Monday, May 16, 2005

Jay McShann

Jack Batten
The Toronto Star

Something odd and distracting occurs half way through The Hot Kid, Elmore Leonard’s new novel: a living person, as opposed to a fictional character, turns up as a figure in the story. The person is Jay McShann, the Kansas City jazz and blues pianist who still performs today at age 89 (in fact, he appeared at the Montreal Bistro in Toronto just last month).

Jack Batten
The Toronto Star

Something odd and distracting occurs half way through The Hot Kid, Elmore Leonard’s new novel: a living person, as opposed to a fictional character, turns up as a figure in the story. The person is Jay McShann, the Kansas City jazz and blues pianist who still performs today at age 89 (in fact, he appeared at the Montreal Bistro in Toronto just last month).

The Hot Kid takes place in Oklahoma, with side trips to McShann’s home territory in Kansas City and other nearby spots of lively interest, during the decades between the two world wars. Most of the action, of which there is plenty, centres on Carl Webster, a U.S. marshal who kills a lot of people but is fair-minded about it. When he arrests bank robbers and other villains, he leaves his gun in its holster, warning the bad guys, “If I have to pull my weapon, I’ll shoot to kill.”

Carl is the son of Virgil Webster, the marine in Leonard’s 1998 novel, Cuba Libre, set in Cuba through the years of the Spanish American War in the late 19th century. Virgil was on board the USS Maine when it got blown up in Havana Harbour. He survived, fought against the Spanish dons in the war and returned home to Okmulgee, Oklahoma, where he found himself rich when oil gushed out of the earth on his pecan farm.

Carl is more than a chip off the old block. He’s cool in the manner of the central characters in most Leonard novels, supremely self-confident without needing to make much of an effort about it. Virgil thinks his son is a show-off, always liking to get his name in the newspapers after he’s had to pull his weapon and kill a bank robber. Virgil allows that showing off runs in the family.

Carl’s major rivalry in the book, the enmity that drives the plot until the very last page, is with Jack Belmont, a truly nasty piece of work. Like Carl, Jack is the son of a rich Oklahoma oilman. Unlike Carl, Jack is spoiled rotten and a psychopath who enjoys killing for its own sake. Even his girlfriend says of Jack, “there’s something wrong with his head.”

It’s partly to track down Jack that Carl travels to Kansas City. The other reason for the journey is to look for Louly Brown, the pretty little thing Carl is sweet on. His first night in town, Carl falls into a conversation in a club with a black guy who introduces himself as Jay McShann the piano man.

In four pages of dialogue, McShann tells Carl his life story. How he grew up in Muskogee, Okla., taught himself music and jobbed with bands around the southwest; how he now works with his own trio in K.C., the great jazz town. Then McShann tells Carl about the drinking club where Louly Brown is employed to wait on the gentlemen while wearing only a skimpy teddy.

When McShann exits the scene and the book, he leaves behind puzzlement. Readers ask themselves, what is a real person doing in this novel? The first question is soon followed by a second: If one character is real, is that the case with others in the book? Or, putting the second question another way, which people are real and which are made up?

As a service to all Leonard readers, I went to the Google search engine for the names of several characters in The Hot Kid, and found the answer to the second question to be apparently that all the rest are made up. Many real people, mostly Kansas City musicians, are referred to in passing - Julia Lee, Count Basie - but none of them enters into the story in the disruptive manner of McShann.

A couple of characters sound as if they might be from the real world. One is Cecil Guyton, a clever criminal lawyer, and another is Tony Antonelli, a writer for True Detective Mystery magazine. But Google has nothing that places either in the right time, place or profession.

Antonelli, who faithfully chronicles the activities of lawmen and bank robbers for his magazine, fills a similar role in The Hot Kid to one taken by the character Neely Tucker in Cuba Libra. Tucker is a foreign correspondent for the Chicago Times in the novel, and he is on the scene to record events in Cuba before and during the Spanish-American War.

The name “Neely Tucker” produces several Google entries, but the real person by that name is a figure from today’s present, a newspaperman whose curriculum vitae includes a period as a foreign correspondent for the Detroit Free Press. Leonard, a Detroit resident, seems to have been having a little fun in Cuba Libra with the Neely name.

Having fun must be what Leonard had in mind with Jay McShann in The Hot Kid. If so, it’s a terrible idea. All that the presence of McShann accomplishes in the book is to send mystified readers to their computers to Google the names of all the other marginal characters. McShann is a distraction, and Leonard himself emerges from The Hot Kid, which is otherwise a very entertaining book, as the sort of fellow that Carl Webster might be: a bit of a show-off.

Jack Batten’s Whodunit appears every two weeks.

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