After eighteen novels written over the course of three decades, Elmore Leonard, who lives and writes in a suburb north of Detroit, has made it big with Glitz, a novel about a policeman, a psychopathic criminal, two beautiful women, and Atlantic City gangsters. His previous books were paperback originals, but this one is near the top of the hard-cover best-seller list, it is a book-club selection, and it is receiving favorable reviews just about everywhere, except where it is getting raves.

Less spectacular is the success of Ross Thomas, a resident of Malibu, California, whose twentieth novel (including five written under the pseudonym Oliver Bleeck), Briarpatch, also is winning its author many new readers. In recent years Thomas has begun to surface from what might be called the obscure glory of a devoted cult following, and each of his last few books has been a contender for best-sellerdom, attracting increasingly widespread, and favorable, reviews.

Although both Leonard and Thomas deserve the recognition, if not necessarily the uncritical adulation, they are receiving, neither new novel is truly representative of its author's best work. Glitz is mediocre by the standards Leonard set in his brutal documentary novels of 1970's Detroit, when the city acquired its reputation as a case-study of urban failure and the murder capital of the nation; Briarpatch is driven by Thomas's characteristically mordant wit and romantic sorrowfulness, but it lacks the exuberant verve and zany inventiveness of his better work.

A crime writer is perennially faced with a choice between, on the one hand, circling around and around a carefully plotted mystery (à la Raymond Chandler) and, on the other hand, painstakingly describing the overlapping zones of the criminal-justice system and the underworld (à la Dashiell Hammett). This, in fact, is one obvious point of contrast in the work of Leonard and Thomas. But important as this is, it is as nothing compared with the writer's choice of how to portray the criminal environment itself. A mystery can always be solved; why a man gets involved in one and what he discovers there about himself and others is what is interesting. That many Americans have found this a fascinating subject for stories about themselves and their cities is itself an important key to our national culture.

The culture of crime certainly fascinates Elmore Leonard; his interest in the ordinary details of the lives of the people who inhabit that culture is what has led to comparisons of him with Dickens and (by none other than George Will) Anthony Trollope. Dickensian, Leonard's novels certainly are not; their range is much too narrow. Entertaining, however, they are. Glitz, true to its title, is filled with razzle-dazzle motion, jarring dialogue, amusingly frightful characters. (Leonard may have mellowed a bit; in his earlier Detroit novels the characters are invariably appalling.)

The hero of Glitz is Lieutenant Vincent Mora of Miami. Almost always in Leonard's novels the good man is a police officer, and Mora is both a good guy and an excellent detective. But he has a small problem. In the strictest self-defense (in fact his restraint caused him to be wounded), Mora killed an armed robber and it bothers him (it is his first killing). While he is convalescing in Puerto Rico, a pathological criminal named Teddy Magyk, whom Mora had sent to jail for several years, appears, determined to seek revenge. So at the very time that Mora needs to be on his most agile toes, he is both physically and psychologically distracted. The question is, basically, who will be faster on the draw?

The answer is not surprising and it should not be. Psychotic killers do not defeat the law in Elmore Leonard. The only question is how Lt. Mora will deal with his problem.

As with all Leonard's books, there is no real plot (though in this one he indulges in some uncharacteristically incredible twists), attempts at humor are rare, the conversation is notable for its vulgarity, and the characters are detestable to the point of caricature. The climax is more or less inevitable as soon as the key characters are defined. There are no sudden reversals at the end. The simplest way of defining the underlying thesis of Glitz, as of all Elmore Leonard's work, is to say that it proves a man's got to do what he's got to do.

Leonard's portraits of the worst kinds of human wrecks, particularly the eighteen-to-thirty-year-old hard-core recidivists who, according to police statistics, commit most of the violent urban crime, are done with a documentary realism that is, unquestionably, shocking, but that also corresponds to much of the evidence about the fate that has befallen large parts of some of our cities. Leonard's popularity, at any rate, has increased as the Hobbesian view of society that his novels project has gained adherents. Even Detroit's extremely liberal mayor, Coleman Young, who is black, and who won his office by running against the police, is now trying to increase the size of the force and is demanding strict security in the schools, enforceable by searches. And it is interesting that the one Leonard criminal who is likable, Ernest Stickley (in the Detroit novel Swag [1976] and the Florida novel Stick [1983]), is pitted against the kinds of psychopaths normally taken care of without much due process by Leonard lawmen, and that Stickley takes care of them the same way they do.

Leonard is a realist in the background, one might say, and a melodramatist in the foreground. (Earlier in his career his heroes were Arizona gunslingers, and his Hombre of 1961—with a gunslinger in the role of a Christ-figure—was named one of the best Westerns of all time.) Certainly he does not mistake the utter grimness of his cityscapes for a portrait of the way we live. The moral dilemmas are not drawn as sharply as they are, for example, in Dashiell Hammett, not because Leonard fails to see them but because most of his criminals inhabit an underworld where such issues would have no meaning. The cops therefore can hardly waste time fretting over them….

Leonard's tales correspond to an abiding view of their society that Americans have expressed through their crime fiction: the streets are dangerous, but there are men strong enough to make them at least a little bit less so. Thomas's novels express a sensibility at once more anachronistic and more contemporary, the distrust of government and its ruthlessly corrupting influence. That both authors are popular today really should not surprise us.