Let us attempt to narrow it down. Elmore Leonard is a literary genius who writes re-readable thrillers. He belongs, then, not to the mainstream but to the genres (before he wrote thrillers, he wrote westerns). Whereas genre fiction, on the whole, heavily relies on plot, mainstream fiction, famously, has only about a dozen plots to recombinate (boy meets girl, good beats bad and so on). But Mr. Leonard has only one plot. All his thrillers are Pardoner's Tales, in which Death roams the land—usually Miami and Detroit—disguised as money.

Nevertheless, Mr. Leonard possesses gifts—of ear and eye, of timing and phrasing—that even the most indolent and snobbish masters of the mainstream must vigorously covet. And the question is: How does he allow these gifts play, in his efficient, unpretentious and (delightfully) similar yarns about semiliterate hustlers, mobsters, go-go dancers, cocktail waitresses, loan sharks, bounty hunters, blackmailers and crime syndicate executioners? My answer may sound reductive, but here goes: The essence of Elmore is to be found in his use of the present participle.

What this means, in effect, is that he has discovered a way of slowing down and suspending the English sentence—or let's say the American sentence, because Mr. Leonard is as American as jazz. Instead of writing "Warren Ganz III lived up in Manalapan, Palm Beach County," Mr. Leonard writes, "Warren Ganz III, living up in Manalapan, Palm Beach County." He writes, "Bobby saying," and then opens quotes. He writes, "Dawn saying," and then opens quotes. We are not in the imperfect tense (Dawn was saying) or the present (Dawn says) or the historic present (Dawn said). We are in a kind of marijuana tense (Dawn saying), creamy, wandering, weak-verbed. Such sentences seem to open up a lag in time, through which Mr. Leonard easily slides, gaining entry to his players' hidden minds. He doesn't just show you what these people say and do. He shows you where they breathe.

Mr. Leonard is as American as jazz, and jazz is in origin a naive form. Yet Mr. Leonard is no Louis Armstrong. He can do melody, but he is also as harshly sophisticated as late Coleman Hawkins. He understands the post-modern world—the world of wised-up rabble and zero authenticity. His characters are equipped not with obligingly suggestive childhoods or case histories, but with a cranial jukebox of situation comedies and talk shows and advertising jingles, their dreams and dreads all mediated and secondhand. They are not lost souls or deal souls. Terrible and pitiable (and often downright endearing), they are simply junk souls: quarter-pounders, with cheese.

In Riding the Rap, Chip Ganz, aging pretty boy, parasite and predator, plans to commit the crime of the century. Not this century: the next. His crime will be a new crime. "Burning herb," "maintaining on reefer," the marijuana-sotted Chip has picked up various odds and ends about the hostages in Beirut—"seen them on TV when they were released, read a book one of them wrote." His idea is to take rich Miamians hostage. "You talking about kidnapping?" asks his associate, Louis Lewis. No. You don't demand a ransom. You don't call his family. You wait, and then you ask the victim how much his life is worth.

"Starting out, Chip had pictured a damp basement full of spiders and roaches crawling around, pipes dripping, his hostages huddled against the wall in chains. He wanted it to be as bad as any of the places in Beirut he'd read about.

"He told Louis and Louis said, 'Where we gonna find a basement in Florida?'"

So the malefactors have to catch as catch can. The hostage they take is not a politician or a diplomat; he is a mob bookie called Harry Arno. The muscle they hire is not a Shia terrorist but a Puerto Rican debt collector called Bobby Deogracias. The dungeon they use is not a fetid cellar but a spare bedroom in an oceanfront residence in Palm Beach owned by Chip's mother. The diet they put their hostage on consists not of bread and water but of frozen dinners and Jell-O. "Louis said the Shia fixed their hostages rice … but no doubt would have given them TV dinners if they had any."

Of course the scheme unravels into a peculiarly American chaos. Crime, Mr. Leonard insistently informs us, is always half-baked, and always goes off half-cocked. Death (or life, behind bars) comes in the form of the fast buck, or its promise. Ranged against these seedy blunderers is United States Marshal Raylan Givens (a welcome carry-over, like Harry Arno, from Mr. Leonard's previous novel, Pronto). Raylan is perhaps the cleanest character in the entire oeuvre, dead straight and "all business," a genuine enforcer, unlike the gray-area skip tracers and writ servers who, in Mr. Leonard's work, usually represent the law-and-order industry. Raylan isn't post-modern, he is an anachronism from out of town. And he is fascinating, because he shows you what Mr. Leonard actually holds dear—the values he can summon in a different kind of prose, in different American rhythms, those of Robert Frost, or even Mark Twain:

"He could cut official corners to call a man out … but couldn't walk in a man's house unless invited, or else with a warrant and bust down the door.

"It was the way he was raised, to have good manners … back when they were living in a coal camp and the miners struck Duke Power: Raylan walking a picket line most of the year, his dad in the house dying of black lung, and company gun thugs came looking for Raylan's uncle … They came across the street, five of them, a couple with pick handles, and up the walk to where his mother stood on the porch…. The gun thugs said they wanted to speak to her brother…. She told them, 'You don't walk in a person's home 'less you're invited. Even you people must believe that. You have homes, don't you? Wives and mothers keeping house?'… They shoved her aside and hit Raylan with the pick handles to put him down….

"Her words hadn't stopped them. No, what they did was stick in Raylan's mind—her words, her quiet tone of voice—and stop him, more than 20 years later, from breaking into this man's house."

I first read Riding the Rap in mid-January. In mid-March I read it again. The reviewer curling up with the present participle. Re-reading Elmore Leonard in the morning, and saying it was work. The experience, like the book, was wicked and irresistible. This was post-modern decadence. This was bliss.