THE HOT KID
By Elmore Leonard. Morrow. 312 pp. $25.95
Elmore Leonard, who will turn 80 later this year, continues to amaze. When he graduated from the University of Detroit in 1950, Leonard took a job with an advertising agency. He wrote at night and was soon publishing Western novels. Several were turned into films, including "Hombre" with Paul Newman and "Valdez Is Coming" with Burt Lancaster. After the rising popularity of television all but eliminated interest in Westerns, Leonard turned his talents to crime fiction. His crime novels were unlike any others. Guns went off and men died from time to time, but his novels were essentially comedies. Leonard liked his crooks. He had us rooting for them. As such delights as Fifty-two Pickup , Gold Coast , Glitz and LaBrava poured forth, his audience grew, and Hollywood again came calling. All told, about half of his 40 novels have been adapted, perhaps most memorably by Quentin Tarantino, whose "Jackie Brown" was based on Rum Punch . Leonard's books have not been huge bestsellers, because they are a bit too off-beat, too subversive, for mass audiences, but legions of us love them. He once said of his writing, "I learned by imitating Hemingway, until I realized I didn't share his attitude about life. I didn't take myself or anything as seriously as he did."
The Hot Kid , Leonard's newest, carries us back to Depression-era Oklahoma, whose residents are far more thrilled by the adventures of bank robbers than by those of presidents or movie stars. John Dillinger is particularly admired, and Bonnie and Clyde are considered amateurs who give bank robbing a bad name. God-fearing, law-abiding people may have lived in Oklahoma in those days, but Leonard's world is one of near-perfect ignorance and near-total amorality. Farm boys dream of robbing banks, and farmers' daughters suspect that being a gun moll is a grander fate than chopping cotton. The hot kid of the book's title, handsome young Deputy U.S. Marshal Carl Webster, is on his way to being a legendary lawman. We meet Webster at age 15, when he calmly shoots and kills a man who is trying to steal his cattle. He comes by his talents honestly: His father, fighting in the Spanish-American war, once "killed three men in less than ten seconds." The father came back to Oklahoma, struck oil and retired to the pursuit of pleasure, but his son is more ambitious. He becomes a marshal at age 21 and soon guns down a bank robber who made the mistake of insulting him in an ice cream parlor when Webster was a teenager.
Other desperados test his mettle. In one shootout, Webster faces down a homicidal strikebreaker and the army of Klansmen he has recruited to burn down a speakeasy. Webster's rise to fame is aided by one Tony Antonelli, who churns out purple prose for True Detective magazine. The writer immortalizes Webster's habit of warning outlaws, "If I have to pull my weapon I'll shoot to kill." Webster is also a lady's man, and sweet on an underage redhead called Louly, whose first taste of celebrity came when her cousin married Pretty Boy Floyd. Following the cousin's example, Louly ran off with an aspiring bank robber, then shot him dead and decided that a lawman was a better bet.
The villain of the piece is Jack Belmont, a millionaire's son who is bad to the bone. As a teenager he tried to blackmail his father about his mistress; when that didn't work, he kidnapped the mistress. A few years in prison only made him meaner. He emerges determined to become Public Enemy No. 1 and kill Webster. The story builds to a scary climax when Belmont tries to ambush the marshal. Who will survive? Will Webster's vanity bring him down, or will his skill with a .38 Colt save the day? Is this finally a comedy or a tragedy we've been reading with such delight?
Elmore Leonard is our Prospero, a magician who has given us inspired fun for 50 years. He floats above the action, amused; his motto is surely Puck's "What fools these mortals be." In The Hot Kid , Oklahoma is his version of Shakespeare's enchanted isle in "The Tempest," a brave new world where maids and monsters, outlaws and oilmen, strange creatures all, act out their dubious destinies. ·
Patrick Anderson reviews thrillers for Book World in The Washington Post's Style section. His e-mail address is mondaythrillers@aol.com.
