THIS novel starts with a trip to prison. Why not? No self-respecting Elmore Leonard character avoids the occasional legal infraction, and this new book resurrects a few repeat offenders.
It flings together Jack Foley, best known as the guy George
Clooney played in Out Of Sight; Cundo Rey, a Cuban go-go dancer and entrepreneur shot by the title character of LaBrava; and Dawn Navarro, who appeared in Riding The Rap as well as in other past lives. More later about Dawn's belief that she was once an Egyptian Pharaoh.
Ordinarily, the writer who turns to his own pages for inspiration risks looking lazy. But Leonard's crime stories are packed with players who deserve curtain calls. And there's nothing remotely wheezy about his way of throwing together Foley, Cundo and Dawn (as they're known in Road Dogs). Foley has the brains, Cundo the machismo and Dawn the shamelessness to make this one of Leonard's most enjoyably sneaky stories.
"We road dogs, man, we do for each other no matter what," Cundo tells Foley. If Cundo wants to see it that way, the bank-robbing Foley isn't going to argue. Cundo, who has put together a small real-estate empire in California during his eight years of incarceration, pays for the "smartest chick lawyer", who helps get Foley out of jail.
Cundo wants only one favour in return. He wants Foley to keep an eye on Dawn, his sort-of wife, a psychic who got into a common-law marriage with Cundo for reasons of mutual exploitation. (She liked the houses in Venice and saw Cundo as a wealthy mogul. He thought a fortune teller could help him find other people's fortunes.)
When Foley meets Dawn, Cundo's assumptions about buddyhood are immediately given the lie. It's not Foley's fault; Dawn will put the moves on anyone she thinks might be useful to her.
To the extent that it has a theme, Road Dogs is about what Dawn thinks of as "the guy-thing": male loyalty. How much of Foley and Cundo's friendship is authentic, and how much can it be dispelled by a woman who'll do anything to advance her agenda? If Dawn, like some of Leonard's other female characters, sounds like a misogynist's dream, the Egyptian royalty angle does make her special.
Among the other hieroglyph rock chisellers scheming their way through Road Dogs are the neo-Nazi bodyguard who works for Cundo only grudgingly, the kid gangster who shot a salesman because he didn't like the way the man was selling him a pinstripe suit, and Lou Adams, the FBI bloodhound who wants either to catch Foley robbing a bank or to write a book celebrating Foley's bank-robbing skills; whichever happens first.
Leonard, now 83, still writes with high style, great energy, unflappable cool and a jubilant love of the game. As ever, his scorn for fussy prose is best expressed through his own superbly lean locutions.
One sentence is all he needs to show how Dawn feels about Cundo: "In a few moments she would be timing her breathless gasps and cute grunts to the little killer's thrusts, hoping he wouldn't cause her to break wind and disturb the performance."
This article was first published in the Scotland on Sunday on November 1, 2009