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It’s been an odd few years for Elmore Leonard. After churning out crime novels of the first rank like a veritable factory, culminating in the career best Get Shorty, he’s been on a gentle but distinct slope. Rum Punch, Pronto and especially his last, the formulaic and characterless Riding The Rap, have been marking time, just at the point where, paradoxically, his stock among filmmakers (Get Shorty, Steve Soderbergh's Out of Sight, and Jackie Brown, Tarantino’s blaxploitation remake of Punch) has never been higher. Leonard’s response has been to write a western.

Well, not a western, exactly, but something more akin to his roots than the comic 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, for Cuba itself.

Cuba Libre is a curate’s egg. Leonard clearly enjoys himself being back amongst the horses and six guns, the snarling villains and square-jawed heroes, writing 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 here 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? The answer has to be qualified. No Elmore Leonard novel could be wholly bad - he’s too good a writer for that - and Cuba Libre certainly 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 finally putting pen to paper on that much-promised and long-overdue sequel to Get Shorty. •

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