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Rum Punch
Elmore Leonard
Viking hardback, 304 pages
Review by Gerald Houghton (1993)

Twenty years handling plastic cups and a synthetic smile for jaded island-hoppers has taken its toll on Jackie Burke. One day she lands at Palm Beach with a luggage of dirty laundry, fifty thousand dollars and a bag of happy dust. Flash Feds Nicolet and Tyler are sniffing around her superior, gun-runner Ordell Robbie, and offering a deal – she drops him or they drop her for five.

In a game where convoluted plotting is valued over everything, Elmore Leonard is something of an anachronism. He has successfully developed a formula that is as unformulaic as any method can be. The books flow from their characters, the development of plot eschews any obviousness, allowing an intimate slow burn, effectively building itself as assorted cops, bad guys and essentially decent folk imprint themselves on the page.

Jackie joins the by now long line of Leonard women, too flawed to be heroines, too strong and genuine not to be. She and the sympathetic fifty-something bail bondsman Max Cherry wander a recognisably scummy sun soaked landscape peopled with the lowlife, low-rent good and bad guys that don’t often make their home between the pages of high class fiction. The farcical Big Guy, would-be paramilitary neo-Nazi who’ll rack his load with the black Ordell when it suits; Ordell’s string of not-quite-so air-headed girlfriends; and plebeian hold-up man Louis with more firepower than brain power – each painted with a striking vivacity, spewing line upon line of the tightest, sharpest dialogue this side of the street.

Like Get Shorty or Maximum Bob, Rum Punch leaps from the page with the clipped, economic pacing common to all late period Leonard – funny, frightening, irreverent. You read with the book in one hand, an Uzi in the other, and a broad smile stapled to your lips. •

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