Leonard's bandwagon had left the station by the time I heard its music, and I've had to do some running to catch up. But better late than never: Leonard is the real thing. He doesn't write "literature," and I'd be astonished if he claimed to; there's nothing in his fiction to suggest that he packs even an ounce of pretentiousness. But like John D. MacDonald, whom he resembles but does not appear to imitate, he raises the hardboiled suspense novel beyond the limits of genre and into social commentary; he paints an acute, funny and sometimes very bitter picture of a world that is all too real and recognizable, yet a world that rarely makes an appearance in the kind of fiction that is routinely given serious consideration.

It is a world in which people do business; they don't often do it honestly, but in one form or another business is what they do. This is the great untouched subject in contemporary American fiction: the focus round which American life revolves, yet which American writers resolutely ignore. As a character in Stick puts it: "Anyway, what's my goal, the American dream. What else? Put money in some gimmick everybody has to have, get rich and retire. No more worries, no more looking over your shoulder." Making a buck: it's a story rooted as deeply as any other in the American tradition, yet when it comes to telling it in fiction, only a handful of suspense writers and an occasional peddler of schlock are willing to take up the challenge.

The buck-making in Stick takes two forms: Chucky hustles drugs, Barry engages in "investing, trading or speculating." The fellow who watches them both is named Ernest Stickley Jr., known to one and all as Stick…. He has just been released from prison in Michigan, where he served seven years for armed robbery. Now he is in South Florida….

But that's only part of the story. As Stick goes through the process of getting back into the rhythm of life outside the penitentiary, Leonard sends him through an impressive (but in no way gratuitous) series of alarms and diversions: the tawdry underworld of the drug dealers, the tacky luxuries of the ostentatiously rich, the clash between Anglo and Latin cultures as it permeates life in South Florida. There's a rather hilarious evening during which more sexual passion is thrust at Stick than even a "real man" can handle, and several sobering encounters with unsavory fellows whose assignment is to put Stick permanently out of commission.

But if thrills and amussements are Leonard's principal stock in trade, it is also clear that Stick is a novel with more serious purposes. Stick, as he re-enters the world of ordinary life after seven years in the cramped, isolated world of prison, is a man trying to adjust; Leonard has Jack Henry Abbot firmly in mind as he depicts Stick's attempts to relearn the rules of the world on the outside, rather than to impose the laws of "the hole" on society. And he obviously has Abbott's literary and political accomplices in mind when he depicts Barry Stam, with his taste for assembling a retinue of the violent and notorious….

Elmore Leonard has no tolerance for sham or pretense, in the prose he writes or the people he depicts. He's funny writer—all the best suspense writers are—and an incisive, unsparing one. He does honest work, and reading it is great pleasure.