Justified

Last night I caught the initial episode of Justified, a new series on the FX cable network based on the writings of Elmore Leonard, who is an executive producer of the show. The 84 year old Leonard, who is one of my favorite writers, has written 48 novels mostly about low-life criminals and the lawmen that pursue them. They are written in a dry comic style that emphasizes dialog and straight-ahead exposition rather than interior monologue and all the other accouterments associated with High Art. That being said, he has been praised by writers such as Saul Bellow and is also one of James O’Connor’s favorites, as he confided to me a long time ago.

Within his body of work, you will find some works that transcend his usual cops-and-robbers focus and that obviously explain his appeal to both O’Connor and me. The 1987 Bandits is one of them, described on Leonard’s website as follows:

Bandits assembles an unlikely crew: an ex-nun, an ex-cop, and an ex-con. They’ve got their eyes on several million dollars that they’ve decided should not be sent to aid the Contras in Nicaragua. Of course, a lot of other people have their eyes on the money, too – including the CIA. But Lacy, Jack, and Roy have a plan. Their motives may differ, but one thing is certain: Together they’re going to make out like bandits.

One I have not read but that appears to be in the same vein as Bandits is Cuba Libre, a historical novel set during the Spanish-American war that is described this way in an allreaders.com review:

On his arrival in Havana just three days after the American battleship Maine is blown up in Havana harbor, Ben meets a collection of characters worthy of Elmore Leonard’s rich imagination. There’s the planter, Roland Boudreaux, his lovely girl friend Amelia Brown and his second in command Victor Fuentes, who is to take delivery of the horses. There’s also a vicious member of the Guardia Civil, Lionel Travalera and a hotheaded Spanish officer, Teo Barbon. Tyler kills Barbon in a gunfight and ends up in Havana’s notorious Morro Castle, along with one of the few survivors of the Maine’s destruction, Virgil Webster.

Slipping in and out of the story is Chicago Tribune reporter, Neely Tucker, a source of much of the background information about the coming war between America and Spain – and how it will affect Tyler.

Amelia and Tyler fall in love at first sight, and get together after a wild gunfight between Cuban revolutionaries and the guards at a nearly abandoned prison to which Tyler and Webster have been transferred. Amelia – fed up with the life of the idle rich and disgusted at the treatment of the poor sugar workers – and the revolutionaries develop a bizarre scheme to raise money for the revolution. They will tell Boudreaux that she has been kidnapped and demand $40,000 in ransom.

One of Leonard’s novels—Comfort to the Enemy—can be read online at his website. It appeared originally as a serialized novel in the NY Times, perhaps as a way of fulfilling the role once assigned to him as “Detroit’s Charles Dickens”. These are related tales about a character named Carl Webster, whose crime-fighting career began in the 1920s. The final section has him tracking down Nazi war criminals. This is how the novel begins:

A German prisoner of war at the camp called Deep Fork had taken his own life, hanged himself two nights ago in the compound’s washroom. Carl Webster was getting ready to look into it. Carl’s boss Bob McMahon, 17 years the United States marshal at Tulsa, said there was a question of whether the man did it on his own or was helped. McMahon shook his head over it.

“I doubt you’ll learn what happened. He’s a grenadier, the dead guy, Willi Martz. You ask about it, they look down their nose at you, deciding if they want to tell you anything.”

“I know what you mean,” Carl said. “Some of ‘em ever talk to you, it’s like they’re doing you a favor. But then they march off to work like the Seven Dwarfs singing the panzer song, Heiß uber Afrikas boden. Or the one about Horst Wessel, that pimp they call a Nazi saint. I never saw a bunch of guys liked to sing so much. And they’re serious about it. You imagine GIs singing like that?”

There’s little indication in the biographical material I have seen on Leonard that would explain his sympathy for leftists in Nicaragua or Cuba. Perhaps this is just a function of living during the Great Depression or else just one more indication that he is simply carrying out the essential function of the novelist which is to describe the human condition. While you can be a reactionary novelist (V.S. Naipul and Martin Amis—a fan of Leonard I should add—come to mind), most tend to reflect the contradictions of the society that they live in.

In a February 15, 1996 interview with the New York Times, Leonard stated “My heros are John O’Hara and Steinbeck and Hemingway. I studied Hemingway. I loved the white space on the pages. It meant there was plenty of dialogue to move the story along.”

My recommendation, of course, is to read Elmore Leonard but if you want a good introduction to his work based on a film adaptation, I’d recommend the Steven Soderbergh’s Out of Sight that featured George Clooney as a bank robber who has an affair with a US Marshal on his trail, played by Jennifer Lopez. Soderbergh really has an affinity for Leonard’s style and Scott Frank’s screenplay retains the witty dialog of the original novel for the most part. (Frank also wrote the screenplay for Get Shorty, another adaptation of a Leonard novel.)

The FX show is not without its charms but is simply not in the same league as Soderbergh’s movie. The main character is Raylan Givens, a US Marshal who has been exiled to his home town in Harlan County, Kentucky—home of the militant labor struggles recorded in Barbara Kopple’s 1976 documentary—after gunning down a gangster in a busy Miami restaurant. Givens, who might be described as a hair-trigger type personality, is played by Timothy Olyphant, a young actor who bears a striking resemblance to Bill Paxton and even sounds like him.

In the premier episode, Givens investigates the murder of a neo-Nazi carried out by an old friend named Boyd whose father, like Givens’s, worked in the coal mines. Boyd fought in the first Gulf War and became a white supremacist somewhere along the line. There is not much care taken in the development of his character, especially politically. He is prone to mix rants about mountaintop removal, a pet peeve of the environmentalist movement in Kentucky, with denunciations of the Jews, Blacks and immigrants. The character will be immediately recognizable to anyone who has seen “Law and Order”, a convenient villain that plays to an audience’s liberal sensibility.

That being said, the show is still worth watching if only for some of the dry Elmore Leonard humor that shines through all the otherwise conventional storytelling. The NY Times review makes this observation:

The dialogue sometimes has a snap that’s rare, or let’s just say nonexistent, in prime time. After Givens shoots a man in that Florida hotel and then, upon being transferred to his home state of Kentucky, promptly shoots another, his new boss warns him that he might be getting a reputation. “Put it like this: If you was in the first grade, and you bit somebody every week, they’d start to think of you as a biter.”

At any rate, a second-rate adaptation of pop culture icon Elmore Leonard, like his fellow icon Stephen King, is better than first-rate CSI or Law and Order episodes—at least that’s my opinion. Check it out on Tuesday at 10pm for yourself.