Tom Clancy (1947–2013), Jack Ryan, and Red Storm Rising (Collins, 1987): a Friday Forgotten Book

Events, I'm afraid, have rather overtaken me here. I've been promising – myself as much as anyone else – that I'd do a series of blog posts on Tom Clancy for bloody ages, so it was a bugger to learn on Wednesday that he'd gone and died (at the not overly ripe age of sixty-six), thus denying me the opportunity to do so while he was still with us (the swine). Not that Clancy would have cared or even noticed, I'm sure – as, say, Elmore Leonard probably didn't notice anything I wrote about him before he carked it a couple of months back – but even so, it would have been nice, as I managed with Leonard, to post something while he was still alive, given that so few of the authors I blog about are, and also given that I've been reading Clancy for longer than most of them.

There was a period in the 1990s when it felt like the only fiction I was reading was Clancy's. It was, I think, the movies wot did it. As an admirer of well-crafted action flicks and thrillers, I had a lot of time for two of the three Clancy film adaptations that had been released by the mid-'90s: John McTiernan's The Hunt for Red October (1990) and, especially, Phillip Noyce's Clear and Present Danger (1994). (I was much less keen on Noyce's earlier Patriot Games, which lacked the light and shade of his later effort.) Naturally, those two films led me to the source texts: the Jack Ryan (no relation) series of novels, of which Clancy penned eight instalments proper, plus a bunch of spin-offs starring CIA agent John Clark, his partner Domingo Chavez and, latterly, Ryan's son, Jack Jr.

The Ryan books are mostly great big bricks of things, even in paperback, which was how I originally read them. (More recently I've been picking up UK Collins hardback first editions in Lewes charity shops, with that aforementioned, now likely abandoned, series of Clancy posts in mind; you can see them, with their David Scutt-illustrated dust jackets, scattered about this post; they're more akin to breeze-blocks than bricks.) Even so, I tore through them in the late-1990s and early 2000s, from The Hunt for Red October (1984) to The Bear and the Dragon (2000). (I haven't yet read the 2002 Ryan prequel Red Rabbit, which you can spy lurking in the background in the top photo, again bought in a Lewes charity shop.)

That they became, in one respect, increasingly far-fetched – the machinations necessary to elevate Ryan from CIA analyst (Patriot Games, 1987), to Deputy Director of the agency (Clear and Present Danger, 1989), then National Security Advisor, Vice President (Debt of Honor, 1994) and finally, outrageously, President of the United States (Executive Orders, 1996), left Clancy's authorial strings ever more visible – almost didn't matter: they were efficient, dense but incredibly pacey thrillers, turning on plots – Soviet defections, the war on drugs in South America, conflict between Russia and China – with more than a passing nod to real world tensions (and with an eerie prescience in the case of Debt of Honor), and narratives that were never weighed down by the technobabble Clancy loved to lace his thrillers with.

It's for the Ryan novels that Clancy will chiefly be remembered – there's a Kenneth Branagh-directed rebooted Ryan movie on the way which will doubtless help to cement that rep – but for me, Clancy's best book is one of the very few not set in the Ryanverse – his second novel:

Red Storm Rising, co-written with war gamer Larry Bond and published in the States in 1986 by Putnam's and in the UK the following year by Collins (the edition seen here). A plausible account of a hypothetical shooting war between Russia and NATO over oil reserves, its power resides in its breathless, irresistible sweep, in the way the narrative affords a swooping, God's eye view of the theatre of conflict. The action leaps from locale to locale with brazen abandon: Iceland, the north Atlantic, Europe, West Germany, back and forth, surging from one nerve-shredding military encounter to the next, and with the threat of nuclear escalation ever-present.

Admittedly the characterisation is tissue thin – the protagonists are little more than cyphers, and years later I struggle to recall a single thing about any of them (whereas I can still just about conjure up the odd bit about Jack Ryan and John Clark and Ding Chavez) – but that's a relatively minor quibble: for sheer scope and scale, the book can't be beat. Certainly it deserves not to be overlooked in the torrent of Clancy eulogies and obituaries that are sure to ensue, which is why I'm commending it (a day early, as is my wont, but also so that this post doesn't appear too far behind the news of Clancy's demise) to this week's edition of Patti Nase Abbott's Friday's Forgotten Books, in order that it should, I hope, escape that eponymous fate.

Road Dogs by Elmore Leonard (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2009); Sequel to Out of Sight (and LaBrava... and Riding the Rap)

NB: Featured in this week's Friday's Forgotten Books.

To read his introduction to the 1989 Armchair Detective Library edition of The Big Bounce (originally 1969), you'd think Elmore Leonard doesn't really go in for sequels. (He notes that "each time you sell a film rights to a studio, they own the character for a specified number of years. So I change the names".) But dig into his backlist a bit and you'll find it's fair littered with follow-ups, series and returning characters. The Big Bounce's Jack Ryan features again in Unknown Man No. 89 (1977), while Ernest Stickley, Jr., alias Stick, stars in both Swag (1976; sometimes mistakenly lumped in with the two Jack Ryan novels due to it costarring a Frank Ryan – no relation – although Jack does get a mention) and Stick (1983, which itself almost begat a sequel). US Marshal Raylan Givens (of Justified fame) stars in Pronto (1993), Riding the Rap (1995), Fire in the Hole (2002, a short story in When the Women Come Out to Dance) and Raylan (2012), while fellow Marshal Carl Webster stars in The Hot Kid (2005), Comfort to the Enemy (2006, a short story/novella collection) and Up in Honey's Room (2007). And then there's this:

Road Dogs, published in 2009 – this copy being the Weidenfeld & Nicolson British first edition, with a dust jacket illustrated by Tim Marrs. Ostensibly a sequel to 1996's Out of Sight – it picks up serial bank robber Jack Foley's story shortly after he's shot and arrested by US Marshal Karen Sisco at the end of that novel – it's also, in a way, a sequel to two other Leonard books: LaBrava (1983) and Riding the Rap, at least in as much as it features returning characters from both. There's Dawn Navarro – "Reverend Dawn" – a comely psychic encountered by Raylan in Riding the Rap; and rather more surprisingly there's her common-law husband, Cundo Rey, a one-time car thief and go-go dancer turned Hollywood drug dealer and property magnate who, when last seen towards the end of LaBrava, appeared to be very dead indeed.

Cundo does offer an explanation for his miraculous resurrection, but the truth of the matter is that, as Leonard admitted in a 2009 interview by James Mustich on the Barnes and Noble Review site, the writer simply "liked Cundo Rey a lot" and "didn't think I'd done enough with [him] and Dawn in those earlier books". Jack Foley's return, on the other hand, was inspired by George Clooney's portrayal in Steven Soderbergh's film version of Out of Sight (much as Raylan Givens' return in Raylan was inspired by Timothy Olyphant's take on the character in Justified): "I thought it was one of [Clooney's] best pictures," Leonard told Mustich, "no doubt about it. I thought he'd want to do another one." (To date, the actor has show no inclination.) When Mustich asked whether it was harder writing Foley this time with Clooney in Leonard's head, the author replied, "It worked – because I could hear Clooney." (He added: "I couldn't bring back one of my favorite characters, Stick, because Burt Reynolds played him, and if I think of Burt Reynolds as Stick, it won't work.")

Personally, I'm not sure I especially heard Clooney whilst reading Road Dogs – no more so, I don't think, than when I read Out of Sight – but Foley remains for me one of Leonard's lesser leads: charming and affable, sure, but lacking the depth of, say, Stick or Joe LaBrava. That said, his interactions with Cundo – with whom he served time, and who engineers and pays for the bank robber's release from prison – and Dawn, as well as frustrated FBI man Lou Adams (not to mention assorted gangsters) are enjoyable enough – which is good, because the novel is supremely plotless, even by Elmore Leonard's standards (the writer isn't terribly interested in plot per se). Instead there's a succession of plans and schemes – some oblique (why Cundo gets Foley out of prison is never really established), others rather more obvious (albeit engagingly duplicitous), and almost all abortive (disappointingly so in the case of an underdeveloped cul-de-sac involving a rich divorcee). And with little in the way of menace to offset the double-crossing and banter, the net result is a lightweight, fun confection, but nothing more.

Next in this interminable season of Elmore Leonard posts: 1998 historical adventure-cum-western Cuba Libre.

Elmore Leonard's Stick (Allen Lane, 1984, Signed First Edition) and the Sequel That Almost Was

Before we get stuck into the meat of this post, i.e. how Elmore "Dutch" Leonard's intended sequel to his 1983 novel Stick (itself a kind-of-sequel to Swag, 1976) morphed instead into his subsequent novel LaBrava (also 1983), an illustration, dear reader, if you'll indulge me, of the madness of book collecting. Well, my book collecting, anyway...

A couple of months ago I bought a 1983 Arbor House US first edition of Stick, one of my favourite Elmore Leonard novels (part of a job lot of Leonard books purchased from Brighton book dealer Alan White) – a perfectly (near) fine copy thereof, and actually quite a nice, very reasonably priced find for someone living in the UK (where American editions aren't always easy to come by). Good enough, in other words, for any sane book collector.

Cut to a few weeks ago, and having (re)read and reviewed Stick and acquired (and reviewed) LaBrava in a signed Viking UK first edition, I was browsing AbeBooks and the like for other interesting Elmore Leonard books bearing his John Hancock and spotted a relatively inexpensive signed copy of Stick for sale, from a British seller. It wasn't clear which edition the book was, but my strong suspicion was that it was the British first edition, published by Allen Lane in 1984. Figuring it would make for a nice companion to LaBrava, I made some enquiries and established that it was indeed the Allen edition:

which, although the dust jacket is not dissimilar to the US Arbor one (it uses the same Antler & Baldwin logo, except with a different typographic treatment – and different blurb), is pretty uncommon in and of itself. But especially so signed:

(on the title page, which, unlike the US edition, repeats the cover logo), this copy being the only one I've come across.

Obviously that's no excuse for buying the same novel twice, but it's not like it's the first time I've done that (stand up, Donald "Richard Stark" Westlake and his Parker novels), and its acquisition does at least afford me the opportunity to return to the article by Elmore Leonard's researcher, Gregg Sutter, in the Winter 1986 edition of The Armchair Detective, and the relationship between Stick and LaBrava. The genesis of Stick is interesting enough (apparently Leonard was inspired to write the novel as a result of checking his calendar and realising that "Stick was due to get out of Jackson State Penitentiary after doing seven years for armed robbery" – which nobody but Leonard would have known since the last time Stick had been seen, at the end of Swag, he'd only just been arrested), and there's some intriguing background on Sutter's work on the book (having to research how to break into a car, for example). But things get really interesting when Sutter turns to LaBrava:

At first, the book which [Leonard would] eventually call LaBrava was going to be a sequel to Stick. This time, Stick would go to work for a private eye who would hire him to keep an eye on a female rock singer who then hires Stick as her bodyguard. Dutch focused on Patti Smith, the eerie punk chanteuse of the middle '70s as a model for this singer and named her Moon. But as quickly as the idea was born it was cast aside. Next Stick was going to be a photographer who had taken some award-winning photos of Indians in the Southwest after leaving in haste from Barry [Stam]'s place in Stick. His studio is destroyed in a fire, and he goes back and tries to re-create it...

Then, Stick the character got summarily dumped from the story. The book Stick had just been sold to Universal and Dutch wanted to avoid the hassle he'd had with Split Images where he'd had to change Raymond Cruz's name to Bryan Hurd and lighten his moustache because United Artists had the name Raymond Cruz locked up for five years, making a movie deal difficult if not impossible.

The names weren't right anyway. To Dutch, getting the names of characters right is akin to getting the character right.

The passage is quite illuminating as regards Elmore Leonard's writing process and the way a book changes from conception to completion – the road not taken, if you will – but there are a couple of other noteworthy bits besides. Firstly, in the event, elements of Leonard's original ideas for the Stick sequel did make it into LaBrava: Joe LaBrava is a photographer; his mentor, Maurice Zola, took some award-winning shots; and the notion of Stick looking after a female rock singer evolved into LaBrava looking after a Hollywood starlet. But there's also the business about the movie rights to Stick being sold. Leonard stated in his intro to the 1989 Armchair Detective Library edition of The Big Bounce that "each time you sell a film rights to a studio, they own the character for a specified number of years. So I change the names." That's probably the chief reason why the Stick sequel became LaBrava, and it's also, as alluded to by Sutter, why the intended sequel to 1980's City Primeval (featuring Detective Raymond Cruz) turned instead into 1981's Split Images (featuring Lieutenant Bryan Hurd).

Mind you, Leonard doesn't always change the names. Stick of course appears in both Swag and Stick, while another Leonard ne'er-do-well, Jack Ryan, features in The Big Bounce (1969) and Unknown Man No. 89 (1977), and US Marshals Raylan Givens and Carl Webster star in seven books between them. And then there's 2009's Road Dogs, which boasts returning characters from three different novels...

Out of Sight by Elmore Leonard (Viking, 1996)

NB: Featured in this week's Friday's Forgotten Books.

I guess I could've presented this next Elmore Leonard novel as part of last year's series of posts on books which begat perhaps more famous movies; I certainly had the book in question to hand back then, having bought a British first edition in Camilla's secondhand bookshop in Eastbourne not long before, and I'd seen the 1998 Steven Soderbergh flick it begat. Unfortunately, at that point, I hadn't read the novel. (Another Elmore Leonard book-to-film adaptation made it into that series instead – 1974's Mr. Majestyk.) However, I have now – as part of my ongoing Elmore Leonard readathon – so let's take a look at it:

Out of Sight, published by Viking in 1996 under what can only be described as a bloody awful dust jacket – design uncredited, possibly to spare the embarrassment of the designer. The almost-as-crappy front cover photo is credited, however, to one Colin Thomas, who should perhaps have been made aware prior to the shoot that the novel's female lead, federal marshal Karen Sisco – I assume that's her holding the shotgun – is in fact blonde. Sigh... (Mind you, Jennifer Lopez wasn't especially blonde in Soderbergh's Out of Sight movie, and Carla Gugino was decidedly brunette in the short-lived 2003 Karen Sisco TV series, so in that respect the cover photo might charitably be termed prescient.)

Shonky '90s cover design aside, in the Elmore Leonard oeuvre Out of Sight follows two of my favourites of the author's works – Pronto (1993) and Riding the Rap (1995), both of which, possibly not entirely coincidentally, also feature a US marshal (one Raylan Givens, of Justified fame); evidently the United States Marshals Service was much on Leonard's mind in the mid-1990s. But Out of Sight is only partly Karen Sisco's story; her co-star is Jack Foley, a serial bank robber who busts out of the Glades Correctional Institution in Florida at the start of the book and elects to kidnap Karen – who's outside the prison, waiting to serve a summons to an inmate – depositing both her and himself in the trunk of the car his cohort Buddy has brought along to aid his escape.

All this is set against a background of a bigger breakout by a bunch of Cubans which, I learned thanks to a fascinating 1996 New Yorker article on Elmore Leonard's researcher, Gregg Sutter (kindly sent to me by Book Glutton), Leonard based on a real life Glades prison break from 1995, when six inmates escaped via a tunnel they'd dug from the prison chapel to the other side of the perimeter fence. And it turns out Jack too is based in part on an actual person: a man Sutter interviewed who according to the article "had escaped from more prisons in Florida than anyone else", and whose ability to control his emotions during a prison break (essentially by acting: "You act cool," he told Sutter, sounding not unlike an Elmore Leonard bit-part player, "you going to be cool") Leonard responded to and applied to Jack.

That said, to my mind Jack lacks the depth of some of Leonard's other ne'er-do-wells – the introspective Ernest Stickley, Jr. from Stick, say, or the confused, conflicted Jack Ryan from The Big Bounce and especially Unknown Man No. 89. Foley is by comparison a fairly unreconstructed sort, both as a criminal and as a person, and therefore perhaps less interesting as a character. But his studied cool works a treat on Karen: their mutual attraction – infatuation, even – drives the, admittedly meandering (in typical Leonardian fashion), narrative, all the way to a climactic ill-advised Detroit home invasion where the bodies stack up and Karen draws a definite line under their curious relationship.

As would become evident over a decade later, however, Leonard wasn't quite done with his charming recidivist; inspired by George Clooney's turn as Foley in the Out of Sight film (recently picked by The Playlist as the best Elmore Leonard movie adaptation), he brought Jack back in the 2009 novel Road Dogs... although before we get to that book, a necessary detour is in order: namely Leonard's 1983 Edgar Award-winning novel LaBrava, and a very special edition thereof...

Stick, by Elmore Leonard (Arbor House First Edition, 1983); Sequel to Swag

NB: A Friday Forgotten Book.

I noted in the previous post, on the Elmore Leonard omnibus Dutch Treat, how I've been on something of a Leonard kick of late, fuelled in part by a big haul of Leonard first (and other) editions I bought off Brighton book dealer Alan White – one of which being the aforementioned Dutch Treat. Most of the Leonard novels I've been reading have been new to me, but I've also reread a couple of the author's books I first read many years ago: Get Shorty, which was as sublime as I remembered it being, and Stick, which I obtained from Alan in a 1983 US Arbor House first edition (with a jacket design by Antler & Baldwin, Inc.).

I didn't know it when I originally read it, sometime back in the '80s or early '90s – borrowed from Beckenham Library, no doubt (probably in its 1984 UK Allen Lane edition, which used the Arbor House jacket design) – but Stick is actually a sequel of sorts to one of the three novels in Dutch Treat: 1976's Swag. Swag detailed the exploits of armed robbers Frank Ryan and Ernest Stickley, Jr., alias Stick, ending – if you'll excuse the necessary spoiler – with the pair being led away by the law (prompting Stick's parting shot – surely one of the best closing lines/payoffs in a novel – "Frank, why don't you shut the fuck up?"). Stick picks up the story seven years on, with our eponymous lead now flying solo, newly released from jail and falling in with a fellow ex-con down in Miami, tagging along on a drug money drop that goes disastrously wrong.

What's interesting, at least to me, rereading the book decades on, is how heavily Swag is referenced throughout – Stick repeatedly reflecting on his time as a, ahem, stick-up man (and before that car thief), even telling a few people about some of the scores he and Frank took down, and the four men he was forced to kill. Especially poignant if you've read Swag – and if you're aware of Leonard's history with alcohol (see also Unknown Man No. 89) – is Frank's fate, which is revealed early on, but there's a wistful feel to the novel as a whole – Stick, now in his early forties, thinking about the choices he's made and wondering what to do with the rest of his life.

Of course, this being an Elmore Leonard novel, there's also lashings of delicious dialogue, a wonderfully meandering plot – Stick somehow winds up chauffeuring for a wealthy stock market mogul, all the while trying to evade the unwanted attentions of a drug dealer and his henchmen – moments of heightened tension and a swift, violent climax. And Stick is a disarming presence in the narrative, as amiably appealing in his own way as Raylan Givens, Jack Ryan... or indeed the male lead of the next Leonard book I'll be looking at – another career criminal and jailbird who would, like Stick, be granted starring roles in two Leonard novels.

Elmore Leonard's Dutch Treat: The Hunted, Swag, Mr. Majestyk (Viking Omnibus, 1987)

It's kind of fitting that my first proper post in six weeks (for reasons outlined here) should be on Elmore Leonard, since Leonard is who I've been reading pretty much exclusively for the past few months (and who I may well continue to read pretty much exclusively for the remainder of the year, I'm enjoying him so much; we shall see). Fortuitous too: this week's instalment of Patti Nase Abbott's Friday's Forgotten Books is devoted to Elmore Leonard, so my being on a Leonard kick has worked out rather nicely. I could've picked any one of the five Leonard novels I've read (or reread in one instance) recently and happily banged out a few hundred words without having to give it too much thought (in a good way: all of those novels have been great, although in truth I've yet to read a duff Leonard); but seeing as this is sort of a special occasion, I thought I'd take a look at this book:

Elmore Leonard's Dutch Treat ("Dutch" being Leonard's nickname), which is in fact three books; it's an omnibus comprising three of Leonard's novels from the 1970s: Mr. Majestyk (1974), Swag (1976) and The Hunted (1977). First published in this configuration by Arbor House in the US in 1985, the copy seen here is the notably scarce UK Viking edition from 1987 – a review copy, as it happens, as evidenced by the review slip accompanying the book:

While in the States Dutch Treat represented the hardback debut of two of the three novels (Mr. Majestyk and The Hunted, both of which were published as paperback originals), in the UK it represented the hardback debut of one of them (Swag; The Hunted was issued in hardcover by Secker & Warburg in 1978) and the first British publication overall of Mr. Majestyk. I've already reviewed Mr. Majestyk, so I'll skip daintily over that one and turn instead to The Hunted and Swag, the former of which is as lean and gripping a manhunt thriller as you could wish for, the latter a splendid example of the kind of low rent larceny Leonard specializes in.

Leonard brings his distinctive storytelling "voice" to both, but they're quite different novels, each boasting their own unique spin on well worn set-ups. While The Hunted is on the surface a straightforward man-on-the-run tale, it's the story's locale which lends it its additional edge: Israel, with its history of conflict (the scars visible now and then in the narrative) and constricted geography. It's a tiny country, almost impossible to hide in, which makes it perfect for a game of cat and mouse between a trio of hitmen and a Federal witness businessman and his new Marine buddy. The appeal of Swag (also known as Ryan's Rules), on the other hand, rests chiefly on the bickering relationship between criminals Frank Ryan and Ernest Stickley, Jr, alias Stick, who team up and embark on a string of hold-ups, following Frank's ten rules for success and happiness. But it's also a convincing, credible account of what life must be like for a middle rung recidivist – making enough to lead a fairly comfortable existence but knowing that at some point the party has to end – more than likely in a jail cell.

Something else Swag has, at least if you're familiar with Leonard's work, is a sense of a shared universe for the characters who populate the author's novels and stories. Frank shares a surname with Jack Ryan, of The Big Bounce and Unknown Man No. 89, a fact made explicit when a character in Swag remarks that he used to do some breaking and entering with Jack. Meanwhile Stick would go on to star in his own eponymous Leonard novel – and I'll be taking a look at that book, as well as some of the other Leonards I've read of late, before too long.

Unknown Man No. 89 by Elmore Leonard; Signed First Edition (Secker & Warburg, 1977), Sequel to The Big Bounce

NB: Featured as one of this week's Friday's Forgotten Books.

I've got a further handful of signed editions (I ran a lengthy series on signed books from July to September last year) lined up for forthcoming posts, two of them dating from as recently as 2012, making them almost – splutter – new. But not this next one; this one dates from 1977, and is a sort-of sequel to a novel I blogged about during my series of posts on paperbacks at the tail end of last year:

It's the British first edition of Unknown Man No. 89 by Elmore Leonard, published in hardback by Secker & Warburg. The dust jacket design is uncredited but it's almost identical to the 1977 US Delacorte edition – the type treatment is different and there's a bit of extra blurb on the American one – although since I don't know who designed the jacket of the Delacorte edition either, that doesn't really get us anywhere. This copy is, however, signed, and inscribed:

to a Howard, who has been advised by Leonard to "take it easy". I sincerely hope he followed Leonard's excellent advice. The Secker first is uncommon enough, but signed copies of it are really thin on the ground; I've seen three offered for sale online, the cheapest being a copy bearing a signed bookplate for £55, and the cheapest one signed on the actual page being about £130 (I didn't pay anything like that – or indeed like £55). I found this one on the shelves of the same Cecil Court secondhand bookshop as the book it's a sort-of sequel to:

Elmore Leonard's first published contemporaneously-set novel (following a number of westerns), The Big Bounce, which was issued as a paperback original by Gold Medal in 1969. In truth, though, if I hadn't told you that – and if you hadn't read both books, like I have (and hadn't seen the information online somewhere... oh, whatever) – you wouldn't know it: there are no connecting plot threads between the two, and Jack Ryan, the protagonist of Unknown Man No. 89, is barely recognisable as Jack Ryan, the protagonist of The Big Bounce.

Leonard wrote in a 1989 introduction to The Big Bounce that all his male leads "resemble Jack Ryan" and that Ryan "might possibly have become a continuing character aging along with his maker, if it were not for the fact that each time you sell a film rights to a studio, they own the character for a specified number of years. So I change the names." Which makes me wonder if he hadn't, then would Tom Clancy have alighted on that same moniker for his hero? But I digress: I think Leonard's actually doing himself a disservice. Though it may seem counterintuitive to praise a novelist because a protagonist is quite a bit different to the protagonist from an earlier book, even though they're supposed to be the same character, in the context of Leonard's explanation in that intro, it makes a strange sort of sense. Leonard's leads aren't all the same, even when they're meant to be; the earlier and later Ryans are different, and that's A Good Thing.

If you wanted to, I guess you could put those differences down to Ryan having grown up, but it's simpler just to ignore The Big Bounce and take Unknown Man No. 89 on its own merits. Because it has a great many. Like the best Leonard books it boasts deceptively simple, idiosyncratically honed prose and terrific dialogue, right from the opening lines: 

A friend of Ryan's said to him one time, "Yeah, but at least you don't take any shit from anybody."

Ryan said to his friend, "I don't know, the way things've been going, maybe it's time I started taking some."

It's unpredictable and surprising, the plot ebbing and flowing around the cast of beautifully defined characters: the calculating, infinitely flexible Mr. Perez, whose business is finding lost stock – in this case belonging to the soon-to-be-late Bobby Leary, the eponymous unknown man – and taking a cut; the charming but dangerous Virgil Royal, Bobby's partner-in-crime, who smells a significant payday; Bobby's wife, Denise, who finds a kindred spirit in Ryan; and of course Ryan himself, here having discovered a talent as a process server in Detroit. Surprisingly for what is ostensibly a crime novel – I mean, surprisingly if you haven't read Leonard and think his work is basically just crime fiction (oh I'm insufferable, aren't I?) – it's partly about alcoholism; Leonard is especially good on the cravings and justifications of the alcoholic, and the perceptive, insightful middle section of the novel spends some time exploring the affliction.

As it winds towards its conclusion, though, and Ryan attempts to turn the tables on Mr. Perez, the undercurrent of menace buzzing deep beneath Leonard's misdirecting veneer of geniality intensifies, embodied partly by the cunning and deadly Virgil, and partly by the even deadlier Raymond Gidre, Mr. Perez's right hand man.

Incidentally, here and there Unknown Man No. 89 reminded me of another 1970s-set urban crime drama: George Pelecanos's What It Was, in particular that novel's Red Fury, who's akin to Virgil Royal... except that Pelecanos's book was published in 2012. I'd be interested to find out if Pelecanos was influenced by Leonard's novel at all. (UPDATE: Book Glutton has since pointed out in the comments below that in Pelecanos's 2011 novel The Cut, Spero's brother Leo teaches Unknown Man No. 89 to his students – which, given that I reviewed The Cut last year, I really should have remembered... but at least it answers that question. Thanks, BG!) But anyway: Unknown Man No. 89 may not be the best known of Elmore Leonard's books, but it's a bloody good one. I wouldn't be at all surprised if, like The Big Bounce did last year, it wound up in my "best of" list come the end of 2013.

Elmore Leonard's Debut Crime Novel: The Big Bounce; First Edition (Gold Medal, 1969); Robert McGinnis Cover Art; Review

NB: A Friday Forgotten Book.

From a Gold Lion original sporting a Robert McGinnis cover, next in this series of posts on paperbacks, another Gold Medal original, once again sporting a Robert McGinnis cover:

Elmore Leonard's The Big Bounce, published straight to paperback in the States by Fawcett/Gold Medal in 1969. This copy came from the basement of a Cecil Court secondhand bookshop, for less than a tenner – quite a nice find, considering the only copies I've seen online are in the US and listed for rather more than a tenner (and with postage on top), and the book's significance. 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 (alias The Captives) – more on that one later – 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".

Eighty-four (!) rejections, one rewrite and a title change later (although the line the original title was inspired by is still in the book), The Big Bounce found a home as a novel at Gold Medal and as a movie at Warner Bros. The film, directed by Alex March and starring Ryan O'Neil and Leigh Taylor-Young, is by all accounts a bit of a stinker – and the 2004 version isn't much better regarded – but the novel is terrific; not Leonard at his absolute best – that would come later with the likes of Stick, Get Shorty and Pronto – but not far off. Even at this early stage in his career, Leonard had a prose style all his own: lilting, deceptively easygoing, yet focused and intense; clever, lightly handled but thorough character work; and that gloriously naturalistic and yet still idiosyncratically Elmore-esque dialogue.

The plot isn't terribly complicated, but then Elmore Leonard plots rarely are; that aspect of writing just isn't that important to him. A young drifter, Jack Ryan (no relation to Tom Clancy's later CIA analyst-turned-president), takes a job working as a handyman at a Michigan lakeside cabana complex owned by local justice of the peace Walter Majestyk (no relation to Vincent Majestyk from Leonard's own Mr. Majestyk). Majestyk has seen film footage of Ryan using a baseball bat in a fight and so knows he has a self-destructive streak; but he also sees something worthwhile in the younger man, and does what he can to help him out – with a certain amount of resistance on Ryan's part. But then Ryan, who has a string of minor robberies in his past and has already turned over one local property, gets mixed up with Nancy, the manipulative mistress of Ray Ritchie, the rich farm owner for whom Ryan briefly worked as a picker – and Nancy has a plan for stealing fifty grand from Ritchie.

Everything flows from character in an Elmore Leonard novel: the decisions the protagonists take and the ramifications of those decisions; the things they say or do to one another and the consequences of those actions. It helps that Leonard has a forensic eye for character – not in an overwritten, overly intrusive sense – for really, how well can we truly know one another (something that Leonard-through-Ryan reflects on late in the novel: "What good was being cool if you weren't you? Whoever you are, Ryan thought") – but in the way he observes the little details: a certain look shot across a bar booth; the cocked head and corner-of-an-eye glance when combing one's hair in the mirror; the idle daydreams of a bored female holidaymaker, fantasizing about Ryan sweeping her off her feet.

Ryan is the archetypal Leonard male lead: quick-tempered, ready to stand up for himself (there's a memorably bruising but ultimately amusing encounter with Ray Ritchie's right hand man, Bob Jr.), sometimes kind of dumb, unselfconscious for the most part, but also self-aware and thoughtful. In fact, so archetypal is Ryan that Leonard admits in that 1989 introduction to The Big Bounce (reproduced here) that "All of my male leads... even in the westerns, resemble Jack Ryan in that they have much the same basic attitude about their own existence, what’s important and what isn’t", adding, "Jack Ryan might possibly have become a continuing character aging along with his maker, if it were not for the fact that each time you sell a film rights to a studio, they own the character for a specified number of years. So I change the names." Or rather, some of the names: like Raylan Givens and Ernest Stickley, Ryan would be granted the honour of another starring role, this time in 1977's Unknown Man No. 89.

The one character in The Big Bounce I struggled with was Nancy. She's so bored, feckless, destructive and malicious it's a wonder any man falls for her, let alone Ryan, who has to constantly fight the urge to boot her in the behind and bugger off out of it. As it turns out, though, Nancy has her basis in a particular type of Los Angeles lass, characterised in a February 1967 issue of Esquire as "The New American Woman", and described by Hollywood literary agent H. N. Swanson as girls looking for "the bounce". The bounce in this case being the scheme to grab Ritchie's money – although latterly Nancy concocts an even bigger, rather more deadly bounce.

The Big Bounce marked the end of one phase of Elmore Leonard's career and the beginning of another, one which would come to define him as a writer. Appropriately, there's a sly parting farewell to the wild west form in the novel: during one of their misadventures, Ryan and Nancy spy on Walter Majestyk while Majestyk is watching television in his house. Ryan recognises the Randolph Scott horse opera the older man is engrossed in – "a good one", Ryan recalls, and then listens intently to "the part where Randolph goes in the cave after the guy named Billy Jack... jams the sawed-off shotgun under Billy Jack's chin and wham the guy's face disappears quick, the way it would happen, without one of those fakey fights." The western in question? The Tall T.

Next in this run of paperback posts: things take a turn for the science fictional...