posted on 06 Oct 2022

Rum Punch by Elmore Leonard

Elmore Leonard’s 30th novel, Rum Punch is the source for what might be, for a good number of people, a much more familiar confection - Quentin Tarantino’s movie, Jackie Brown. The film director inevitably made a number of tweaks - a change of location and an altered ethnicity and name for the lead - but there was no real need for wholesale rewrites because this is one of Leonard’s most straight-forward plots.

Would-be underworld gangster and gun-runner, Robbie Ordell is technically a rich man - he’s got half a million dollars tucked away from his nefarious dealings. But there’s a problem - it’s stuck in the Bahamas and he needs to smuggle it back to Miami. He’s reliant on Jackie Burke, an attractive 44 year old air stewardess, to bring the money in but she’s being tracked by a couple of Federal Agents and is in need of a bail-bondsman to get her out of their clutches. Step forward Max Cherry, a 57 year-old ex-cop with a failing marriage and more than a lick of Humphrey Bogart about him, who finds himself getting drawn into Jackie’s plans to stiff Ordell and wriggle out of the grip of the Feds.

Jackie’s plan, inevitably, is to double-cross Ordell, to end up with the money and - maybe - Max. Along the way, of course, there’s the usual Elmore Leonard wise-cracking dialogue and plenty of gratuitous violence - which usually originates from avarice  and ineptitude. But I always find that the thing I most enjoy about an Elmore Leonard novel is the way he creates totally engaging and believable monsters - not always the main characters but those that float around the edges of the story. Ordell’s unsavoury ex-con sidekick, Louis Gara is a little time bomb of potential violence who leaves you constantly feeling that he’s likely at any minute to spin out of control and haphazardly slaughter someone. He does, of course, and the victim is another great creation - Ordell’s blousey sometime girlfriend, Melanie.

What I especially liked about this book is the comparative restraint Leonard shows when it would have been so easy to go over the top and turn the characters into circus characters. This isn’t an author that critics will normally praise for restraint and so when it comes along, as Publisher’s Weekly in its review says, it’s noteworthy:

“Like a pulled punch, the author's latest evocation of lives on the periphery has a somewhat restrained quality, although the characters here, especially the women, are vintage Leonard…., and the dialogue is as authentic as conversations overheard in a mall restaurant. “

Rum Punch is Elmore Leonard at the top of his game as the good people at Kirkus noted:

“Leonard's control of this complex scenario and its brilliantly realized actors is breathtaking. Like the title says, it's a heady brew.”

Not as literary as Raymond Chandler and not as outright crazy as vintage Carl Hiaasen, I always find Elmore Leonard a refuge when you want something to read that isn’t going to overtax your concentration but isn’t going to insult your intelligence. His books are easy to find in paperback and won’t cost you a fortune so why not get a copy of this and put it aside for when you’re looking for something to take on a train journey or you just need a  bit of high quality escapism.

 

Terry Potter

October 2022