The Hot Kid

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Elmore Leonard began his writing career in the 1950’s, turning out Western novels and stories. Not until the demand for Westerns abated did he begin writing the crime fiction for which authorities as disparate as Martin Amis, Stephen King, Quentin Tarantino, and George Will have proclaimed Leonard a genius. Leonard, who has also written such historical fiction as Cuba Libre (1998), set during the Spanish-American War, returned to the Western with The Tonto Woman, and Other Western Stories (1998). The Hot Kid combines Leonard’s interests in crime, Westerns, and historical fiction and represents his best work since Out of Sight (1996).

The Hot Kid opens in Okmulgee, Oklahoma, in 1921, when fifteen-year-old Carlos Webster witnesses Emmett Long kill an Indian policeman while stealing thirty dollars from a drugstore. Impressed by how the United States marshals track down and arrest Emmett, Carlos decides he wants to be a lawman. Shortly afterward, the boy shoots and kills a cattle thief. At this, Carlos’s half-Cheyenne father, Virgil, who raised him, realizes, “My lord, but this boy’s got a hard bark on him.” Carlos’s Cuban mother died when the boy was born. Virgil raises cattle and pecans but is wealthy from the oil discovered on his property. The other member of the Webster household is Narcissa Raincrow, whose job description has evolved from nanny to housekeeper to Virgil’s lover.

Jack Belmont is the same age as Carlos but his moral opposite. As a youngster, he had let his younger sister drown, leaving her brain-damaged. As an eighteen-year-old in 1925, he decides to blackmail his father, the oil millionaire Oris. The “good-looking, useless boy” wants ten thousand dollars a month, or he will tell his mother about Nancy Polis, Oris’s mistress who runs a boardinghouse Oris bought her. Jack has been arrested numerous times, including once for rape. “Everything I got into,” he says, “either I didn’t start it or it was a misunderstanding.” Nonetheless, he does what he wants, when he wants, because he has never been held accountable for his actions. After Oris refuses to pay, Jack enlists the ex-convict Norm Dilworth in a bungled plot to kidnap Nancy. Jack is so despicable his mother plans to shoot him the next time she sees him. His only goal is to become “public enemy number one.”

By 1927, Carlos, now known as Carl, is a U.S. marshal on the trail of Emmett Long’s gang of bank robberswhose newest member is Jack, just out of prison. Carl, a ladies’ man, becomes friendly with Crystal, Emmett’s moll, during his pursuit of the gang. Carl kills Emmett, having said, “If I have to pull my weapon I shoot to kill,” and journalist Tony Antonelli begins making Carl famous for using that line. In the world of The Hot Kid, the number of men someone has killed is very important, with Carl keeping track of how many both he and certain criminals have shot. One criminal’s wife tells Carl he is more frightening than any outlaw because he enjoys shooting bad guys. Carl says, “I can shoot at ’em, but not lie to ’em.” Of such contradictions are born memorable characters.

Tony, the journalist, continues chronicling Carl’s exploits in True Detective Mystery magazine. Leonard depicts Carl much like a gunman of the Old West, and Tony resembles the legendary Ned Buntline, who wrote about the exploits of outlaws, gunfighters, and lawmen for the dime novels of the nineteenth century. Tony, who always seems to have more details than do the police, sees the movie-star-handsome Carl as his own means to success, dubbing him “the hot kid.” Tony...

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thanks the marshal for providing him something to write about, as if his writing is just as important as keeping the peace.

The other major character in the story is Louly Brown. In 1924, when Louly is twelve, she attends the wedding of her cousin Ruby to Charles Arthur Floyd. A year later, Floyd is notorious as an outlaw whom the newspapers call Pretty Boy, and Louly develops a crush on him. She thinks of him as Choc, his chosen nickname, short for Choctaw. Louly enters Floyd’s sphere by becoming pen pals with the convict Joe Young, who joins Floyd’s gang upon being released from prison. After having sex with the moronic Joe, Louly “saw how this being a gun moll wasn’t all a bed of roses.” She begins slowly to shift her focus after Carl questions her about Floyd. “She liked the way he shook her hand and thanked her, and the way he touched his hat, so polite for a U.S. marshal.”

An especially colorful interlude finds Jack, his girlfriend Heidi, and Louly in 1930’s Kansas City as Leonard revels in the details of the era during which the city was known as the “playground of criminals.” Louly and Heidi go to work for the enigmatic Teddy Ritz, a gangster who passes himself off as a political operative. Carl arrives to rescue Jack from Teddy’s clutches. The lawman wants Jack on his turf and wants to deal with him only on his terms. Impressed by the marshal’s resolve, Teddy tries to tempt him to crime.

Indicative of Leonard’s style is the way he opens The Hot Kid. Carlos is telling the local police chief about the shooting at the drugstore. The boy, however, leaves out pertinent details, as is shown when this interrogation is followed by a flashback to Carlos’s confrontation with Emmett Long. Leonard helps establish Carlos’s independent character by revealing the information the boy withholds from the police, such as Emmett’s taking Carlos’s peach ice-cream cone. Later, Tony reveals that Louly had shot someone in Floyd’s gang before her character has been introduced; in this way Leonard alerts his readers that Louly is not just another female.

Leonard is known for his distinctively realistic dialogue, which makes use of the twisted syntax of ordinary folks: “I see these two men come in wearing suits and hats I thought at first were salesmen”; “I’m here to put Emmett Long under arrest or in the ground, one”; “News accounts describe Carl as must be one of the world’s deadliest shots.” Leonard also displays a colorful, profane American vernacular. The racist Nestor Lott recruits Ku Klux Klan members to attack Italian Americans by saying, “You know these dagos are all Socialists, enemies of our American way. We run ’em out now or they’ll be after your jobs, your farms, and they’ll lure your Christian women as Eyetalians know how to do.” Carl impresses Jack by talking like a real person, without the “official way of speaking” of other lawmen. “You can be a mean bugger, huh?” Carl asks Jack.

Leonard’s dialogue, falling midway between the naturalistic styles of Quentin Tarantino and David Mamet, is effortlessly graceful, lacking the strained self-consciousness of most writers who attempt to emulate the likes of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. Leonard is, however, self-conscious in another sense. Tony, paid by the word, is a partial self-portrait, and the crime journalist prides himself on writing “the way people actually spoke.”

Even in his narrative, when Leonard filters an experience through the consciousness of a character, he uses that character’s verbal style: “She thought she had to go to the bathroom, the urge coming over her in her groin and then gone, Louly took a few moments to compose herself and act like the mention of Choc didn’t mean anything special, Joe Young’s grin in her face, giving her the feeling he was dumb as dirt.” Leonard has fun with Tony’s elevated descriptive writing: “The sky hung as a shroud over the Bald Mountain Club, gray and unforgiving, a day that dawned with an indifferent beginning, but would end in violent deaths for twelve victims of the massacre.”

The Hot Kid is full of small touches typical of Leonard. Floyd’s family gathers to watch him rob a bank. The criminals consciously ape the behavior of the film gangsters played by James Cagney. A marshal taps cigarette ash into the cuff of his pants to ward off moths. Lott is given a medal during the Great War after forcing his men at gunpoint to advance against fatal enemy fire. Jack’s lawyer refuses to visit him in jail because prisons are unsanitary. John Dillinger thinks Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow are giving bank robbery a bad name by stealing only small amounts. Heidi tries to explain Kansas City jazz to Jack: “You’re not supposed to understand it . . . you feel it.”

The climax of The Hot Kid has Carl teaming with his enemy to protect Jack’s roadhouse from Lott and his “Christian avengers.” Carl and Jack repel the attack while Jack plots to kill Norm so that he can have his friend’s wife, Heidi. All this is observed by Tony, who cannot believe Carl is helping Jack. Tony calmly takes notes during the gun battle, even as Lott plows a Packard into the roadhouse. Jack flees the scene by stealing Tony’s car, the first of two times he takes it. Lott is doomed to failure in Leonard’s world because “He was so serious about being stupid.” Because Leonard usually emphasizes character and mood at the expense of plot, such a tour de force as Lott’s attack is rare. It is one of the most compelling sequences in Leonard’s fiction.

Recent Leonard novels such as Tishomingo Blues (2002) and Mr. Paradise (2004) have offered colorful characters, brilliant individual scenes, and the usual splendid style but have lurched awkwardly from scene to scene at times, finally lacking the usual spark of fun. With his consistent themes of the vagaries of American racism, the pervasiveness of greed, and the stupidity of the criminal class, all smoothly submerged within his storytelling and all on display in The Hot Kid, Leonard is an entertainer with an edge. The Hot Kid is Leonard at his very best, with period details, characters, and style operating at full throttle from first page to last.