Road Dogs: a Genre Reader exclusive review

Elmore Leonard is no stranger to crime fiction. Road Dogs is his latest release, and it features Leonard's trademarked quirky ensemble of characters and heavy dialogue. One of his infamous Rules of Writing is to leave out the parts that most people skip, and that rule is in full effect here.

This novel features the welcome return of no less than three memorable characters from previous books, though knowledge of those books is not necessary to the enjoyment of this one.

The action begins with Jack Foley (from Out of Sight) being driven back to Florida to reconvene his 30-year prison sentence for bank robbery. In the van, he makes the acquaintance of crooked Cuban Cundo Rey (from LaBrava). The two soon become friends--road dogs, in the prison parlance, a term that connotes loyalty unto death--and Rey hooks Foley up with a new lawyer, a professional sentence cutter by the name of Megan Norris. Rey shills out plenty of cash to help Foley get out of prison early, to have kidnapping and escape attempt charges dropped, and then to set Foley up with a place to stay in sunny California once he is a free man. Foley ends up released weeks before Rey, and despite the Cuban's assurances that Foley doesn't owe him a thing, the bank robber suspects that Rey will come calling on the check at some point.

Still, a free house valued at millions of dollars is nothing to give a pass to, and it is in California that Foley meets Rey's girl Dawn Navarro (from Riding the Rap). Dawn is a psychic, and has supposedly been faithful to Rey (despite his long stretch in prison), but when Foley meets her, he soon discovers that she's been less than honest about her fidelity (she's got needs. Lots and lots of needs), less than honest about her motivations for being with Cundo Rey (she's so into his money), and less than honest about her uses of her supposed psychic abilities (she runs ghost busting scams on the local rich types, and hopes to get Foley involved). As Rey's release looms, Foley finds himself caught between a pretty good sounding scam with Dawn, a blossoming romance with a local "haunted" actress, and loyalty to Rey. Add to these main conflicts a slew of secondary characters, including several gangbangers and an overzealous FBI agent who is monitoring Foley 24/7 for one more bank job, and you have what might have been a complex mess of a novel. With so many characters to keep track of and so many plot & subplot threads going on, it takes a deft hand to keep everything straight. However, Leonard has been writing long enough to produce a quick, seemingly effortless read from this complexity. There is plenty going on, though the plot is less about crime than it is about characters. These are all characters with wants and with the impulses to go some very nasty places to obtain their desires.

Much of the action is delivered through the dialogue, and Leonard has a great ear for the nuances of his character speech patterns. This book (like many of Leonard's works) seems to be written with specific actors in mind (particularly George Clooney, who played the Foley character in Stephen Soderbergh's adaptation of Out of Sight), and while this gimmick might have resulted in caricatures, Road Dogs still feels fresh. There is quite a bit of humor, healthy doses of suspense, some thoughtful exchanges, and more basketball than I've seen in a novel since John Updike's Rabbit, Run.

An unusual choice, this time around, finds a supernatural presence in the book. Leonard never fully addresses this as being real or some long con--is Dawn Navarro actually psychic or simply a good reader of people, is actress Danialle Karmanos actually haunted?--and like much of the book it has the feel of being both at the same time. How the reader absorbs this element depends upon their own taste, but a case can certainly be made that this presence or absence of the Unknowable speaks as a metaphor for the whole of the book. Is there something outside of these characters acting upon them, or do they do what they do because of independent choice? A fascinating question by which to read the book in very different ways. (Is my English degree showing? Sorry about that.)

Road Dogs turned out to be rather different than what I was expecting. Truth be told, I was waiting for the book to veer into a One Last Bank Job shtick, but Elmore Leonard deftly avoids that cliché to focus on a group of characters doing what they do to get by in sunny California. Sometimes surprises of this nature can prove disappointing, but in this case I was pleasantly surprised, entertained, and given a few things to think about. I don't ask for much more from my leisure-time reading, and often don't even get this much.

Road Dogs by Elmore Leonard
262 pages
William Morrow
Published 2009
Mass Market Paperback due out 2010

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Murder of Crows: a Genre Reader Exclusive Review

This slender volume is a third party adventure module for Chaosium's Call of Cthulhu role playing game. It is a single adventure, good for a couple of evenings of play, and it is set in the horrific world of Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos.

Reviewing a role playing game module in the context of Genre Reader is a tricky thing. These sorts of books serve two major purposes: first, they tell a story, but they do so in a different way than typical fiction does. In some ways, they act like a screenplay in that adventure modules are designed to primarily act like a blueprint, a springboard for other people to play a game set in this particular tale/world/whatever. Sometimes this duality of purpose results in a poorly realized, somewhat boring read: a string of tangentially related encounters for players to hack and bash their way through in the search (to paraphrase Mel Brooks from Spaceballs) for more loot. Not every role playing game book is written the same, however. There are plenty of books that both tell an intriguing tale and lend themselves to allowing gaming groups to expand on the material and ultimately to twist it to their purposes.

The granddaddy of delightful RPG reads is not Dungeons and Dragons. It is Call of Cthulhu. Based on the works of H.P. Lovecraft (and others), the books are lighter on the mechanics of gaming (aka crunch) and very heavy on atmosphere and good old storytelling. There are some gaming supplements that I enjoy reading for the pleasure of reading, and Call of Cthulhu books are those.

Though it is the first offering in the Cthulhu universe from a relatively new company (Super Genius Games), Murder of Crows is no exception to the trend of story driven adventure modules.

In CoC, players take on the roles of normal folks thrust into the dangerous and sanity shattering world of the Cthulhu Mythos. Murder of Crows poses an intriguing mystery story set in the town of Bethlehem, New Hampshire during the Roaring 1920s. The town itself has recently been beset by thousands of crows. The birds choke the town's rooftops, trees, and telephone lines, watching the town. While this is eerie enough, the birds have also been attacking anyone who dares to venture into the woods outside of town. This has caused a major crimp in the local tourist season (always an important aspect of New England's culture and economy). It is up to the player characters to get to the bottom of the mystery.

The book itself is divided into three "Acts," though this is a pretty awful term for the three sections. For me, "Acts" suggests elements of a continuous narrative. However, here the three individual components are quite different. Act 1 details the town of Bethlehem itself, the personalities therein, and provides plenty of clues and red herrings should the players seek to interview the local populace. This is a charming section with some nicely sketched personalities. Act 2 details the series of escalating supernatural events that plague the investigation into the mystery. It is a relatively short chapter and the contents are meant to be incorporated into the activities of Act 1 (see what I mean?). The final Act is the closest we have to a traditional Act structure, as it details the final confrontation between the players' characters and the menace of the story.

Which is not the ancient, tentacle bedecked horror I was expecting to find. The menace behind this story is actually quite human, though it plays quite nicely into the themes and motifs found in Lovecraft's fiction. Imagine that!

Included in this book are some handouts, an appendix for continuing game play in Bethlehem, NH (which does take a paragraph or two to sell readers on the next module from Super Genius), and a quartet of premade characters for players too lazy or eager to start play to make their own.

While Murder of Crows strikes me as a surprise filled and well balanced module for game play, it also fell into the curious place of being something that was simply fun to read for its own sake. Not necessarily the book to sell general readers on starting the habit of picking up role playing books instead of the latest mass market paperback, this is nevertheless a welcome addition to my shelf of gaming reads. I look forward to more Cthulhu adventures from SGG.

Murder of Crows by Stan! (Cover Art by Luis Guaragna)
32 pages
Super Genius Games
Published 2008

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