a baseball, high diving, drawing a revolver, or taking an action photograph (a very small sample of the skills featured in the 45 books spanning Leonard's career). The point where techne becomes automatic and graceful marks that limit beyond which the true professionals in any field begin to separate themselves from the pack of hobbyists, amateurs, and apprentices. At this point they no longer have to think about how to “say” what they want to say; they are free to think about the way they want to say it.
In Out of Sight, the connection between the techne of bank robbery and that of writing, and between both of them and magic, begins with the book's male protagonist, Jack Foley, who has a lot in common with his creator. Both were born in New Orleans and both had a significant life experience related to their choice of profession 30 years before Out of Sight takes place. To judge by Leonard's repeated references to it, the novel unfolds a few days before and after Super Bowl XXX, in late January and early February of 1996, the year the book was published. Jack Foley tells Karen Sisco he doesn't know how many banks he's robbed up to then, but “it's going back thirty years” to when he was arrested after pulling his first heist, “driving for [his] uncle Cully” (p. 44) – that is, back to 1966, the year Wonder's “Uptight” hit the charts and Leonard, like Jack Foley, had just begun his new “life of crime” upon completing the first draft of “Mother, This Is Jack Ryan.” At that point, too, like Foley, Leonard had been “arrested”: it would take three more years, and extensive revision, before “Mother” appeared as his inaugural crime novel under the title The Big Bounce.3 Out of Sight's allusions to The Big Bounce extend to their respective protagonists as well. Jack Foley shares not only the first name of Jack Ryan, the central character of Leonard's book, but also that character's “attitude.” In his “Introduction” to the 1989 Armchair Detective Library edition of The Big Bounce, Leonard wrote that all of his male protagonists, like Foley, “resemble Jack Ryan in that they have much the same basic attitude about their own existence, what's important and what isn't” (“Introduction,” p. iii).
While Jack Foley and Elmore Leonard are both very good at what they do, only Foley is infatuated with the idea of being famous. The first thing he says after introducing himself to Karen Sisco is, “You've probably heard of me,” to which she replies, “Why, are you famous?” (Leonard 2016a, p. 478). The truth is, he's not. Later, staking out the house where Jack and Buddy are participating in a burglary gone terribly wrong, Karen fills in a Detroit detective about the Glades prison break. “The Robbery detective said he'd never heard of Jack Foley” (Leonard 2016a, p. 648). While Leonard repeatedly returned to the theme of fame and its media machinery throughout his career and was fascinated by glamorous gangsters as a boy (Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker are prominently referenced in Out of Sight, along with George R. “Machine Gun” Kelly, and Charles A. “Pretty Boy” Floyd [Leonard 2016a, p. 581]), he was a modest, work‐a‐day writer with no pretensions to fame, although he was proud of his best‐selling status because it told him he was doing his job well.
The Repertoire of Illusions
Like the sociopathic stalker Teddy Magyk in Glitz, who is fond of repeating the phrase, “Now you see me, now you don't,” Adele Delisi (not a sociopath) is one of several characters in books Leonard wrote beginning in the early 1980s that allowed him to explore themes of magic and paranormality, abilities that mimic one or another of his imaginative gifts as a writer, such as envisioning events not present (second sight) and experiencing the thoughts and feelings of others (mind‐reading, channeling the dead, reincarnation, and shape‐shifting, most often from human to animal forms, or what I call, in Being Cool, “manimals” [Rzepka 2013, pp. 162–163]). When Jack emerges from the tunnel on the other side of the Glades prison fence, he's not only transformed into a “hack” (a prison guard) by his stolen guard's uniform, but he's so covered with mud that he reminds Karen of “a creature out of the swamp” (p. 36).
Like Leonard, who writes while wearing what amounts to a magic cloak of invisibility, Jack Foley is a genius at disappearing, whether it's from prisons or from public view, incognito or in disguise, in stolen vehicles or in rented rooms. And Foley, like Leonard, makes a living from what he's good at: he robs banks without a gun, in plain sight, under everyone's nose, and then vanishes. He is, in short, a master magician of crime, and like any top‐flight magician, he needs the help of a beautiful assistant to pull off his greatest illusion to date: his escape from Glades prison.
Adele assists her ex‐husband's escape from Glades by serving as a go‐between, much like a professional assistant helping with a mind‐reading act in front of a big audience. She passes his coded phone messages about the jailbreak – aka, “the Super Bowl party” (p. 12) – to Buddy and another ex‐con, Glenn Michaels, who are preparing the getaway cars. As it happens, US Marshall Karen Sisco is waiting on a different errand in the same prison parking lot as Buddy when the break occurs and gets caught without her gun at the worst possible moment. She's thrown into the trunk of her own car, where Jack joins her, and Buddy drives them to their rendezvous with Glenn, leaving his stolen car behind. In keeping with her role in helping her ex‐husband disappear from one box (his jail cell) and pop out of another (the trunk of Karen Sisco's blue Chevy Caprice), Adele is what magicians call an expert “box jumper” (Leonard 2016a, p. 529).
To be more accurate, she was until recently, when her boss, Emil the Amazing, replaced her with a younger blonde assistant. Not coincidentally, her pop‐out replacement in Jack's love life, Karen Sisco, is also younger, and blonde. While looking for employment, Adele has 3 × 5 business cards printed up to pass out at all the art deco hotels on Miami's South Beach: “Like Magic!” they read, “Call 673‐7925 and out pops Adele!” (Leonard 2016a, p. 527). After Jack called Adele to report that the “Super Bowl party” was about to start, however, what popped out of the box was Karen Sisco, the newer version of Adele. Adele's life with Jack, like her professional life with Emil the Amazing, has enlisted her special skill in the art of making things disappear from point A and reappear at point B and turning one thing into another. Karen Sisco now assumes that role.
Just short of halfway through Out of Sight, the two “assistants” in Jack's prison escape, Adele the professional and Karen her amateur successor, are brought together when, in one of Leonard's typically farcical concatenations of plotlines, Karen visits Adele's apartment to extract information about Jack's whereabouts. She enters just before Jack's fellow escapee, welterweight has‐been José “Chino” Chirino, comes knocking on the door. Chino suspects (correctly) that Jack tipped off the guards about the prison break, preventing him from making a clean getaway. Now he's decided to get his revenge by finding Adele, forcing her to tell him where Jack is, and killing them both. As an excuse to see Adele, Chino phones her pretending to be a magician looking for an assistant. But he can't help letting his genuine curiosity about magic betray his ignorance on the subject when making his pitch over the phone:
“I was a mayishan in Cuba before I come here. Manuel the Mayishan was my name. Let me ask you something. You do the sawing of the box in half trick with you inside?”
Adele paused. “Yes?”
“How you do that trick?”
“How do you do it?”
(Leonard 2016a, p. 529)
When Jack first told Chino about Adele's profession, the welterweight was eager to find out how the sawing‐in‐half trick was done, and also how the woman in the cage got changed into a tiger (Leonard 2016a, p. 518). Karen Sisco, who's been pursuing Chino as well as Jack, happens to be badgering Adele with the same two questions just as Chino comes knocking at Adele's door. Thinking fast, Karen tells Adele to leave the room, but she opens the front door to Chino while Adele is still in the bedroom doorway. Chino bursts in holding a gun in his hand, charges straight for Adele, then stops and turns his head to find Karen Sisco raising a Beretta to his face and ordering him to put his weapon on the table. “Chino raised his left hand … saying, ‘Wait,’ frowning. ‘You not Adele?’ ‘I'm a federal marshal,’ Karen said, ‘and you're under arrest’” (Leonard 2016a, p. 540).
This scene mimics the two illusions that intrigue both Chino and Karen the most: Adele, Chino's target, has apparently split herself in half – she and Karen are standing on opposite sides of the bewildered fugitive convict, like images facing each other in a mirror – and the Karen half has been transformed into a “tiger,” or the federal law enforcement equivalent. “You can live or die,” Karen tells Chino, who is pointing his gun at Adele with his head turned to look at Karen. “It's up to you.” “You wouldn't shoot me … Would you?” he asks. “If you move, if you look at her again, you're dead,” Karen replies, using a rather crude version of magical “misdirection.” Putting his gun on the table, Chino looks up at Karen “in pain”: “I think you would shoot me,” he concedes (Leonard 2016a, p. 541).
The three‐way confrontation between Chino, Adele, and Karen in Adele's apartment not only reprises Adele's two signature magic acts, but it also conforms, symbolically, to the signature features of how Leonard writes. “So once I get into it,” he said in an interview, “and I'm the character or both the characters, or all of them, it's just a lot of fun and I get going and try to entertain myself” (Rzepka 2009, italics added). Splitting yourself into two characters – or three or more – along with transforming yourself into someone, or even something, else (in Maximum Bob, Leonard mind‐melds with a female alligator accidentally locked in someone's screened patio) comprises the magic by which Leonard entertained himself, and us, over the long span of his writing life.
“How do you do it?” asks Karen of the sawing in half and the “Lady and the Tiger” tricks, just before Chino knocks at the door. Adele replies, “If I tell you, you'll be disappointed. It's always simpler than it looks.” (Leonard 2016a, p. 538). That's to say, again, it's not the “how” that matters, in writing or in magic, but “the way” it's done. And Adele insists it's not a “trick,” something performed up close. It's an “illusion,” something that works at a distance.
The bank robbery that Jack and Buddy pull off the day after Jack's escape from prison typifies the illusory nature of their criminal magic act. First of all, they never use guns, even for show. In fact, they are so unfamiliar with weapons that when they are each given a gun to help with the burglary that concludes the book, Buddy asks Jack, “You know how to work it?” to which Jack replies, “I ought to, I've seen it used in enough movies” (Leonard 2016a, p. 633). Instead of real guns, the pair conjures up an illusion of guns. Jack enters the bank while Buddy stays outside with the getaway car. Upon approaching a teller whose nameplate says “Loretta,” Jack indicates an unsuspecting customer across the room who is opening a briefcase and says, “Loretta, you see that guy talking to your manager, has his case open? … That's my partner. He has a gun in there. And if you don't do exactly what I tell you, or you give me any kind of a problem, I'll look over at my partner and he'll shoot [your manager] between the eyes” (Leonard 2016a, p. 503). Naturally, Loretta does exactly as she's told.
The distinction between tricks and illusions may be fine, but it is distinct. Both depend on manipulation, pretense, or even outright lies, but only illusions can transform reality on a large scale, like a novel or a play. Being gullible is not enough to allow a magician to pull off an illusion. Jack and Buddy change innocent customers into dangerous accomplices. They rob banks with guns that exist only in other people's minds. And they are very good at it. Jack's timing has been perfected over many decades and Buddy's getaway technique is impeccable. It's not how they do it, but the way it's done. “He's got style,” Karen tells her dad, describing her irrational attraction to Jack (p. 85).
Fashion, Style, and Self‐Transformation
“It's the way they're done …. How isn't that interesting” also applies to a character's fashion sense, and this, in turn, is crucial to self‐transformation: if ladies can become tigers, bank robbers can become tourists – or businessmen.
Just moments before Karen pays her visit to Adele's apartment and Chino makes his unannounced appearance, Jack appears in front of the building on his way to warn Adele to look out for Chino. Buddy has reminded him that they can't phone her – “Her phone'll be wired” (Leonard 2016a, p. 518) – so he's decided to take a chance and visit her in person. “I'll go as a tourist,” Jack says. “Wear shorts, a straw beach hat, hang a camera around my neck. Wear socks with sandals” (Leonard 2016a, p. 526). The ultimate test of Jack's self‐transformation into Miami Beach tourist is the sharp eye of Karen Sisco. Just as Jack is walking up the sidewalk to Adele's he passes Karen, who is looking in her purse for parking meter change. “You wouldn't happen to have change, would you, for a dollar?” she asks. “Sorry,” says Jack, and keeps walking (Leonard 2016a, p.531). This is not as easy as one might think. Jack has to control his urgent need to look back.
He was past her now without breaking stride, holding to the same unhurried pace, glancing around at signs, the sights, the people, but not looking back, telling himself to keep walking. … He told himself if he looked back he'd be turned into a convict on the spot, in state blue, so don't even think of looking back.
(Leonard 2016a, p. 531)
Leonard chooses his words carefully here: not “he'd be recognized on the spot,” but “he'd be turned into a convict.” Jack controls himself, and the illusion works.
Karen watched him walk past the Normandie [Hotel], past the women on the porch, the [Federal] agent sitting there now. She thought, No, it couldn't be. She saw Foley's face streaked with muck in bright headlights, the guard's cap hiding his eyes …. She waited for him to look back. She waited until he was all the way to the end of the block, crossing the street, and when he still didn't look back, she felt a letdown, a disappointment, believing that if it was Foley he would have looked back.
(Leonard 2016a, p. 532)
It's not how you transform yourself into a tourist: anyone can figure out what to wear. It's the way you do it that matters. In Jack's case, you don't rush, and you don't look back. If you do, you will be “turned into” what you were. The illusion will be undone.
In Out of Sight, clothes don't make the man or woman, because the important question is never “how” to dress, but “the way” you wear your clothes – the way you move, the way you behave, the way you feel in them. In short, your style. When Jack and Buddy need winter duds for a trip north to Detroit, where they expect to meet up with Glenn, the two of them make a stop at the Jewish Recycling Center. “It's like the Salvation Army or St. Vincent de Paul only Jewish,” says Buddy. (Leonard 2016a, p. 548). Though the inventory is unpromising, Jack finds a dark navy blue double‐breasted suit and “knew this was his coat” because it “felt good on him, the sleeves a speck short but that was all right … The pants were a perfect fit and not too shiny in the seat,” (Leonard 2016a, p. 548). Jack's fashion sense is confirmed when, three days later, he fortuitously encounters his love interest, Karen Sisco, in the revolving bar high atop the Renaissance Center in downtown Detroit. She thinks he is “looking great” (Leonard 2016a, p. 593).
Another mirror scene near the end of Out of Sight seems intended to underline, by contrast, Jack Foley's innate sense of style, of what works or, rather, what he can make work. During the burglary on which Jack and Buddy tag along, Maurice “Snoopy” Miller, gangbanger and, like Chino, a former boxer, takes a hiatus to try on some of the homeowner's tailored suits. Jack watches from the doorway, “Maurice … looking at himself turning this way and that in the mirror, like the suitcoat might fit him if he caught it at a certain angle, not hang on him like a sack, the tips of his fingers showing” (Leonard 2016a, p. 646). It's not the “how” – anyone can put on an expensive suit – it's the “way” it's done – the way you wear it, the way you “feel” in it. Maurice is a victim of commodity fetishism: if the suit is expensive with a fancy label, he assumes it must be effective at transforming him from a low‐life gangster and washed‐up boxer into a man of means. But he is so preoccupied with his mirror image, restricting his view to the “angle” (“Stage illusions” 2019) that will allow him to fool himself but no one else, that he isn't paying attention to how it feels on him.
When Jack tries his suit on in a mirror, with a white shirt and dark blue tie, he expects “to see himself as a businessman, some kind of serious executive,” perhaps in the way Snoopy does:
What he looked like was a guy who'd just been released from prison in a movie made about twenty years ago. Steve McQueen as Doc McCoy. Yeaaah … He liked it. He half turned and cocked his hip in a pose: a photo of Jack Foley taken shortly after his daring prison escape. His mind flicked to a picture of Clyde Barrow, hat cocked down on one eye, and right away saw Karen Sisco coming out of the Chevy trunk in her short skirt … He imagined her seeing him in this suit. A semi‐dark cocktail lounge. They look at each other …
(Leonard 2016a, p. 549)
Jack's “posed” imaginings, based on how he feels about himself in the mirror (“He liked it”) soon come true. In just three more days, as he approaches Karen wearing this suit in the Renaissance Center restaurant in Detroit, Karen will mistake him at first for one of three young, well‐dressed businessmen who have been trying to hit on her: “another dark suit appeared, reflected in the window wall, the third guy here to try his line.” Clearly, Jack knows how to play the dapper man of business if he has to. But he undergoes a further transformation in Karen's eyes when he opens his mouth. “Finally he said, ‘Can I buy you a drink?’”
What she had imagined and played with in her mind was happening and she was afraid if she turned her head he wouldn't be there or it would be one of those [three other] guys. She stared at his reflection until she had to find out and turned her head. Karen looked up at Jack Foley in his neat navy‐blue suit, his hair not quite combed but looking great.
(Leonard 2016a, p. 593)
The romantic tryst Karen “had imagined” while officially pursuing Jack to put him back behind bars here coincides seamlessly with what Jack had imagined in the Recycling Center, and the window wall in which his reflection first catches her eye recalls the mirror in which Jack first conceived this encounter. Even the transformation in his reflected image, as Karen beholds it, from businessman to debonair prison escapee recapitulates the transformation in his own mind as he posed in the mirror four days previously. Expecting to see himself as “some kind of serious executive,” an effective disguise for a bank robber to anyone but himself, Jack – who like many of Leonard's criminal protagonists desires more than anything to be famous – is surprised, and delighted, to see instead a glamorous movie antihero like Steve McQueen in The Getaway (1972), or a real‐life criminal celebrity like Clyde Barrow, of Bonnie and Clyde. And he rolls with it on the hunch that it will appeal to Karen, too, as it does.
It does because Jack's preoccupation with the glamor of the celebrity criminal is matched by Karen's inexplicable attraction to the type, as her superiors and her father repeatedly remind her. Her former lover turned out (unbeknownst to her) to be a bank robber,4 and now she's maneuvering to find a way to get into bed, literally, with another. She likes bad boys, try as she might to deny it and even though her strict professionalism will get the better of her foolish heart in the end. What's most important for our purposes is that to Karen, even in his secondhand suit and with his hair barely combed, Jack is still “looking great.”
Timing
Clearly, Karen is supposed to play against type as the Bonnie Parker to Jack's Clyde Barrow in Leonard's noir romance, and Michael Sinowitz, in Chapter 2 of this collection of essays, traces the roots of that plotline to the tradition of American romantic comedy. But the choices Karen made in her life have led her down a path radically divergent to Jack's, and the difference will ultimately foil any possibility of a happy ending because their diametrically opposed choices of “profession” – bank robber, law enforcer – are the result of Jack's having failed at the one thing of utmost importance to any magician: timing.
Timing is a concern throughout Out of Sight and manages to touch upon nearly every theme involving legerdemain. It's a signature feature of Elmore Leonard's style, apparent not only in the rhythms of his dialogues and punch lines but also in the flawless manner in which he intersects separate plotlines in scenes that, if they appeared in a book by nearly any other author, would seem like contrived coincidences. In Leonard's hands they emerge as the natural outcome of many discreet personal decisions: Karen waiting in the same parking lot as Buddy just as Jack is about to break out of Glades, Karen appearing at Adele's door just after encountering Jack disguised as a tourist and just before Chino shows up with a gun, Karen walking into the scene of the burglary at the end of the book just as Jack is about to walk out, and above all, Jack's just happening to enter the RenCen bar when Karen is having a drink there.
Why don't we notice the implausibility of these coincidences until we stop reading and begin to think about them? Leonard's legerdemain with plot depends on letting his characters decide what they want to do next and then finding a way to make all of their decisions compatible with the development of a good story. He carefully adjusts the timing of those decisions, the events that motivate them, and the actions that result by finding plausible reasons for action – or inaction – in each character's personality. As Leonard himself once put it, someone “not planned as an important character” will “assume his way into a position of prominence. And that's the best kind of character to have. One who, on his own, elbows his way into the plot” and demands that its rhythms accommodate his motives (Skinner 1987, p. 42; see also Grobel 2001, p. 282).
For example, the timing of Karen's arrival at the scene of the botched burglary is affected by the delay in her receiving a tip‐off from Maurice's girlfriend, Moselle, who finally gets fed up with her boyfriend's abuse but takes an hour or two to get up the nerve to call Karen and tell her where Maurice is and what he's doing (robbing a house in Bloomfield Hills). Had Moselle called right away, Karen would have had the house staked out and the drama unfolding inside (one rape, two murders) would never have taken place, meaning that the setup for her final confrontation with Jack would not have had time to unfold. Moselle fortifies her resolve by smoking a few joints, a perfectly plausible decision rooted in her milieu and her history as an abused woman sharing a house with dope‐heads and gangsters. But her doing so delays the action longer than one might otherwise reasonably expect.
And there's more: Karen has learned from Glenn (who was deliberately misinformed) that the burglary is scheduled for the next day, so she's caught off guard by Moselle's call. Karen's confrontation with Jack is thus made to seem fortuitous rather than contrived: it wasn't supposed to happen at all. As with his narrative invisibility, Leonard is very good at letting his readers' imaginations do the work of suspending their disbelief. Who is going to question the likelihood of these coincidences when each of them is a plausible consequence of the independent motives and decisions of the characters involved?
As his bank‐robbing technique demonstrates, Jack is a maestro of timing when carrying out his illusions. His disappearing act at Glades is another perfect example. Rather than accept Chino's invitation to join him and his Latino buddies in breaking out through the tunnel they've spent weeks digging, Jack informs a rather dense prison guard named Pupko about Chino's plan and persuades him to watch with Jack from the prison chapel, which is being renovated, while the escape is carried out. In that way, says Jack, Pupko will get all the credit for blowing the whistle and stopping it. (Jack tells Pupko he expects favorable treatment in distributing prison contraband in return.) Just as things get underway, Jack clobbers “the Pup” with a handy two‐by‐four (a piece of construction debris) and trades his prison suit for his victim's guard uniform. This is why Jack decided to piggyback onto Chino's breakout in the first place rather than join in. He needs that uniform to complete his escape. And the blow has to be timed perfectly: too soon and Jack could be caught waiting around dressed in the wrong clothes with the unconscious Pupko at his feet; too late and he could lose his chance to go down the hole before it's sealed up. “I timed it to slip between the cracks, you might say,” he tells Karen (Leonard 2016a, p. 477). It's not how you break out of prison, but the way it's done that matters.
As in the burglary gone sour at the end of the book, so in the prison break that gets things moving: Leonard accentuates the importance of timing by setting up the unexpected threat of mistiming. Both the prison break and the burglary take place a day or two earlier than originally planned, and each of the two protagonists involved – Jack in the first instance, Karen in the second – is surprised by the change. Their improvisations in order to “keep time” with the unexpected course of events is one source of the tension that keeps us reading, further distracting us from the improbability of coincidence.
However, Jack's timing finesse cannot, in the end, overcome his and Karen's incompatible histories, even though that, too, is a matter of timing – bad timing in life. Jack tries to explain his feelings to Buddy so he'll understand why Jack can't help jeopardizing their freedom by trying to get in touch with the US marshal intent on capturing them. “‘I kept wondering if she and I had met, you know, under normal circumstances like at a cocktail lounge …’ He stopped, running out of words, Buddy staring at him again.” “You're too late,” Buddy finally says (Leonard 2016a, p. 497).
But Jack's not ready to give up, and eventually, his counterfactual fantasy, which he first proposed to Karen in the trunk of her car, begins to work on her, too. When she thinks she spots Jack transformed into a tourist outside Adele's apartment building, her first wish is that he stop and speak to her.
Like if she were to make a T with her two hands, or he would, calling for a time‐out, to finish what began in the trunk of the car …. Maybe. Why not? There would be no way to predict what they'd talk about, they'd just talk until their time was up.
(Leonard 2016a, p. 532)
The idea of an agreed‐upon “time‐out” in Karen's official pursuit of Jack is suggested by Super Bowl XXX, which is referenced repeatedly throughout the book, beginning with Chino's jailbreak – it was originally timed to coincide with the Super Bowl, when all the guards would be distracted – and continuing in conversations Karen has with her dad and her FBI supervisor. In football, a “time‐out” is a predetermined period of minutes or seconds when the official game clock is stopped. It's a moment that transpires, in effect, “out of time,” in a temporal dimension unaffected by the rules and regulations of the game unfolding on the field of play. Because, for Leonard, you are what you do and what you do is the sum of what you've done, your history determines your identity. Clock time – “time on the clock” or “regulation time” – is where all individual histories (identities) intersect and either mesh or clash. Clock time is where Jack does or does not “time” his blow to Pupko's head just right. It's where Karen, having decided to stop waiting outside the house in Bloomfield Hills for Jack to come out, does or does not “time” her appearance at the foot of the foyer stairs just as Jack, having had enough of Maurice's botched burglary, appears at the top of them. Clock time, in short, is where you have to play the game. In order to make real their shared fantasy of spending the night together despite the different personal histories that impede the realization of that fantasy in clock time, Jack and Karen must not only stay “out of sight,” they must escape time altogether: they must create a moment “out of time” where their individual histories don't intersect at all.
The same illusion of extratemporality obtains in magic, where the magician can persuade an audience that something has indeed disappeared, but only if they don't suspect it's hidden in another location. This assumption has consequences for the audience's sense of time. If something is neither “here” nor any place else “out of sight” in the present moment, then it is not just “out of sight,” but out of the clock time we experience in common as a shared, lived “now.” Jack and Karen perfect their vanishing act by calling a “time‐out” for one night in Karen's suite at the RenCen Marriott after leaving the hotel's revolving rooftop restaurant (a kind of giant clock face). After they have sex, Karen tells Jack, “I don't want to lose you” (Leonard 2016a, p. 610). “That's part of the feeling we both have,” replies Jack.
But there's nothing we can do – you know that. You're not gonna give up the life you have and I couldn't if I wanted to. It's way too late for me …. when the time's up, it's up.
(Leonard 2016a, p. 611)
Afterwards, Jack acknowledges what the words “too late” imply, telling Buddy he was right after all when he said it was “too late.” Nevertheless, Jack adds, “I still wanted to know what might've happened if things were different.” “You find out?” asks Buddy. “Yeah, I did,” Jack replies. “But what did that mean?” wonders Buddy, silently. “He was disappointed by what he found? Or was sorry now he'd robbed all those banks?” (Leonard 2016a, p. 614).
After Jack leaves the next morning, Karen keeps her eyes closed when she awakens: instead of keeping “out of sight” of the world, she now keeps the world “out of sight” in order to perpetuate the illusion that what she and Jack had for one night could have lasted forever, in an endless present “out of time” with no past or future. “As long as she didn't open her eyes or move he was still there.” Eventually, of course, Karen has to look. “Well,” she tells herself, “now you know,” and gets out of bed to resume her official pursuit (Leonard 2016a, p. 611).
By the time Jack and Karen meet at the scene of the burglary, confronting each other on the stairs of Richard Ripley's home in Bloomfield Hills, Jack has sworn to Buddy that he'll never let himself be taken alive and sent back to jail. Like his True Crime hero Clyde Barrow, he'd rather go down in a hail of bullets. When Karen finally confronts him on the stairs, however, her affection for him makes her spare his life at the expense of his last shred of celebrity dignity: she shoots him in the leg. The time‐out is over. The magic spell is broken. Jack and Karen are back to being who they really are, what their life choices have made them, in regulation time. “I'm sorry, Jack,” says Karen, “I really am” (Leonard 2016a, p. 652)
It's hard not to believe she's sorry for both of them.5
Coda
Out of Sight may have taken its title from Stevie Wonder's 1966 hit, “Uptight,” but the book's magic theme could have a more proximate source in Wonder's oeuvre. In November 1995, when Leonard was already hard at work on Out of Sight, the Motown star released Natural Wonder, a live album he'd recorded with the Tokyo Philharmonic Orchestra in Osaka, Japan. Among the hits reprised on that album was “If It's Magic,” a song originally released on Songs in the Key of Life (1976). The lyrics, about love, speak directly to Jack and Karen's situation:
If it's magic
Then why can't it be everlasting ….
If it's pleasing
Then why can't it be never leaving?
(Wonder 2019a, “If”)
Did the re‐release of “If It's Magic” not only inspire the magic theme in Leonard's thirty‐third novel, but also, through its association with Wonder, move Leonard to reprise the title he'd rejected for his previous book? Did this song jog loose a memory from 30 years before, the memory of a time when Leonard, like Wonder, was still relatively unknown and hanging onto his livelihood by his fingernails? We can't ask him now, of course, but the timing is suggestive.
For that's exactly where Stevie Wonder had found himself in 1965, when “Uptight” proved his salvation. Four years into his contract with Motown, “Little Stevie” had had only one top hit (“Fingertips”) and just two other songs that had made Billboard's top 40 (“Workout,” “Hey Harmonica Man”). He was stuck in a holding pattern at age 15, and Berry Gordy, Motown's CEO, was worried that the young singer's recent voice change would only make things worse.
Released in November, “Uptight” didn’t really take off until early the following year, 1966, when it stayed at number 1 in Billboard's R&B Singles list for five weeks. Elmore Leonard was, at that time, in a struggle of his own. He had just completed and was beginning to revise “Mother, This Is Jack Ryan,” the original version of what would become his first attempt in the crime genre after more than a decade of success writing westerns. Like Wonder, he was undergoing something of a “voice change.” Meanwhile, the rejection letters were piling up: 84 of them would appear in Leonard's mailbox by the end of the year (Leonard 1989, p. iii). And he was not in the best financial shape. Early in 1960, just as the market for westerns had started drying up, he'd quit his lucrative but boring day job at Campbell Ewald, a big Detroit advertising agency, cashed in his stock options to buy a new house for his family of seven, and begun writing full time in a brand new genre. By 1966 he was barely scraping by, living off his savings and composing freelance ad copy and screenplays for educational films. Like Little Stevie the year before, he had hit a wall.
Then two things happened that changed everything. First, Leonard received $9000 from Twentieth Century Fox for the film rights to his prizewinning western, Hombre. He used it to buy the time he needed to revise “Mother, This Is Jack Ryan” into something publishable. And second, “Uptight” came blasting out of radios all over Detroit, like sonic wallpaper. “My money's low and my suit's out of style,” sings Wonder, “But it's all right if my clothes aren't new/Out of sight because my heart is true” – words equally appropriate to that low point in Leonard's career when remaining “true” to his new genre had seemed a long shot and the distant pinnacle of becoming crime fiction's “Dickens from Detroit” (Reed 1984) was “out of sight” indeed. Did the similarity between their professional situations back then help fasten Wonder's ebullient voice in Elmore Leonard's “Panasonic ear” (Reed 1984, p. 101), where it hibernated for three decades until the re‐release of “If It's Magic” prodded it into wakefulness? Whatever the answer may be, the song's ironic, courageous allusion to Wonder's own blindness since birth is a testament to the singer's irrepressible enthusiasm and sheer joie de vivre in the face of adversity, an enthusiasm and a joy that Leonard, who never pretended to be anything more than an entertainer in prose, would have understood. “Out of sight”: the be‐bopper's “copacetic!” the hipster's “groovy!” the magician's “Abracadabra!”
And Leonard's eleventh Rule of Writing. No more doubt. From here on everything would be “alright.”
References
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2. Grobel, L. (2001). Endangered Species: Writers Talk about Their Craft, Their Visions, Their Lives. Cambridge, MA: Da Capo.
3. LaMay, C.L. (1995). Making a killing: an interview with Elmore Leonard. In: The Culture of Crime (eds. C.L. LaMay and E.E. Dennis), 145–153. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction.
4. Leonard, E. (1989). Introduction. In: The Big Bounce, i–iv. New York: Armchair Detective Literary.
5. Leonard, E. (1998). On Richard Bissell. In: Rediscoveries II (eds. D. Madden and P. Bach), 154–159. New York: Carroll.
6. Leonard, E. (2001). Easy on the adverbs, exclamation points and especially hooptedoodle. New York Times (16 July) https://www.nytimes.com/2001/07/16/arts/writers‐writing‐easy‐adverbs‐exclamation‐points‐especially‐hooptedoodle.html (accessed 20 August 2019).
7. Leonard, E. (2016a). Out of Sight. In: Elmore Leonard: Four Later Novels (ed. G. Sutter), 453–652. New York: Library of America.
8. Leonard, E. (2016b). Karen makes out. In: Elmore Leonard: Four Later Novels (ed. G. Sutter), 889–904. New York: Library of America.
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10. Reed, J.D. (1984). A Dickens from Detroit. Time (28 May): 100–101.
11. Rzepka, C. (2009). Elmore Leonard interviews. Part 4. Crimeculture (29 September) https://www.crimeculture.com/?page_id=275 (accessed 24 May 2019).
12. Rzepka, C. (2013). Being Cool: The Work of Elmore Leonard. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
13. Skinner, R.E. (1987). To write realistically: an interview with Elmore Leonard. Xavier Review 7 (2): 37–46.
14. “Stage illusions.” (2019). Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stage_illusions (accessed 24 May 2019).
15. Wonder, S. (2019a). “If It's Magic.” Genius. https://genius.com/Stevie‐wonder‐if‐its‐magic‐lyrics (accessed 24 May 2019).
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Notes
1 G.Sutter, e-mail message to Charles Rzepka, May 23, 2019.
2 The only exception in a career spanning six decades was Hombre (1961), a late western, which was narrated by the character Carl Allen.
3 Leonard's earliest surviving work, “One, Horizontal,” is a noir crime story, but it was not published in the author's lifetime. It appeared posthumously in 2015.
4 Karen's affair with Carl Tillman is the subject of Leonard's short story, “Karen Makes Out,” written before Out of Sight but published the same year as the novel (Leonard 2016b).
5 Jack lives to rob again in Road Dogs (2009) after trading information for an early release from prison.