He also thinks this straight-arrow American lawman won’t shoot unless he’s shot at, won’t actually kill over the mere crossing of a line arbitrarily drawn. The “confident” fat guy thinks he can smooth-talk his way into an advantage, but he’s not a very good talker: everything he says is vacuous, obviously serving no purpose but to cover his approach. Note how Leonard-the master of whip-smart dialogue-sets up the above-excerpted killing with a conversation that’s calculatedly lame. When the guy raised his pistol and had it out in front of him, Raylan shot him again, higher this time, in the chest, and this one put him down.įor characters who are slow to pick up on when to speak, when to listen, and when to make a move, things tend to end poorly in Leonard’s world. Raylan glanced at Nicky standing way over on his left, Nicky with his pistol about waist high Raylan put the Mag on the fat guy again, the guy with his hand on his gut now, looking down like he couldn’t believe there was a hole in him before looking at Raylan again, saying something in Italian that had a surprised sound to it. Put the 357 Mag on him, fired once, and hit him high in the gut. He started to take another one.Īnd Raylan shot him. He said, “Listen, I want to tell you something, okay? That you should know.” He took a step. This time the fat guy stopped and grinned, shaking his head, about sixty feet away now. “You take one more step,” Raylan said, “I’ll shoot you. The fat guy kept coming anyway, saying, “It’s okay, don’t worry about it.” Then lowered it, saying, “I wouldn’t come any closer’n right there. Raylan raised his left hand, this time toward the fat guy. The guy was confident, you could say that for him. Getting within his range, Raylan thought. Get a little closer, that’s all, so I don’t have to shout.” Now the fat guy waved his pistol at Nicky, saying, “Come on,” and started toward Raylan again, getting a sincere look on his face as he said, “We want to talk to you, man. The scene from which I’ll quote is set in Liguria, on Italy’s northwest coast Marshal Givens is there to retrieve an on-the-lam Miami bookie, and has, of course, run afoul of the mob: If you’re planning to read Pronto (and I think you should) and you don’t want me to spoil anything for you (as if that were really possible) then please skip on ahead to the Cayucas video below.
Marshal Raylan Givens, who went on to feature in two more Leonard books and is now the protagonist of the giddily acclaimed FX series Justified. Nevertheless, I’d like to take a quick look at a few paragraphs from Pronto, the 1993 novel that introduces Deputy U.S. (Leonard’s vaunted dialogue is as much or more a tribute to the value of listening than to the value of talking.) The categorical imperative of this moral universe can be summed up with Leonardesque conciseness in two words borrowed from one of his titles: Be Cool.Īlthough Leonard’s dialogue is richly excerptable, his adroit treatment of violent action is less so: it’s hard to convey a sense of the slow build to these scenes, and harder still to convey what he cannily omits from them. Most importantly of all, they know when it’s time to shut up and pay attention. Leonard’s heroes understand what they can and can’t get away with, and they know what they look like through other people’s eyes: what they seem to be. What they fall back on instead-if they know what’s good for them, which most of them don’t-is an attitude, or maybe more accurately a stance.
The inhabitants of Leonard’s world can never be sure of the consequences of their actions, and they’re too foggy on their own motives to ever settle on a solid code of conduct. Leonard’s great achievement, it seems to me, is his evocation of the idiosyncratic moral universe in which his books always take place everything else for which he is justly praised-his off-like-a-shot narration, his fleshed-out characters, his ear for dialogue-proceeds from that. He didn’t let his plots push his characters around, and he also had no apparent use for the shadowy psychopathology that fuels the works of his most critically-lauded midcentury peers: nobody in an Elmore Leonard novel is a case study, or a symptom of anything. Leonard was funny, but not zany he was witty, but resisted being clever.
Leonard began his career as a writer of pulp westerns, but achieved popular success in crime fiction, where he managed to locate a fertile patch of turf midway between wisecracking romantics in the Raymond Chandler mold and their more spartan hardboiled rivals, and then to cultivate that patch with awe-inspiring consistency. His passing has been characterized as the loss of a national treasure, and based on the five or six books of his I’ve read over the years, that seems like a pretty fair assessment. Elmore Leonard died back in August, as you have probably heard.