29 April, 2001: The Hunted
Kicking off the literary year, on Saturday I finished Elmore Leonard's The Hunted. I love Leonard's books -- they're popcorn, but they're very well-written popcorn, and unlike Stephen King (another author of choice for lazy weekend reading), Leonard's books are short. The Hunted is collected in a three-book anthology, Dutch Treat, and my friend Andrew laughed at the size of it. "Elmore Leonard books are meant to be read in an afternoon!" Indeed. And so I did. The Hunted has a rather trite plot -- a man on the run from mob hitmen in Israel turns the tables on them -- but it overcomes the tired set-up. The hitmen come off as real characters, form one thing, because Leonard can't help but make his characters three-dimensional. And it's not a Hemingwayesque "finding your inner killer" sort of yarn, unlike a rather awful Robert Parker book I read with a similar kind of plot. The main character is a sleazy accountant; he doesn't want to find his inner killer -- a Marine from the U.S. Embassy gets sucked into the plot, and he's the one who ends up fighting back. A good afternoon's reading. Elmore Leonard novels should get adapted for film more; the plots are dandy, there's rarely enough material to take the film much over two hours, and since Leonard -- like many crime writers -- is shooting for a transparent, deadpan prose (and hitting it; good Leonard prose is about two steps removed from Raymond Carver's), not much gets lost in the transfer to a visual medium. Maybe the relative success of Jackie Brown and Out of Sight will pave the way for more Leonard adaptions, because the only other one I've seen (Cat Chaser) was awful.