Well, not a western, exactly, but something more akin to his roots than the comic-fuelled crime-capers of recent years. Cuba. It’s the end of the last century, on the eve of the Spanish-American War. We arrive in Havana with Ben Tyler, an independent merchant there to sell horses as cover for arms smuggling. To sell horses to Roland Boudreaux, a rich and flamboyant American planter embroiled in Cuban politics. But there’s also Amelia Brown, Boudreaux’s feisty and fiercely independent mistress with serpentine schemes not only for her beau but for Tyler, and, indirectly, Cuba itself.

A curate’s egg then. Leonard clearly enjoys himself being back amongst the horses and six-guns, the snarling villains and square-jawed heroes; a picaresque but rather contemporary Boys Own adventure. Amelia is far more likely to shoot it out with the boys than simper in a corner, and avarice and duplicity are as much motivations as altruism or revolutionary zeal. The book’s big set-piece - a ransom demand, a train, and much undisguised greed - would play just as well in any of Leonard’s last half-dozen novels.

But is it any good? you ask, and any answer has to be qualified. No Leonard could be wholly bad - he’s too good a writer for that - and the book sure has a cinematic sweep. (The rights went to the Coen brothers even before publication.) But there’s still something naggingly false about the whole endeavour, as though it’s something he had to get out of his system before he can finally put pen to paper on that much-promised and long-overdue Shorty sequel.