Still Cool

Dennis Lenahan, the chief protagonist of “Tishomingo Blues,” Elmore Leonard’s terrifically entertaining and darkly amusing 37th novel, is a simple enough fellow. But simple, in Elmore Leonard territory, does not equal normal.

Lenahan earns his pay ($300 a day) as “a professional exhibition diver,” leaping from the top of an 80-foot steel ladder into a 9-foot-deep tank that looks no bigger, from his high perch, than “a fifty-cent piece on the floor.” He’s a good performer. “But with divers,” Lenahan himself observes, “they say the better the performer, the less stable the personality.”

Lenahan’s stability and safety are endangered during a single-season, first-time engagement at the Tishomingo Lodge and Casino in Tunica, Miss., when, from atop his diving platform at twilight, he witnesses an ex-convict being shot to death by two members of the local “Dixie Mafia.”

The victim, a rigger hired to help Lenahan with his equipment, is sketched in a few deft strokes: “This was a man by the name of Floyd Showers from Biloxi, a skinny guy in his fifties with a sunken mouth and skidrow ways about him. He always had a pint of Maker’s Mark and cigarette butts in the pockets of the threadbare suitcoat he wore with his overalls, wore it even during the heat of the day.”

The killers know Lenahan knows what they did. But, as an intermediary explains, they figure that they have a don’t-ask-don’t-tell understanding with the high diver.

“Keep quiet or get shot,” Lenahan sums up. “That’s some deal.” Soon a whole gallery of quirky types is pushing Lenahan in new directions.

There’s Robert Taylor, the glib, blues-loving African American--”a guy with style and what he called his own agenda,” also a mum’s-the-word witness to the killing--who seems to ad-lib a new scam every day. “What’re you selling?” asks Lenahan, quickly drawn into Taylor’s magnetic orbit. “Myself, man,” he answers, “myself.”

And there’s Charlie Hoke, the Tishomingo Lodge’s “celebrity host,” an ex-ballplayer whose No. 1 fan is himself: “I’ve struck out Al Oliver, Gorman Thomas and Jim Rice. Darrell Evans, Mike Schmidt, Bill Madlock. Willie McGee, Don Mattingly, and I fanned Wade Boggs twice in the same game--if those names mean anything to you.”

And there’s Jerry Mularoni, the Detroit gangster come to Tishomingo to take part in a Civil War battle reenactment as Ulysses S. Grant. And there’s Mularoni’s wife, Anne, to whom Taylor is attracted.

“Was he still in love?” Taylor wonders of Mularoni. “It was hard to tell with a gangster. Robert believed [Jerry] loved [Anne] the way he loved a pair of good-looking alligator shoes he’d never let go of.”

Leonard’s method, here as in other books, is to throw his oddball characters together and see which way the plot bounces. Alliances form and break apart. Bluffs provoke counter-bluffs. Hidden motives emerge. As Taylor says, “Man, you know there’s always more to what you see going on than meets the eye.”

What’s going on in this tale, it emerges in time, is a move for control of the regional drug trade. Mularoni hopes to seize the territory from the local frontman and his Dixie Mafia cohorts and controllers. And he aims to use the Civil War battle reenactment to implement and cover up his cop. But Taylor, who’s sold the scheme to Mularoni, has his own covert agenda: Eliminate Mularoni and install himself as boss.

The folks in “Tishomingo Blues,” as they jockey for control of the local drug trade and one another’s destinies, are like a roomful of con artists playing liar’s poker with a deck of wild cards. It seems sure that more than one of them will be dealt a dead-man’s hand, especially given that certain guns in that Civil War battle reenactment are loaded with real bullets.

It’s instructive to note that Leonard entered the landscape of American letters from a highway built by Hemingway and John O’Hara, via an offramp marked George V. Higgins. Leonard learned nothing of use to him and his stories, he’s said, from poetic prose men like Raymond Chandler and Ross Macdonald (“those first-person guys”), but a lot from the dialogue-driven tales of O’Hara and from Higgins’ “The Friends of Eddie Coyle.”

Having turned himself from a Detroit ad man into a writer first of Westerns and then of crime fiction, Leonard crafts a lean narrative propelled by speech and descriptive sentences that move with the rhythm of talk.

The late writer Grover Lewis said American art comes disguised as entertainment. Leonard at his best is (like Hemingway and O’Hara and Higgins) a great entertainer. Not knowing for sure what people will do is part of the pleasure of reading “Tishomingo Blues.” Leonard’s characters live in a world in flux and, to their minds, almost anything is possible. We read his stories to see what happens next, but they surprise us with terse, poignant glimpses of our land and certain figures moving through it. If we peer hard at those figures, we may see exaggerated versions of ourselves: people trying to get from Point A to Point B in one piece, with a certain amount of grace.

How to rate the 37th novel by a 76-year-old author who’s in a class by himself? Compare it to his previous work?

“Tishomingo Blues” is funnier than “Cuba Libre” but not as droll as “Get Shorty.” Its mise-en-scene isn’t as hip as “Be Cool’s,” but it’s more fun than “Stick’s.” This novel is less poignant than “Pagan Babies,” but it’s more moving than “Maximum Bob.”

In other words, “Tishomingo Blues” is typical Elmore Leonard. Who could ask for anything more?

*

From ‘Tishomingo Blues’

“Mr. Darwin, this is Dennis Lenahan, world champion high diver. We met one time in Atlantic City.”

Billy Darwin said, “We did?”

“I remember I thought at first you were Robert Redford, only you’re a lot younger. You were running the sports book at Spade’s.” Dennis waited. When there was no response he said, “How high is your hotel?”

This Billy Darwin was quick. He said, “You want to dive off the roof?”

“Into your swimming pool,” Dennis said, “twice a day as a special attraction.”

“We go up seven floors.”

“That sounds just right.”

“But the pool’s about a hundred feet away. You’d have to take a good running start, wouldn’t you?”

Right there, Dennis knew he could work something out with this Billy Darwin. “I could set my tank right next to the hotel, dive from the roof into nine feet of water. Do a matinee performance and one at night with spotlights on me, seven days a week.”

“How much you want?”

Dennis spoke right up, talking to a man who dealt with high rollers. “Five hundred a day.”

“How long a run?”

“The rest of the season. Say eight weeks.”

“You’re worth twenty-eight grand?”

That quick, off the top of his head.

“I have setup expenses--hire a rigger and put in a system to filter the water in the tank. It stands more than a few days it gets scummy.”

“You don’t perform all year?”

“If I can work six months I’m doing good.”

“Then what?”

“I’ve been a ski instructor, a bartender ....”

Billy Darwin’s quiet voice asked him, “Where are you?”

In a room at the Fiesta Motel, Panama City, Florida, Dennis told him, performing every evening at the Miracle Strip amusement park. “My contract’ll keep me here till the end of the month,” Dennis said, “but that’s it. I’ve reached the point .... Actually I don’t think I can do another amusement park all summer.”

There was a silence on the line, Billy Darwin maybe wondering why but not curious enough to ask.

“Mr. Darwin?”

He said, “Can you get away before you finish up there?”

“If I can get back the same night, before showtime.”

Something the man would like to hear.

He said, “Fly into Memphis. Take 61 due south and in thirty minutes you’re in Tunica, Mississippi.”

Dennis said, “Is it a nice town?”

But got no answer. The man had hung up.

*

Tom Nolan is the author of “Ross Macdonald: A Biography” and the editor of “Strangers in Town: Three Newly Discovered Mysteries by Ross Macdonald.”