Another Leonardo : RUM PUNCH <i> By Elmore Leonard</i> , <i> (Delacorte: $21; 297 pp.)</i>

When he edits his manuscripts and comes across a page that sounds written , Elmore Leonard told a writers conference a few years ago, he throws it out in horror and revulsion. Leonard is indeed a minimalist writer, like the late Georges Simenon, who wrote his novels in 14 days and allotted one of the days entirely to removing adverbs and adjectives.

Leonard lets his characters reveal themselves in talk (torrents of it, all wonderful) and action, described in terse narrative that echoes the mind-set and vocabulary of the players (these days almost always lowlifes operating along a Detroit-Miami axis). And the results are irresistible. In “Rum Punch,” his 30th novel, Leonard reintroduces an interracial pair of hoods named Ordell Robbie and Louis Gara, whom we first met in “The Switch” in 1978. Both have been guests of the government at intervals since. Ordell is now a medium-sized dealer in illicit arms. Louis, more recently emerged from the slammer, is working as a collector for a bail bondsman.

Into these lives falls Jackie Burke, a stewardess working for a small shuttle line in the Caribbean and augmenting her wages by smuggling stacks of money into Miami for laundering. She is busted by a couple of undercover agents who, like many of Leonard’s good guys, are only tolerably good. Jackie is not the game; the Jamaican money man and Ordell are the targets, she the lure. Leonard depicts women very well, and Jackie is a resourceful sort who can sting a sting or recross a doublecross.

Leonard does his homework; you have to believe he’s learned enough about bail-bonding to start a shop of his own. He knows Miami as well as he knows Detroit: where people live and how they live and how marriages fail and what racial animosity, subtle or shouted, sounds like.

He continually invents characters who lie, cheat, steal, rob, deceive, betray, maim, kill and stomp on any remaining niceties of civilized behavior that get in their way. The wonder is that he makes these figures comprehensible and occasionally even sympathetic. Why and when Jackie stopped being just another stew with a bright smile and a way with trays is not really spelled out; but when the smell of cordite has drifted away, the least malevolent of the cast are still on their feet, and we could hardly be more pleased.