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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