Thursday, November 02, 2006
Hong Kong Review of The Hot Kid
South China Morning Post
Charmaine Chan
The Hot Kid
by Elmore Leonard
HarperCollins, HK$95
Elmore Leonard is a master when it comes to pace - not to mention dialogue, characters and setting. Just how skillful he is in all these departments can be seen in The Hot Kid, the 80-year-old author’s 40th or so novel. The protagonist of the title is Car(los) Webster of the US Marshals Service.
His father is a rich oil man by accident and pecan farmer by choosing. Their foils are the bank robber Jack Belmont and his father, another
black-gold millionaire. Set in depression-scarred Oklahoma, the novel entertains with robbers, molls and speakeasies - the subject of interest of one Tony Antonelli of True Detective magazine. It’s to this crime hack that Webster partly owes his fame, although he’s undeniably good with a gun, bad with felons and smooth with the ladies. Written with a keen ear, although some sentences would have benefited from closer editing, The Hot Kid is rollicking fun until the inevitable showdown between Webster and Belmont. Who wins ultimately determines the way in which readers will think of the book: as a prolonged chuckle or a tragedy in disguise.
The underlined part cracks me up.
