Book Review : A Fast Read Amid the Explosions

Freaky Deaky by Elmore Leonard (Arbor House/Morrow: $18.95, 341 pages)

It’s impossible not to love Elmore (Dutch) Leonard.

Here is a man in his mid-60s, a devoted Midwesterner, a World War II veteran, a recovering alcoholic, who spent more than 30 years in the salt mines of literature, pounding out pulp Westerns and then hard-boiled detective fiction. “The Big Bounce,” his first effort at writing something other than a Western, was turned down by 84 publishers and movie producers. He was 60 before his name appeared on a best-seller list.

Today, Leonard is hot. He commands those multimillion-dollar advances that are the Big Spin of the lottery that passes for book publishing in America. The photograph on the dust jacket of his new book, “Freaky Deaky,” is by Annie Leibovitz--”for the American Express Card,” an apparent reference to the kind of commercial endorsement that is a sure sign of celebrity. His publisher circulates a profile that appeared in Esquire--”Elmore Leonard is the literary Lana Turner”--and “Freaky Deaky” is festooned with blurbs by, of all people, George Will and Walker Percy. The world has discovered Leonard at last.

It is somewhat harder to love the new book itself, a hard-boiled version of “The Big Chill” set in Detroit and populated by burnt-out baby boomers who walk through a melodrama of bombs, extortion, sexual assault, drugs, and safe sex while still in the thrall of the ‘60s. But my complaints about “Freaky Deaky” are small and mostly beside the point. Leonard, who surely knows how to write a competent thriller, has written yet another one--and he deserves the adoring readership that he has only lately gathered.

As in all mystery fiction, the art of “Freaky Deaky” is found in its craft. And Leonard is a craftsman with a sure hand, even if he does not possess a soaring imagination. We have the familiar figure of the contemporary knight errant--Chris Mankowski, a Detroit cop who has been suspended from the force but still goes to the rescue of a damsel in distress, an aspiring young actress named Greta Wyatt.

The villains are Skip and Robin, a couple of aging radicals turned criminal yuppies--once upon a time, they blew up ROTC buildings, and now they are shakedown artists looking for a big score. (Significantly, Robin is a failed writer of pulp fiction who decides she can make more money by blowing up rich people.)

Robin’s targets are the Ricks brothers, an unlikely pair of rich kids who are now middle-aged, tired, jaded (but still rich, and still partying hard), and their servant, Donnell, an even more unlikely fellow who used to be a Black Panther and is now a chauffeur and caretaker for the ludicrously gluttonous and alcoholic Woody Ricks. All of them--the cop, the bomb makers, the rich brothers and the houseman--are caught up in a reverie of the ‘60s, and the clockwork plot of “Freaky Deaky” is lubricated by their insistent reminiscences of those good old days.

Skip: “The first time I ever saw you, Lincoln Park in Chicago, man, that was a long time ago.”

Robin: “It was the Saturday before the start of the Democratic National Convention, Aug. 24, 1968.’ She was nodding, seeing it again. ‘Lincoln Park . . .’ ”

Banter, Jive and Monologue

The book owes little to the literary craftsmanship of, say, Raymond Chandler. Indeed, “Freaky Deaky” is all dialogue--cool banter, jive talk, interior monologue. Virtually everything we learn about the plot and the characters is imparted through conversation, and so the book reads like a radio script. (Or, more to the point, like a movie script.) Sometimes I found myself reading a particularly baffling bit of dialogue out loud just to figure out how it scanned: “Like we know Booker’s done guys we find out at Metro in long-term parking.”

And Leonard spares us any troubling allusions to art or letters. Rather, he defines his story and his characters solely in terms of various minor icons of the popular culture: Huckleberry Hound, “Barney Miller,” Sigourney Weaver, “Dance Fever,” Mel Gibson, “Lethal Weapon.” (As a child of the ‘50s, I grew up with Huckleberry Hound, and even I found the reference to be a little obscure.) When describing the physical appearance of Chris Mankowski, he resorts to the laziest and most calculating kind of shorthand: “You know who Esther thinks you look like? Robert Redford.” “Come on.” “I’m not kidding.”

Carping of Reviewers

Leonard, I am sure, will be untroubled by the carping of book reviewers. So will his readers. What we seek in “Freaky Deaky”--and what Leonard gives us--is a fast read, lots of shooting and explosions, a number of couplings, a dose of nostalgia, some cool talk and some hot action.

For example, on the very day I started reading “Freaky Deaky,” my wife came home from her last class after three years of graduate school, put down her copy of “Object Relations in Psychoanalytic Theory,” and announced: “Now I want to read something light.”

“Ann,” I said, “have I got a book for you.”