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Swag and The Moonshine War - Still Out of Print

I have to keep bringing this subject up every so often.  Below are the last U.S. paperback reprints dating from the early 90s.

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“Putting Bad into the Good Guys and Good into the Bad Guy”

The Advertiser (Australia)
BYLINE: by Ian Orchard

Up in Honey’s Room

A NEW Elmore Leonard is always greeted with anticipation for the style, the characters and the dialogue. And even though Leonard is now in his 80s and this is his 41st novel, his skills show no sign of waning.

The plot’s another story. What starts off as an intriguing departure for Leonard - a spy ring in World War II America - suddenly veers back into more familiar territory for the climax.

The story starts in 1939. Honey Deal, sassy, sexy, maybe too modern for the times, has just divorced Walter Schoen, a German who was born on the same day in the same hospital and looks exactly the same as Heinrich Himmler, the Nazi.

Fast-forward to 1945 and the FBI comes knocking on Honey’s door to question her about her husband’s involvement with a German spy ring, headed by Vera Mezwa and her cross-dressing lover/slave Bohdan.

There’s also Jurgen Schrenk, a German Afrika Korps officer, and Otto Penzler, an SS major, who escape from a PoW camp and are being sheltered by Schoen.

Carl Webster, a U.S. marshal, is on the trail of the two escapees. Carl is attracted to Honey, but manages to stay true to his wife, despite the temptations put in his way. The sexual tension adds spice. Honey consoles herself with Jurgen, making her a traitor for harbouring a PoW.

Her hapless ex-husband, Walter, is a figure of ridicule.

Fearing that some accident at birth has somehow robbed him of the greatness he should be sharing with his doppelganger, he reveals his grand plan to remove himself from under his shadow and to strike a blow for the Fuhrer. Suddenly, cross-dressing Bohdan embarks on an unforeshadowed orgy of killing for the flimsiest of reasons, and a tale of espionage turns into pretty much a standard crime novel. It’s not so much a twist as a U-turn.

Leonard’s genius is putting bad into the good guys and good into the bad guys, so that we forgive them their flaws. In the same way, we can also forgive Leonard his flaws for the enjoyment he brings. But here’s a test: If this were a first novel, what would we make of it then? The answer would be to lick our lips in anticipation of better things to come.

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The Season’s Best Language Books

Boston.com (The Boston Globe)
By Jan Freeman

Present tense

When I saw the advance copy of “Elmore Leonard’s 10 Rules of Writing” (Morrow, $14.95), I wanted to disapprove. It’s the very essence of stocking stuffer: A book made by padding and packaging a few words by a famous author.

Funny words, yes: “Never open a book with weather.” “Keep your exclamation points under control.” Useful, too, except - as Leonard admits - when they aren’t. But they’re freely available on the Web. And the book design scatters sentences one to a page, including some not designed to fly solo.

But the hardcover won me over. The illustrations, by Joe Ciardiello, are perfectly Leonardesque; the paper is art-book luxurious; and all that blank space will be useful for scribbling dissents and counter-examples, as any self-respecting would-be author will do.

 

 

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Elmore and The True West

POSTED BY RON FORTIER

The Complete Western Stories of Elmore Leonard.

A good magnetic compass will always point to what is called “true North.” After having finished this whopping big book, I found myself thinking the one clear cut theme throughout these thirty-one stories was that they all pointed “true West.” Social historians have for years claimed a big part of this country’s moral fiber was shaped during the post-Civil War years during our expansion west. The era of the “wild west” and the cowboys somehow infused itself onto our cultural consciousness. From the early dime novels to the rampant production of the silent B movies, tales of the old west have imbedded themselves into the identity of what it is to be an American.

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