My favorite Elmore Leonard novel is whichever one I'm reading, or finished most recently—right now it's The Switch. There's around ten that I read over and over again. I think he might have written more than forty, so it's a bit like an endless Chinese menu from which I keep ordering a few dishes I know are good. His first novels are westerns and I haven't read any of them. Then, in the mid-1970s, when he was in his late 40s, he switched to the crime genre. Those are the ones I know something about and love.
First time I read The Switch, I wrote about it here. The Frank Dawson character had plainly made the biggest impression upon me. But, on re-readings, one's eye tends to stray and this time mine settled on Richard Edgar Monk. The last name is perhaps something of a sly jest since Monk lives alone in a small house in Detroit on West State Fair Avenue across from the Michigan state fairgrounds. He had lived there with his mother, his wife, and his young son. Then his wife left him, taking the kid with her. Then his mom died. That's why Monk is now alone. Here is Leonard performing what I believe is called by English teachers "character development":
Richard wanted to go to California to look for his wife and boy and believed he could do it himself because of his interest in police work and procedures. He read books on it, watched police shows on TV and, until recently, had had a job with Alert Security Services—patrolling shopping centers, rich neighborhoods and construction projects—which Richard felt was good training. The trouble with the job, he'd only made three-sixty-five an hour, one-ten a week take-home, had to buy his own uniform and wasn't able to save anything. So he had begun drawing fifty bucks on the side to disappear or look the other way whenever the coon came at night in the truck to pick up building materials. That was fine until he got questioned, readout and fired without notice.
Now he had a two-tone police uniform and no job. He was patiently waiting for the big one the coon, Ordell Robbie, told him was going to come anytime now.
The wannabe cop, an American loser who also—surprise!—is a racial bigot: though they aren't usually the subject of literature, our country is full of these guys, and to me it seems natural to think, for example, of George Zimmerman, the Florida man who assigned himself to the armed neighborhood patrol and then killed Trayvon Martin. To round out the portrait of Monk, one of the rooms in his house is devoted to the guns and Nazi paraphernalia that he collects.
[Spoiler alert.]
I can't resist relating one incident that will divulge a bit of the plot. The "big one" in the passage quoted above refers to the criminal plot that, in its execution, supplies the main action of the novel. These are not sophisticated criminals—hell, Monk is one of them. The building supplies that Ordell steals, paying Monk to look the other way, are sold at a low price to Dawson, who puts them to use improving the rental properties he owns. That's how "coon" Ordell happens to know Dawson, the country-club golf champion and grown-up college Republican. Ordell concocts a scheme to deliver a payday out of all proportion to funds generated by the building supply scam. He and his main accomplice will kidnap Dawson's wife, Mickey, and extort a big ransom. He brings Monk in because they'll hold Mickey in the nondescript house on West State Fair while negotiating the ransom delivery. This begins well enough, though it soon develops that the criminals have failed to consider the possibility that Dawson might have a young hottie on the side and could care less about Mickey, his aging trophy who ends up a prisoner on West State Fair longer than had originally been intended. The celibate Monk has drilled a hole in the bedroom door where she's held (and another in the door of the bathroom she uses), through which he hopes to view her undressed. It's frustrating though because she only has the clothes she was kidnapped in and so rarely undresses. She does, however, discover the hole in the bedroom door. When she knows she's being observed, she moves to a corner where she can't be seen and lights a cigarette. Then, having crept along the wall that the door is on, she slowly slides the cigarette toward the hole and, when almost to the bored edge, suddenly jabs the lit end into it. Downstairs, the brains of the operation are trying to cope with the incipient unravelling of their criminal scheme and so are not too distressed by Monk's howls.
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