Riding the Rap
Elmore Leonard
Viking hbk, 304 pgs
Now a Penguin paperback
Review by Gerald Houghton (1995)

Seventy this year and still the young turks are compelled to doff a hat or two to crimemaster-in-chief Elmore Leonard. He was playing pop culture before Tarantino ever sniffed that damn video store (cheekily, Reservoir Dogs is a name that's dropped) and Riding The Rap hums with Oprah-watching bad guys, altercations over Digable Planets and the relative merits of Paul Newman popcorn verses Orville Redenbacher. The difference is Leonard never feels the need to lard the point.

Dale Crowe Junior was a major player in the best of Leonard's recent novels, 1991's Maximum Bob. And yet this is no feeble-minded sequel. At the opening Dale's picked up for weaving and a busted taillight, to be taken back to Palm Beach by Rylan Givens, straight-edge U.S. Marshal, working Warrants, fetching fugitive felons. Givens himself was last seen in 1993's Pronto, travelling to Italy for the ageing Harry Arno when one too many men whose names begin and end in vowels noticed the former Mob bookman's tendency to skim their cream.

Only now Harry Arno's upped and gone again. He was last seen by hippie psychic (certified spiritualist and medium) Dawn Navarro, who knew a few too many things about her latest reading. Things known to Chip Ganz, in debt to Harry, who's read a thing or two about Middle Eastern hostage taking, and sees merit in doing things the Shia way. Just at a profit. He and sidekick Louis Lewis enlist the help of Puerto Rican bounty hunter Bobby Deo and Harry is told he has to come up with a way of paying them off they like: "Because if we don't like it, you're dead."

Ostensibly our hero, the tenacious Raylan, cuts a curious figure: a twisted black and white morality, big cowboy hat, and continual dogging over having shot the gangster Zip at the end of the last book. "You called him the Marlboro man and I said, 'Yeah, except he's real.'"

Leonard's set up is as smooth as silk. His bad guys are not kidnapping, they reason, because they are not involving anyone else. Chip wants things done right - he wants straw mattresses that no one in Florida makes - but as Louis points out: "Chipper, there's no way to treat hostages like they did in Beirut in a five million dollar house in Manalapan, Florida." They feed Harry TV dinners because, "Louis said the Shia fixed their hostages rice and shit, but no doubt would have given them TV dinners if they had any."

There's been a lay-off in Leonard's usually clockwork schedule, to remarry after the death of his wife Joan. Perversely, it seems to have done the author good where it really counts, on the page. Smart as Pronto and Rum Punch were, they lacked the costume jewellery sheen and sandpaper itch of Maximum Bob or the marvellous Get Shorty (now a major John Travolta picture, no less). Characterisation here is sharp, dialogue pithy, plot allowed to feast free range on itself. Riding The Rap is Elmore Leonard back on something like prime mid-season form, and no matter how good you think Tarantino is, here's where he learnt everything he knows.