Martin Amis said Elmore makes Raymond Chandler look clumsy, but I read an opening paragraph like the one below and ask what Hemingway or Fitzgerald ever wrote that’s as terse and powerful.

<< The church had become a tomb where forty-seven bodies turned to leather and stains had been lying on the concrete floor the past five years, though not lying where they had been shot with Kalashnikovs or hacked to death with machetes. The benches had been removed and the bodies reassembled: men, women and small children laid in rows of skulls and spines, femurs, fragments of cloth stuck to mummified remains, many of the adults missing feet, all missing bones that had been carried off by scavenging dogs. >>

No, it really doesn’t get any better. And, nobody comes close in a body of work, now that we see so many of these stories joined together by the touchstones.

All through these books, too, there’s the kind of honesty that writers blab on about but so few actually deliver on. We’ve talked about Swag as a real turning point, and I always think of Frank’s “pussy speach” in that book. It pretty much summed up the entire “sexual revolution” in one paragraph with a punchline. It’s a lot different from that Pagan Babies stuff, but just as good.

The last two posts clearly state why Elmore Leonard is not just a mystery writer.

He is Hemingway and Tarantino.

Great posts!