"The Big Bounce"
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| Elmore Leonard's good reputation was well-deserved. |
Jack Ryan has a man’s fists, a boy’s mind, and the cunning of an ex-con. Nancy Hayes has a woman’s sleek moves and the instincts of a shark.Now, in a Michigan resort town, a rich man wants Jack gone and Nancy for himself. For Ryan the choice is clear: Nancy’s promises of pleasure, her crazy, thrill-seeking schemes of breaking into homes, shooting guns, and maybe stealing a whole lot of money are driving him half mad.
But there’s one thing Ryan doesn’t know yet: his new playmate is planning the deadliest thrill of all.
Elmore Leonard’s "The Big Bounce," published straight to paperback in the States by Fawcett/Gold Medal in 1969.
Because "The Big Bounce" was Elmore Leonard’s first crime novel – or, more accurately, his first contemporaneously set novel. Up to this point in his career, Leonard had published only westerns – novels and short stories – pretty successfully in the 1950s, with two of them, "3:10 to Yuma" and "The Tall T" being made into films in 1957.
As soon as he decided to leave his ad agency job in 1960, however, the western market died on its arse; as Leonard explains in his introduction to the 1989 Armchair Detective Library edition of "The Big Bounce," for most of the rest of the decade he “wrote ads, promotional material, industrial and educational films, everything but cocktail napkins and not a word of fiction.”
Eventually, the movie rights for his 1961 novel "Hombre" sold, and Leonard used the money to fund the writing of his “first novel with a contemporary setting, 'Mother, This is Jack Ryan.'”
“The Big Bounce,” set in Michigan, was published
in 1969 and kicked off a series of hard-boiled crime narratives —
“Fifty-Two Pickup,” “Swag,” “Unknown Man No. 89”and the raw genre
masterpiece “City Primeval: High Noon in Detroit” among them — that to
some of his die-hard fans define the essence of urban noir.
“Glitz,” published in 1985, was Leonard’s 25th novel and the
breakthrough that flew to the top of the best-seller fiction lists and
put him on the cover of Newsweek. But he felt it was the movie “Get
Shorty” that really made his a household name.
“After writing almost anonymously” for decades Leonard wryly noted
in 1996, “I am what you call an overnight success.”
Coming soon:
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| Corky's Barbecue in Memphis |
With the closing of the Harlan County, Kentucky, coal mines, marijuana has become the biggest cash crop in the state. A hundred pounds of it can gross $300,000, but that’s chump change compared to the quarter million a human body can get you—especially when it’s sold off piece by piece.So when Dickie and Coover Crowe, dope-dealing brothers known for sampling their own supply, decide to branch out into the body business, it’s up to U.S. Marshal Raylan Givens to stop them. But Raylan isn’t your average marshal; he’s the laconic, Stetson-wearing, fast-drawing lawman who juggles dozens of cases at a time and always shoots to kill. But by the time Raylan finds out who’s making the cuts, he’s lying naked in a bathtub, with Layla, the cool transplant nurse, about to go for his kidneys.
The bad guys are mostly gals this time around: Layla, the nurse who collects kidneys and sells them for ten grand a piece; Carol Conlan, a hard-charging coal-mine executive not above ordering a cohort to shoot point-blank a man who’s standing in her way; and Jackie Nevada, a beautiful sometime college student who can outplay anyone at the poker table and who suddenly finds herself being tracked by a handsome U.S. marshal.
Dark and droll, Raylan is pure Elmore Leonard—a page-turner filled with the sparkling dialogue and sly suspense that are the hallmarks of this modern master.
"Mr. Majestyk"
Once, Vincent Majestyk crashed through a jungle with an M-15 and a sack of grenades. Now he works under the open skies of the American Southwest, growing melons on his farm.
But a strong-arming punk came to Majestyk’s fields and set off a violent chain reaction that left Majestyk without a friend in the world—except for one tough, beautiful woman.
Heading to prison, Majestyk finds himself shackled beside a notorious Mafia hit man. And now a man who’s been searching for peace and a man who’s been looking for an angle are about to be set free by a violent breakout: making the farmer and the hit man each other’s only hope—and worst possible enemy.
Albert Maysles in Transit from Greg Vander Veer on Vimeo.
"Be Cool"
"Be Cool" is an unforgettable, hilarious and dead-on insider’s look at Hollywood as only Leonard could write it; Leonard takes readers on a back-side tour of Tinseltown’s other big business—the music industry.
Chili Palmer’s follow-up to his smash hit film Get Leo bombed, and in Hollywood you’re only as hot as your last project. Once again outside the system, Chili is exploring an idea for his third film by lunching with a former “associate” from his Brooklyn days who’s now a record label executive.
When lunch begins with iced tea and ends in a mob hit, Chili finds himself in an unlikely alliance with one of the LAPD’s finest, Detective Darryl Holmes; he also becomes the very likely next target of Russian gangsters. With a hit man on his trail, Chili tries to pull together his next movie, the story of Linda Moon; Moon is a real-life singer with dreams that go further than her current gig performing Spice Girls songs with Chicks International.
Moon is also desperate to tear loose from her current manager, an erstwhile pimp named Raji. Orchestrating his movie as he goes along, Chili wrests the reins of Linda’s singing career away from Raji, basing the plot of his new film on the action that unfolds as a result.
As he fakes his way to success in the music business with his trademark aplomb, Chili manipulates his adversaries and advances his friends, proving to all that he knows how to be cool when the heat’s on.
"Cat Chaser"
George Moran, isn’t looking for trouble but finds it anyway when he winds up in bed with the wife of a drug-dealing mob-connected Dominican cop—vicious, macho and ready to follow George to the ends of the earth, which in this case means Miami.
Nostalgia takes ex-Marine George Moran back to Santo Domingo, where, 16 years previously, he had fought his way from street corner to street corner as a member of the Strike Force sent to the Dominican Republic during the Johnson Administration.
Nostalgia, and also curiosity about the fate of a teenage girl who had tried to kill him all those years ago. What George Moran finds is not what he expects, and what he brings back to his Florida home is more than he bargains for.
The sequence of events in Cat Chaser builds to a climax in which love, terror, passion and violence combine to create a testing ground as searching as any battlefield.
"Last Stand at Saber River"
A quiet, haunted man, Paul Cable walked away from a lost cause hoping to pick up where he left off.
But things have changed in Arizona since he first rode out to go fight for the Confederacy. Two brothers—Union men—have claimed his spread and they're not about to give it back, leaving Cable and his family no place to settle in peace.
It seems this war is not yet over for Paul Cable. But no one's going to take away his land and his future—not with their laws, their lies, or their guns.
"Last Stand at Saber River"A quiet, haunted man, Paul Cable walked away from a lost cause hoping to pick up where he left off.
But things have changed in Arizona since he first rode out to go fight for the Confederacy. Two brothers—Union men—have claimed his spread and they're not about to give it back, leaving Cable and his family no place to settle in peace.
It seems this war is not yet over for Paul Cable. But no one's going to take away his land and his future—not with their laws, their lies, or their guns.
"Djibouti"
Dara Barr, documentary filmmaker, is at the top of her game. She's covered the rape of Bosnian women, neo-Nazi white supremacists, and post-Katrina New Orleans, and has won awards for all three.
Now, looking for a bigger challenge, Dara and her right-hand-man, Xavier LeBo, a six-foot-six, seventy-two-year-old African American seafarer, head to Djibouti, on the Horn of Africa, to film modern-day pirates hijacking merchant ships.
They learn soon enough that almost no one in the Middle East is who he seems to be.
The most successful pirate, driving his Mercedes around Djibouti, appears to be a good guy, but his pal, a cultured Saudi diplomat, has dubious connections.
Billy Wynn, a Texas billionaire, plays mysterious roles as the mood strikes him. He's promised his girlfriend, Helene, a nifty fashion model, that he'll marry her if she doesn't become seasick or bored while circling the world on his yacht. And there's Jama Raisuli, a black al Qaeda terrorist from Miami, who's vowed to blow up something big.
What Dara and Xavier have to decide, besides the best way to stay alive: Should they shoot the action as a documentary or turn it into a Hollywood feature film?
Albert Maysles talks about "In Transit," as mentioned in the book.
