Even those who don't care for crime fiction may like what Elmore Leonard makes of it, especially his way of representing common or low American voices. Consider this splendid speech in Bandits, by an old but still lively Louisiana bank robber banished by his relatives to a shabby nursing home:

"My boy wanted me to stay with them, I mean live there," Cullen said. "It was Mary Jo was the problem. She'd been thinking about having a nervous breakdown ever since [her daughter] Joellen run off to Muscle Shoals to become a recording artist…. See, Mary Jo, all she knows how to do is keep house. She don't watch TV, she either waxes furniture or makes cookies or sews on buttons. I said to Tommy Junior, 'What's she do, tear 'em off so she can sew 'em back on?' I got a picture in my mind of that woman biting thread. First day I'm there, I look around, I don't see any ashtrays. There's one, but it's got buttons in it. I go to use it, Mary Jo says, 'That is not an ashtray. We don't have ashtrays in this house.' I ask her, well, how about a coffee can lid I could use? She says if I'm gonna smoke I have to do it in the backyard. Not in the front. She was afraid the neighbors might see me and then she'd have to introduce me. 'Oh, this is Tommy's dad. He's been in the can the last twenty-seven years.' See, it's bad enough Joellen takes off with this guy says he's gonna make her a record star. Mary Jo sees me sleeping in her little girl's bedroom with the stuffed animals and Barbie and Ken and she can't handle it, even sewing on buttons all day. She keeps sticking her finger with the fucking needle and it's my fault. So I have to leave…."

It looks easy—just suppress some conjunctions and relative pronouns, start a few sentences with "See," throw in an occasional defective verb tense or down-home locution, and life leaps at you off the page. But as in the "realistic" speech in Dickens or Joyce or Hemingway, it takes art to show Cullen's knack for ironic mimicry ("become a recording artist" must be how Joellen, or Mary Jo, put it—Cullen himself later just says "record star"), the folkish shrewdness in a phrase like "thinking about having a nervous breakdown," his malicious imagining of Mary Jo's regal prissiness ("We don't have ashtrays in this house") collapsing into "been in the can," a verbal betrayal by the lawless indecorum she so badly wants kept outside. Cullen knows that her obsessive sewing is material for comedy, and he understands, quite unforgivingly, that it comes from her powerlessness to "handle" the rest of her disappointing life.

In Bandits Leonard directs his artful renditions of common reality toward a more difficult subject than realistic crime fiction usually takes on, the entrance of national nightmares into domestic dreams of money and personal freedom. In New Orleans Jack Delaney, an erstwhile clothing salesman, amateur fashion model, hotel jewel thief, and convict, now works in his brother-in-law's funeral home. Nearing forty, educated by the Jesuits, at Tulane (for a year), and in Angola Penitentiary, Jack is no fool on his own turf, but he is not very knowing about the larger world outside it; "I'm not good at environment," he cheerfully confesses, "I'm weak in those areas." But that world intrudes on his all the same, in the person of Lucy Nichols, a young ex-nun just returned from Nicaragua. Lucy has given up the Sisters of Saint Francis but not her concern for good works, and she persuades Jack to help her save a young Nicaraguan beauty queen, Amelita Soza, whose brutal former lover, once a friend of Somoza and now a contra commander, seeks to kill her for (he frantically supposes) infecting him with leprosy.

Jack hasn't kept up with the news from Central America, and his idea of religious sisterhood leans heavily on old Deborah Kerr movies and Sally Field playing the Flying Nun. But Lucy is attractive enough, and his present life dull enough, to induce him to help protect Amelita as well as to relieve Colonel Dagoberto ("Bertie") Godoy of the large sums he has raised from rich right-wing Americans to aid the contras. Half the loot is to go to Jack and the gang he recruits for the project, but he's also pleased that Lucy will take the rest to Nicaragua to help repair the harm Godoy and his ilk have done.

Leonard writes neatly and convincingly about most of the people in Bandits: the tough, monstrous, finally frivolous Godoy; his enigmatic Miskito Indian hit man, Franklin de Dios, who likes to ask, "How you doing?" but kills men as other men kill flies; Delaney's buddy Roy Hicks, an ex-cop and ex-con whose nerve and ruthlessness scare even his friends; Jack Delaney himself, whose amiable, boyish recklessness isn't big on idealistic causes but who knows that scheming and fighting for people you like is more fun than doing it just for money. Lucy and her well-connected oil-man father, who thinks of contributing to Godoy's secret arms fund but decides it's too risky an investment, seem flatter and more familiar; but one would not say this about the redneck gun dealer in Gulfport who dismisses the Klan as a "bunch of negative thinkers" because they don't see that "commonism" is the real menace, or Jack's old girlfriend Helene, who finds the techniques of embalming fascinating and decides to make it her profession. As for Ronald Reagan, it would be hard to improve on his testimonial letter to Godoy ("To assist you in delivering your message of freedom to all my good friends in Louisiana, I have written to each one personally to verify your credentials as a true representative of the Nicaraguan people, and to help affirm your determination to win a big one for democracy").

Godoy aims, however, not at winning a big one for democracy but at securing a lot of big ones for himself and his druglord pals in Florida; he has no intention of delivering the money to the contras. It's a touch that recent news makes plausible, but it leads to a difficulty in Bandits that Leonard's other books don't have. In them he deals sympathetically with people who are, or have been, criminals at least in some technical way, or with policemen whose occupational closeness to crime makes the line between good guys and bad guys sometimes hard to see. His is the familiar but still intriguing premise that, since hardly anyone is innocent in the old-fashioned sense, we are all potentially free to make a life with some new but authentic claim to value, a value based not on learned rules but on impulsive acts that will henceforth define us. The bad people in his books don't accept this freedom, and they must pay the price, usually a grim one. But those who accept it may survive and even profit, though (old rules do die hard) usually not by getting rich. In the end Jack Delaney gives Lucy not half but all the contra money, though he still has Godoy's new $60,000 Mercedes to sell off, and he isn't sure he won't keep the proceeds.

Leonard has sometimes used politics for fictional background—Cat Chaser, for instance, recalls the American intervention in the Dominican Republic in 1965—but the moral implications of public policy in Bandits press much harder than before on personal behavior. Godoy's people are not just bad characters, Detroit street hoods or Miami dope runners; they are agents of a social and political malaise that the author, to his credit, wants us to be seriously anxious about. Private guilt is not disabling in itself; Jack Delaney has stolen before and is ready, if not exactly eager, to steal again, especially for what he can consider a good cause. The danger for him isn't guilt but going back to jail. Lucy Nichols is a nun who has always been on the right side, against her rich, complacent parents as well as ogres like Godoy; she has trouble thinking that stealing from Godoy is a crime, even if committed in the company of a thug like Roy Hicks, who seems as vicious as Godoy himself. But Jack and Lucy increasingly have to ask themselves if ends justify means, and even Hicks is puzzled when he learns that Godoy has the protection of certain local and federal authorities: "I want to know what side we're supposed to be on," he tells Jack, "the good guys or the bad guys." He's willing to be either, but it helps to know.

Godoy's gunman probably gets closer than anyone else to the heart of the puzzle: "Franklin de Dios was wondering if he was certain about the sides. If there were more than two sides. If he was on the side he thought he was on or on a different side. He was getting a feeling, more and more, that he was alone." (Franklin's eventual decision that he is in fact alone and will not kill for anyone but himself is what makes things come out more or less justly for the others.) And the experienced reader of Leonard's stories may also be doing some wondering. The book has proposed views of Godoy that don't mesh: does he stand for a political nightmare in which the American government and private wealth conspire to support an odious public intention, or is he just a brutal crook like those in Leonard's other novels, serving no intention save his own greed and machismo?

The latter view suits the genre Leonard has perfected; to side, as we do, with Jack and Lucy is only to prefer nominal lawlessness, in otherwise likeable people, to the real and ugly thing, and that seems no problem. But the moralizing political view, in which Leonard has invested so much effort and feeling, is harder to accept, even for a reader who suspects that the real contras are largely a pretext for corrupting conspiracies like the one the book describes. A real Godoy might of course combine both views, but Leonard's kind of novel hasn't enough room for such complexity. Bandits is not as efficient and coherent as Leonard's best books, like LaBrava, Stick, and Split Images; but readers who care as much about what is happening in the political underworld as about crime books may feel glad that he wrote it.