One of the best crime novels of the century?
Nicholas Lezard
GLITZ by Elmore Leonard
Viking, £8.95 He says to me, 'Don't go back, Fran, it's all artsy-craftsy over there now. Hurley Brothers Funeral Home, they changed the name to Death 'n' Things. The bars, you can't walk in you hit your head on the ferns in the hanging baskets. Where would our dads go for a drink?'
Although the reported speech of one of the more guilelessly vulgar characters in Elmore Leonard's latest work, this extract does show a pleasantly unusual resistance to Americana from an American. 'Over there', incidentally, is New York, terra incognita to nearly all of Leonard's charac- ters, and the speech is reported in the surveillance room of one of Atlantic City's largest casinos. Even the irredeemably tasteless are allowed their value judgments without the author pouring too much scorn on them. Mr Leonard's heroes are usually born in Detroit, frequently ending up in Miami. Glitz is slightly different, in that the hero hails from Miami and ends up in Atlantic City. The very mention of an American place-name carries its own morality, Detroit suggesting upstanding honesty, Atlantic City now a totem for fiscal depravity.
Elmore Leonard at the moment is suffer- ing from a rash of belated publicity. The New Musical Express recently dubbed him 'the prince of wild assholes with revolvers', while the Sunday Times colour supplement called him something else and went hoopla about how long Glitz has been on the best-seller lists. The book is also included in a Newsweek selection of the best ten crime novels this century, and allegedly sane men have compared Leonard to, inter alia, Dickens, Balzac, and Dostoevsky. Although par for the course for a writer of criminal fiction enjoying moderate atten- tion, one feels that none of this will go to Mr Leonard's head. He is, after all, 60 years old and correspondingly wise.
Glitz is the story of one Vincent Mora, a Miami detective beginning to curl at the edges, who, while on convalescent leave in Puerto Rico, has an affair of sorts with a local girl of extraordinary beauty and inversely proportional intelligence. She gets whisked off to an Atlantic City casino to be a 'hostess' (euphemism), and shortly after arriving manages to fall off an 18th-
storey balcony. Vincent, in the pioneering tradition of a detective-hero brought up on Dickens, Balzac, and Dostoevsky, assumes that She Was Pushed and goes off to do justice. The bulk of the rest of the novel concerns his trying to work out whether the culprit was any one of a succession of deeply unpleasant gangsters or an even more deeply unpleasant psychopath he keeps running into. I should point out that this rather jaded summary does the book little justice; but when faced with a jacket blurb that informs the gentle reader that the plot 'climbs and twists and turns, peaks with an electrifying climax, and doesn't come to rest until the reader is literally (sic) breathless', further enthusiasm seems a little bit pointless. Luckily the plot doesn't do anything of the kind. Such acrobatics, even if they do exist beyond the copywriter's feverish imagination, confine themselves to soap-operas.
What Vincent lacks by way of a decent upbringing (i.e. in Detroit) he makes up for in wisdom, here exemplified by a marked tendency to avoid physical heroics. Elmore Leonard himself has described the hero as being 'the only person not playing a role', and this is a rather good way of putting it. Only with a little help from Vincent do the Bad Guys succeed in bringing about their own undoing: 'Wonderful things can happen when you plant seeds of distrust in a garden full of assholes,' he says at one point to those of feebler intellect at a loss to understand his modus operandi. 'The thinking man's policeman', he is called by one of the Good Guys who finds a character free from unpleasant affectation a thing of wonder. Vincent is described early on as being 'tired if not sad', a turn of phrase that can mean either tired or sad or both: similarly, the whole book is shot through with a sense of exhausted perseverance. The prose itself is tired: a lax style indirect libre which quite often is speech that Leonard seems simply to have forgotten to put inside quotation marks. The effect, instead of being a grating faux-naïveté, is that of a man too tired, or seeing no need, to embroider the mot juste (funnily enough, no one has compared Leonard to Flaubert, yet). His characters say 'out a' as opposed to `outa' (as in 'out a his head'): the former, far less common locution illustrates both a faithful ear for the vernacular and a curious, distant respect for the mauling of grammar involved in its use. The virtue placed on the old-fashioned becomes apparent in the most incongruous places: after the psycho- path, Teddy, beats an elderly woman to death under the Boardwalk, he decides to rape her; the prose states that 'he hadn't intended making love to her', the quaint phrase 'making love' itself being, as the Americans say, 'brutalised'. In such a way, Leonard manages to convince in his study of evil, by noticing, like others before him, its banality.
Whether or not Mr Leonard deserves his current lionisation is difficult to say. Be- fore the critics felt obliged to work them- selves up and start bandying names of authors whose works they might possibly not have read exhaustively, they compared Leonard to Chandler. Whether this was laziness or insight doesn't really matter, as the association is rather more helpful than the Balzac angle. The notion of the moral man in the immoral universe is always a good one: the immorality of the universe is always defined as the habits of the time, and the morality of the man his resistance to those habits. Note that Vincent Mora's sleuthing in Glitz is unpaid, and that in an alarmingly health-conscious age he takes up smoking again. One complaint I might have had would have been that there is a little too much sex in this book; but upon noticing that the affair between Vincent and the Puerto Rican belle is described so tactfully that even a close third reading leaves me still unsure as to whether or not the Deed of Darkness actually takes place, I have decided that the fault lies with myself rather than the author.
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