Tishomingo Blues [Paperback]

The plot includes a murder witnessed from an 80-foot high dive, a Mississippi casino, the Dixie Mafia, and various sexual liasons, all leading up to the climax at a Civil War reenactment. The main character is Dennis, a high diver who's another of Leonard's likable guys with a few flaws. The "good-guys", good being a relative thing with Leonard, are Robert, a Jag-driving streetwise gansta' from Detroit; Charlie, a Native American who may have pitched for the Tigers in the World Series; and John Rau, a straight-as-an-arrow lawman. Bad guys include an ex-deputy who runs the Dixie Mafia and his henchmen. A variety of other folks swirl in and out of the story.

What's best about this book is how even though you're never really sure what will happen next, the characters never do anything you wouldn't expect them to do. The people in Elmore Leonard's stories are smart, funny, sexy, and completely true to their motives. This will certainly not be the last of his books which I read.

I've read only a few of Elmore Leonard's works, mostly from early on. Besides the tight plotting, sinister edge, and note-perfect dialogue, they all carried a kind of implicit moral heft.

So, despite its being manifestly better than 90% of the crime novels out there on the top lists, I was a bit disappointed in this venture. The plot meanders, its wheels amiably clanking rather than being ominously greased, and the cold-blooded killers we're supposed to root for seem to have nothing over the ones we're supposed to root against, except for a better sense of style. There goes that moral heft.

The rest of the master's strengths are still on display, though. And if it's not a page turner throughout, there are only a few slow stretches. There's the aging, philandering high-diver. The endearingly daffy subculture of Civil War re-enactors. The smoothly enigmatic blues fan from Chicago, arranging for a victory in his turf war with the inept local Mafia, which he intends to be as precisely choreographed as the battle of Brice's Cross Roads.

They all make for solid entertainment. But on the whole this will become more memorable within the canon of films based on Leonard (once the inevitable movie is made) than within the canon of his books.

The art of characterization is what Elmore Leonard does best. In fact, he may very well do it better than anyone else. This latest book is no exception to that. The plot can be a bit flimsy but it is the characters that bring it to life. Humor is also interspersed with the relatively casual and emotion free murders. The use of a Civil War reenactment provides a clever yet lighthearted approach to the ludicrous behavior of the bad guys and the really bad guys.