Forty-eight-year-old Jack Foley is in prison for robbing more banks 'than anyone in the computer', has an ex-wife in Miami working as an assistant to a magician called Emil the Amazing, and remains supernaturally attractive to beautiful young women of far greater prospects than he. Foley is, in other words, an Elmore Leonard hero: another low-grade Florida criminal, hard-boiled but soft-centred, with the familiar Leonard pathology of 'wanting to be a good guy' and the familiar Leonard cool of a con who breaks out of prison just in time to watch the Super Bowl. Out of Sight is Leonard's thirty-third novel, and it's business as usual.

Foley is picked up outside the prison walls by his old partner, Buddy, and an aspiring hotshot called Glenn 'Studs' Michaels. But he had not reckoned on the arrival of US Marshal Karen Sisco, the latest in Leonard's long line of sassy professional women (often known as 'broads') who invariably wind up in bed with his protagonist. Even her father—a private investigator, naturally—describes Karen as 'the tough babe'. She smokes. She wears medium heels and black Chanel suits. And in the trunk of her car, she keeps a pistol, a ballistic vest, several sets of handcuffs and leg irons, an expandable baton, a can of Mace and a Remington pump-action shotgun. Karen seems to have got the hang of the whole empowerment thing.

The tough babe gets mixed up in the escape and soon finds herself locked in the trunk of Buddy's car with Foley. The two of them do the obvious thing in such circumstances, which is to discuss the films of Faye Dunaway. After the convicts have ditched Karen, Foley can't get her out of his head. She's a little smitten, too, taken in by the nonchalant charm of a thief who, before asking the cashier to hand over the money, would say something such as: 'I sure like your hair, Irene. Is that the latest style?' Or, 'Mmmmm, your perfume sure smells nice. What's it called?'

Foley and Buddy head for Miami. Karen is determined to bring them in. Glenn heads for Detroit to meet Maurice 'Snoopy' Miller and rob the home of Wall Street scammer Richard 'Dick the Ripper' Ripley. Leonard fans will by now be experiencing a certain amount of déjà vu. He has experimented in the past (as in 1987's Touch, an eerie account of a faith healer), but Out of Sight is generic Leonard, strictly on home turf. It's another tale of minor-league crooks set against a backdrop of Miami kitsch: Buddy's 'imitation Danish sofa'; the 'pastel-coloured apartment hotels'; Foley dressed up as a tourist in 'a color-coordinated orange and bright ocher beach outfit' and dark socks with his leather sandals.

Leonard's romanticism has always coexisted uneasily with some truly nasty violence. Here, Foley's affair with Karen is pure male fantasy, perilously close to schmaltz. But Maurice's brother Kenneth, 'wired on crystal meth', is a serial rapist and murderer whose acts are too brutal for Leonard's characteristic rosy glow. Leonard loves guns, but he makes light of what guns do, indulging instead a fetishist's enthusiasm for their associated terminology: MAC-10, Ruger .22, Beretta nine, .38 Smith snub-nose and—heaven!—an entire Swat team armed with MP-5 submachine guns.

You can see why Quentin Tarantino loves Elmore Leonard. He is about to start filming Leonard's novel Rum Punch, but no movie has yet caught the nimble, hipster's rhythm his fleet pages require. Leonard's novels read like screenplays-in-waiting, and film, not literature, is the tradition they repeatedly acknowledge. Out of Sight alludes not only to Faye Dunaway, but to Stranger than Paradise, Steve McQueen prison pictures, Woody Allen's Take the Money and Run, Repo Man, Kiss Me Deadly and Pulp Fiction.

Film may be able to capture Leonard's heists, weapons and smart lines (Karen's father: 'I always liked nuns. They're so clean. They never seem to sweat.') But it won't catch the zero-gravity float of his third-person narration, which drifts in and out of the characters' interior monologues, as if to pick up the tempo of their thinking. And for all his movie sensibility, Leonard's novels are full of a chanced-upon verbal lyricism, like the names of the card tricks Adele can do—'The Hindu shuffle, overhand shuffle, the doubt lift, the glide …'—or the hard, consonantal music of Cadillac, Pontiac, Buick. Out of Sight is remarkable for its lavish automobile taxonomy: blue Chevy Caprice, white Cadillac Sedan De Ville Concours, '89 Olds Cutlass Supreme in faded maroon, '94 Lincoln Town Car, Chrysler Newport. No writer alive has such colourful, evocative traffic.

It's been fashionable to make big claims for Leonard ('One of the best novelists of any genre, high or low'), as if these books have the vast empathy, perception and inventiveness of, say, Saul Bellow. Out of Sight is a novel Leonard's written several times before under different titles, such as 1984's Stick, the story of a fortysomething ex-bank robber with a good heart who's just out of prison and romances an extremely desirable young stockbroker (and tough babe) called Kyle.

You don't read it so much as breathe it in, like a gas. And the memory of it evaporates almost the instant you lay it down, even such prize moments as Buddy and Foley visiting the Jewish Recycling Centre to buy warm coats for the Detroit freeze, Foley choosing a navy blue double-breaster. 'A slim cut, not at all boxy, like the coat was wearing him.' But it's a lot of fun while it lasts.