SOURCE: "Common Criminals and Ordinary Heroes," in Armchair Detective, Vol. 22, No. 1, Winter, 1989, pp. 14-20.

[In the following essay, Sandels surveys Leonard's crime novels and reveals how the author departs from and provides commentary on traditional crime story formulas; Sandels also delineates standard themes and elements of plot and character found in these works.]

Elmore Leonard's crime novels have much of the flavor of his earlier Westerns. In City Primeval (1980), subtitled High Noon in Detroit, a police detective, Raymond Cruz, and a killer, Clement Mansell, face each other in a classic Western shoot-out. The shoot-out which ends Glitz (1985) is almost identical to the one which ends Leonard's 1979 Western novel Gunsights. The tone of his Westerns of the 1960s and 1970s conformed to the social criticisms of the day. Blacks, Indians, and Mexicans instead of WASPs were often the protagonists, and they looked deceptively harmless on the outside. On the inside, they were tough and resourceful, as their enemies soon found out. Leonard shattered other aspects of the traditional Western formula by allowing his heroes to shoot at men carrying white flags of truce and to kill the horse because it was easier to hit than the rider. In Gunsights, the wife of the hero interrupts the walk-down between her husband and a nasty antagonist by hauling out a rifle and shooting the man off his feet. Leonard infuses many of his contemporary crime novels with elements of the Western formula, but it is his own version, not the traditional one, which we see.

Many of the protagonists in Leonard's contemporary crime novels have the same kind of Mexican names and looks that decorated his Western heroes. Raymond Cruz in City Primeval even wears a big mustache that makes him look "old-timey," like "someone in an old tintype photo." From time to time, he and Clement reflect on how, in an earlier time, "we might have settled this between us."

Leonard also adds elements of the police procedural to his three crime novels that feature police protagonists. (City Primeval, Split Images, and Glitz have police heroes. Two others have protagonists with some quasi-legal past: Unknown Man #89 and LaBrava.) There is the procedural's obligatory introduction of the officers of the homicide team. They have interesting personalities. They talk of bullet "frags" and exit wounds. But good police work does not make much difference, and justice remains elusive.

Having employed two of the most enduring fictional approaches to the pursuit of justice—the frontier's direct confrontation of good and evil and modern, scientific criminal detection—Leonard turns both into farce. His police novels become almost a parody of the police procedural because none of the procedures is going to convict anybody. In City Primeval, some friends of a murder victim—Albanians in dark suits—provide a model for effective procedure: they go to Clement's apartment building, pull out their guns, and fire away at him on a public street. When the leader of this tribe of innocents asks homicide detective Raymond Cruz, "If you know he kills people, why do you let him?" Raymond has no answer. But, later on, he too goes to the Clement apartment, pulls out his gun, and starts shooting, though not before permitting Clement to go for his can-opener sharpened to a knife-point.

Leonard raises here the disturbing and timeless question of vigilante justice. This theme is amplified in Split Images, wherein an amateur assassin kills out of a warped sense of justice. His accomplice, an ex-cop, once killed out of frustration at the law's protection of "the guilty." When everybody kills for reasons of justice, which they themselves provide, where exactly is the contest of good and evil being carried out?

As Leonard avoids rational resolution of crime, he also makes simple frontier justice practically impossible by immersing it in contemporary jurisprudential difficulties. After presenting crime and criminals in their rawest, frontier-like simplicity, he withholds the satisfying final scene of heroic retribution. In the one novel in which he allows that scene to take place—handgun against can-opener—it is in the form of burlesque. He creates situations in which an intensely personal combat goes on between good men and bad but in which the simple opposites of the Western formula are present in form only. The contest of good and evil takes shape in the narrative as a contest between delusion and reality.

It is among the rich that Leonard locates the source of much of this delusion. Loathing for the rich and powerful, a belief that their corrupting influence lies at the root of social problems, is one of the founding assumptions of the hardboiled tradition, stretching back to the 1920s. It serves as a form of class struggle in that tradition shaped by writers of a generally liberal and proletarian political outlook such as Daly, Hammett, and Chandler. Their tough-guy heroes could work among the rich like beekeepers, insulated by their professional hardness, self-denial, and weary weltschmerz. But, in Leonard's hands, the tough-guy motif takes on a decidedly aesthetic quality. His heroes adopt a kind of everyday, pedestrian simplicity of style. They offer realistic sensibilities in opposition to the posturing and self-delusion of those around them.

Leonard's rich thrash about in a frenzy of acquisition. It is their primary form of aesthetic expression, a game in which the object is the scorekeeping. Eventually, a point is reached at which their lives become "irrelevant," having "nothing to do with reality." Worse, their wealth weighs heavily on the susceptible who try to emulate them. Angela Nolan, a writer making a study of the rich of Palm Beach, tells police detective Bryan Hurd in Split Images about her poor schnook of a father who drives around Palm Beach in his Cadillac, talking about real estate and "trying to sound rich. But he doesn't know how." That's what's wrong with the rich, she says: "The rich people make their lives look so goddamn good we all bust our ass trying to get the same thing." Evil appears in Leonard's crime novels as that mysterious force which makes criminals out of petty men with hopelessly wrong ideas about who they are and how the world really works.

An inventory of the criminal characters pursued in Leonard's books shows that they are almost never the great masterminds of the perverted American success myth. General de Boya, the butcher of the Dominican Republic in Cat Chaser (1982), Francis X. Perez, the sinister con man of Unknown Man #89 (1977), and Nestor Soto, the ruthless drug czar of Stick (1983), are men of elegant strategies who have a firm grasp of how things are done, and nobody is trying very hard to bring them to justice. It is generally the lesser men, the obscure psychopaths and small-time hustlers with harebrained schemes and no chance of a long life, who are confronted by Leonard's heroes. His books remain this side of reality by respecting the criminal hierarchy. Exiled Latin American generals living in mansions in Florida are not normally hauled before police magistrates. They live too close to our fantasy of the American Dream. Leonard's heroes do not labor to rid the earth of evil but to cart away the nuisances.

George Moran in Cat Chaser faces down General de Boya but only to take his wife away from him. Can he help it that she brings along a suitcase full of the general's money? In Stick, Ernest Stickley only wants some money that a minor drug dealer owes him, and so he goes, hat in hand, to Nestor Soto, the master drug trafficker, to seek permission to poach on his territory. Stick is a crime comedy of class and manners—a kind of Upstairs, Downstairs of South Florida financial hustling, in which Ernest Stickley lives in the chauffeur's garage apartment while learning how to fit himself into the game going on in the Big House. Leonard has made a specialty of writing about men and women who take what is coming to them, perhaps win a point of honor, but leave justice to a higher authority.

One of the characters in LaBrava refers to the cockroaches in the walls and basement of an old Miami Beach hotel who labor mightily to hold the place up. Like those indispensable insects, Leonard's better class of criminals are taken to be part of the foundation, so ingrained that removal could bring the edifice down. There are, then, limits to how much justice one seeks in this world.

What remains to struggle with Leonard's heroes are the small-time nobodies of crime. It is not the mobsters or international drug magnates in Atlantic City on whom police detective Vincent Mora concentrates in Glitz, but the murder of an obscure casino "hostess" by Teddy Magyk, one of Leonard's most interesting sociopathic creations. He is a petty criminal so ignorant and befuddled that he can never translate his criminal willingness into the glitz of Atlantic City and has to wheedle gas money from his old mom in order to go out and kill people for slot-machine quarters. Nobody expects to get rid of the cockroaches in the basement, but we do expect them to keep their troops out of the living room.

Typically, the objects of pursuit are like Teddy or like Richard Nobles in LaBrava or Roland Crowe in Gold Coast (1980)—swamp thugs who have only recently emerged from the Everglades or the bayou to heave their reptilian bulk about on dry land and to look in condos and carpeted offices for prey. They are sometimes menacing Colombians or Cuban "boat-lifters" from Mariel who run amok in the free enterprise of an endless con game. In the end, they have little to show for their efforts. Teddy Magyk is shot in the back by a casino lounge singer who has never held a gun in her hand and in the front by the very man he has been stalking. Richard Nobles is manipulated and murdered by the very same actress he has expected to take for all she is worth. Clement Mansell is shot at by Albanians, locked in a safe and left to die, and finally murdered by a policeman. Even the likable Frank and Ernest, the methodical, fun-loving holdup men of Swag (1973), cannot seem to keep to their ten commandments for stick-ups and soon go to prison. In LaBrava, Richard Nobles' schemes for making illegal money are comically pathetic. His idea of extortion is to walk into a hotel lobby and threaten to "dump" in the hotel pool if the proprietor does not pay protection money.

Nobles and his ilk are not great criminal success stories. They cannot understand why Joe LaBrava or Vincent Mora is after them. They imagine themselves to be immune, just as the Nestor Sotos and General de Boyas are. Teddy Magyk really thinks he is magic. He does not need to plan anything because everything is supposed to work for him.

The criminal is linked through his own delusions to the man he stalks. There is something about the man that challenges the criminal's self-image. Leonard often represents these contrasts in his characters' perceptions of reality by images on film. Teddy Magyk takes pictures of Mora, but they do not tell Teddy why he has to kill him. Robbie Daniels, in Split Images, makes a murder video which is supposed to validate his crime. While Joe LaBrava, a professional photographer, is out trying to make a living recording the world of the "barefaced fact" in Miami Beach, Jean Shaw, an ex-movie queen from the days of film noir, is watching her old movies to get inspiration for the day's intrigues. Joe cannot tell when she is real and when she is just using such movie lines from the 1940s as "I need you Joe."

The Vincent Mora who shows up in the photographs that Teddy takes of him is not an imposing person. Leonard's heroes never are. They are like the melon farmer in Mr. Majestyk (1974). On the outside, he is just a melon farmer with a Polish name and no money. Inside, he is tough and clever. When a professional hit man, Frank Renda, accidentally encounters him, Renda cannot figure him out but knows he has to kill him for what Renda thinks is arrogance.

He couldn't get the melon grower out of his head; he wanted to hit him so bad, and he wasn't sure why. Not because the guy had belted him a couple of times; though that could be reason enough. No, it was the way he pulled that cheap cool shit and acted like he couldn't be bought.

Teddy wants to kill Mora for much the same reason. It is not simply revenge for having sent him to prison. It has something to do with what Teddy sees in Mora's eyes—a look which he has to eradicate. It is a look, Teddy thinks, that is not exactly of hate—"it was more a look of knowing something."

Teddy does not say exactly what the thing is, but Mora's personal style provides a clue. Like many other Leonard heroes, Mora is utterly straight. His professional hardness is modified by humor and perspective. He values unaffected speech and simple dress, he values truth, frankness, and love. He is not a man to take at face value the absurd posturing of a Teddy Magyk. Teddy does not see reflected in Mora's eyes the person whom Teddy imagines himself to be but rather the reflection of a "poor wimp who thought he was magic and couldn't be scared." Teddy has substituted for the real world the norms of his own fantasies. That is why he cannot figure out Mora's look—the way Mora can see into his head and know that he is a vicious jerk. "Guy thinks he knows more about you than you do," Teddy thinks: "Like he can look into your head and see things that make him want to blow your head right off." As Mora leaves a liquor store with a bag in his arms, Teddy steps up to shoot him. "I want to be looking in your eyes as I pull the trigger," Teddy says. His obsession with that look is what gives Linda Moon enough time to creep up and shoot him in the back. Delusions, then, can be fatal things.

This tension between the illusions of the criminal and the utter straightness of the hero provides the dramatic formula for nearly all of Leonard's crime novels. It binds the two characters together with an affinity that explains their compulsive fascination with each other, the one following his illusions and the other wondering, as Joe LaBrava does, how they "get so sure of themselves … without knowing anything."

The chief function of a Leonard hero seems to be to try and bring a little reality into people's lives. He is a kind of psychiatric device operating in the world of the badly deluded. He spreads a gospel of healthy straightness, and sense as well, to other characters who, though they may not be indictable, still share something of the killer's delusionary diseases.

Virtually all major characters in Glitz can be categorized by how far they have sunk into the fog of delusions that afflict Teddy Magyk and by how likely they are to be saved by Mora. Jackie Garbo, the casino manager, talks incessantly about big deals and is always wrong. He has no idea how to deal with women, how to avoid the police, or how to claim the loyalty of his employees. When Mora comes to warn him against laundering money for drug dealers through the casino tables, Jackie assumes that Mora is a cop on the take and has him beaten and thrown out by his bodyguard. La Donna Padgett, a former Miss Oklahoma and Jackie's mistress, thinks that Jackie has everything figured out and spends her life drying up in a desert of inattention.

As he proceeds, Mora attracts straight people such as Jackie's bodyguard, DeLeon Johnson, who can see Mora's cool professionalism. "You way, way ahead of me, ahead of Jackie, ahead of everybody," DeLeon tells Mora:

All this hip shit. You understand what I mean? The casino business, all this razzle-dazzle. All the people thinking they know everything. Now you, I see you go about quietly doing your business. I know I been exposed to Jackie too long.

There is about all this—about the very language of DeLeon's speech, for example—a concern for something of value in the past now lost or buried. Leonard's books are often set in places where rapid social change has smothered older values: Atlantic City casinos, the Detroit of the rust belt and South Miami Beach—a museum of art deco tawdriness. In such places, one can glimpse a past more abandoned than outlived and now given over to coke dealers and swamp thugs who accompany the forces of change. They do not have any nostalgia; they are looking for the main chance.

Robbie Daniels, the playboy assassin of Split Images, laments the liquidation of his Detroit nuts-and-bolts factory—a casualty in the Japanese automobile offensive. And, not without some tenuous connection, he practices his murder techniques on a hapless Haitian refugee wandering onto his Palm Beach estate. Robbie is no ordinary murderer. He is in training for his first assault on the forces bringing the country down. His enemies include Yassir Arafat and the PLO fedayeen, Carlos the Venezuelan terrorist, and the Baader-Meinhof gang. But for starters he will shoot Chichi, a local womanizer and drug dealer.

Robbie's accomplice, a cynical ex-cop named Walter Kouza, clings to his Polish working-class sentiment for the old neighborhood in Detroit and, apparently, to some of its older values. Killing the bad guys on Robbie's list who are terrorists or drug dealers is one thing, but he will take "no parts of shooting broads," he tells Robbie Daniels. When Robbie later kills a woman who has witnessed the shooting of Chichi, Walter drops the video equipment with which he has been recording the event for Robbie and flees to Detroit. He flees not as a fugitive but as a man going home. Like DeLeon Johnson, an Ethiopian who never entirely left his tribal past, Walter Kouza is still rooted somewhere in his ethnicity. The detective hero finds him without much trouble in a Detroit tavern, measuring the precipitate decline of the West by the fact that only one Frank Sinatra record can be found on the jukebox amidst incomprehensible music by groups called The Ants and The Infections. "The Infections, for Christ sake. What's going on? Look—picture of the broad over there on the wall?" Pointing to a poster of David Bowie, Kouza asks, "Who knows who she is?" He remembers a time when everybody worked at Dodge Main, when the Japanese "were still making birthday-novelties and toys that fell apart."

Here, nostalgia indicates a condition of personal disconnectedness, of characters sailing rudderless into moral oblivion. When Frank Sinatra is displaced, so is Walter Kouza. Leonard's salvageable people have somehow or other preserved their links with the reliable values more carefully than has Walter Kouza. Leonard's "best people" have that personal style which denotes goodness. They talk right, "without buttering words to slip past emotions." They are "into real life."

Walter and Robbie have looked at their situations and each in his own way has tried to answer the question of who is to blame for the social decay which they perceive all around them, and each takes action according to his imperfect analysis. Like many other Leonard characters, Walter and Robbie are embodiments of prevailing notions of "how one should live," "how one should get ahead," and "who is to blame." The criminal's delusion is like a disease, the toxic consequences of too much change. Imperfectly understood historical and social changes set loose ever new criminal viruses. People such as Walter Kouza and Robbie Daniels, Ernest Stickley and DeLeon Johnson either survive because of the strength of their connections with older values or they go down.

Somewhere among the forces of change that have confounded Walter Kouza is Leonard's answer to the question which his heroes so often ask: "How do they get so sure of themselves?"