Elmore Leonard began his career churning out tales for Western pulp magazines. You can feel that dust coming off the range in his 40th novel, “The Hot Kid,” a slick-as-grease yarn about a marksman working for the federal marshals in Oklahoma in the 1930s.
Carl Webster, the novel’s hero, shoots his first bandit with a Winchester at age 15 for stealing cattle off his father’s ranch. A few years later he gets to even the score with an even meaner son-of-
a-gun named Emmett Long, whom Carl met as a kid when he was robbing a local store. It’s the first in a cycle of retributive killings that makes this novel about as bloody and violent as anything Leonard has written to date.
Like many of Leonard’s recent works, “The Hot Kid” features an ensemble cast that emerges into the story line cinematically, fully grown, so vivid it’s hard to appreciate they were ever an idea in a writer’s head. In addition to Carl, there’s Jack Belmont, who, like Carl, is the son of oil baron, but unlike Carl, takes this lineage and decides to become a bandit.
A simpler crime writer might have made this a question of right and wrong – it is, to a certain degree; killing is wrong – but to Leonard, it is also a question of style. After all, the book takes place in the era when gunslingers and the men who brought them to justice were the celebrities of the day. Instead of E! on cable TV, the public turned to True Detective magazine, and instead of Billy Bush, it was pulp writers like Tony Antonelli who brought them the latest fix.
In a way, Leonard is acting as our own Antonelli, bringing us the ins and outs of this time period as if it could be recaptured and spun back as entertainment. He’s nearing 80, and he is still the best in the business at convincing us what is possible. Here, for example, is the Grand Master describing Jack’s apprenticeship and its code of decency:
“He didn’t want to shoot Norm when he wasn’t looking. He didn’t want to call him out, either, Norman a dead shot with rifle or revolver. He’d already killed two cops chasing them out of Coalgate that time. Leaned out and drilled them through the windshield of the police car. The only person Jack had shot was the colored boy running from the mob during the race riot, when Jack was fifteen. It told me he ought to shoot somebody now that he was grown, get a feel for it.”
Although “The Hot Kid” doesn’t feature the zinging present-tenseness Leonard is best known for, the book seems more likely to endure than some of his pure pulp efforts. For among the Tommy guns and shootouts, there’s a wide-eyed wonder at work here that never turns the story soft. It’s as if Leonard is 8 years old all over again, marveling at his creation.
“I read somewhere that the most impressionable age for children is between 5 and 10,” Leonard once told an interviewer. “I was between 5 and 10 when all those desperadoes were roaming the Midwest and holding up banks. They were kind of folk heroes.” “The Hot Kid” adds a few to that roster, and you kind of think Jack Belmont could take Bonnie and Clyde any day.
John Freeman is a writer in New York.
The Hot Kid
By Elmore Leonard
Morrow, 312 pages, $25.95
