Tishomingo Blues

[...] Cool. That's Elmore Leonard. Not kid cereal cool, or Saturday morning cartoon cool, or Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure cool; but Cool. The kind of pure, simple Cool that runs like a knowing thread from blues to bebop to beat, Hank to Johnny to Waylon, quintessentially American Cool. And if Cool is the man, then Cool must be the man's world: spotting Cool, playing Cool, being Cool enough to get someone to blow their cool. The man's men and women either have it or don't. And woe be those who don't. Cool backs the action in Tishomingo Blues, Sir Elmore's 37th (count 'em) romp through the mythology of American Crime. It is a mythology he has played a large part in creating. Foresaking his hometown of Detroit ("Cleveland without the glitter") and his much made of mean Miami streets, Leonard descends into a Delta almost as foreign - and as brutal - as the Rwanda of his brilliant Pagan Babies. The place: Tunica County, Mississippi, a big muddy swim from Arkansas, where poverty is next to Godliness. Or used to be anyway, before the casinos came a callin'. Now that there's gambling in them thar hills things have taken on a whole new meanin' - money. And with the grab bag comes the crooks, kooks and otherwise exploitative characters. And oh what a terrific blend of high-living low life. In no particular order Tishomingo Blues boasts a weathered - but Cool - carny high diver; a slick, smooth and crafty D-Town hustler (Cool, natch); a poor honest soul made whole by unlucky love and Jenny Crank diet plans; a half-bit ex-con former Sheriff's Deputy and his inbred Dixie Mafia sidekicks; an Outfit chieftain and his two-timing trophy girl; and last but never least, Chickasaw Charlie, a once dim light of big league backlots, who makes a sore point of providing innocuous running commentary from his low rent hustler's perch - a pitching cage. Then of course there's action, brass-white-knuckled action. Leonard pits the cornbread Cosa Nostra against the breakaway Motor City mobsters on a field reenactment of some obscure Civil War battle and creates another a showdown worthy of Peckinpah. Come to think of it, it's a wonder Peckinpah never made motion picture magic of Leonard's work - nearly everyone else has. Frankenheimer, Ferrara, Tarentino, and Soderbergh are but a few who struck celluloid gold filming Leonard's more modern shoot 'em ups. While any of the early wild westerns - 3:10 To Yuma (Glenn Ford, 1957), Hombre (Paul Newman, '67) and Joe Kidd (Clint Eastwood, '72) - are the stuff of gunslinger legend. In Tishomingo Blues, the legend continues, a legend of lives lived hard and fast. In fact, bluesman Robert Taylor (after the "Homes" in Chicago?) talkin' about Roy Scheider doing Bob Fosse in All That Jazz, best sums-up the Leonard legend as thus: "the man living every minute of his life till his very way of living kills him. Beautiful." In an America where bootstraps conceal pistols and Horatio Alger robs banks, Leonard is the perfect chronicle

i'm tempted to say that anyone who rates a leonard novel lower than a 4 is missing the point. but i already did. look fellow readers, you'll find yourself comparing Dutch Leonard ONLY to himself. one elmore leonard novel may fall short of another, but all elmore leonard novels are outstanding entertainments.

Who but Elmore Leonard could tie together Mississippi Gambling Casinos, a daredevil high diver, Civil War reenactors, redneck meth dealers, a self promoting washed up major league pitcher and a slick Detroit wheeler-dealer who has a picture of his lynched great-grandfather that he uses pretty much as a calling card. The wheeler-dealer, Robert Taylor, crisply delivers lines, and you can picture Delroy Lindo playing the part in the film. You can almost here him say the lines as you read the book. Taylor is certainly one of the most interesting of all of Leonard's charecters. Dennis Lenahan, the diver, plays his straight man, or is it the other way around? Taylor plays the other charecters like a puppeteer. The twist and turns takes the reader through the plot's ups and downs like a roller coaster ride. Leonard's creativity and humor has never been better. Enjoy.

Dennis Lenahan performs from an 80-foot tower, diving into a puddle of water. Right now, he is performing at Billy Darwin?s Indian gambling casino in Tunica, Mississippi. For an opener, his derelict rigger Floyd gets killed. Dennis watches this from the top of his tower and also knows who the two killers are. And now things become complicated. We have ex-deputy Arlen Novis who, with his sidekicks, runs the local drug trade. Trying to muscle in is Robert Taylor, recently arrived from Detroit, where he used to run a youth gang. With him is Germano ?Jerry? Mularoni, specialist in blowing up things. Commentary from the sidelines is given by Charly, a former baseball player. Now it?s everybody against everybody, with Dennis in the middle. Even state cop John Rau becomes involved.How do we sort it out? By having a re-enactment of the Civil War Battle of Brice?s Roads. Everybody dress up in authentic costume, and let the battle start.Both author and reader have a lot of fun with this story. It is a magnificent sendup of Dixie and its hard core Civil War followers. Mr. Leonard has done it again..

Elmore Leonard has to be the king of weird plots and characters among authors currently writing. Who else could combine a high diver, a Native American ex-professional baseball player, Civil War reenactors, members of the Dixie Mafia, and other assorted oddballs into a coherent narrative, and make it work? It's almost impossible to relate the plot of this book, for sometime I wonder if he just wasn't making it up as he went along, and didn't know where it was going himself until it got there, but I was laughing out loud a lot of the way through this work. I found it so well written that I read it almost in one sitting, just to see where Mr. Leonard was going with some of his outrageousness! I hope you will enjoy it as much as I did.