Rum Punch – Elmore Leonard, 1992 ★★★★

The Ups and Downs of Playing to Type

There is a pernicious notion I want to stomp out every time I scan Elmore Leonard novel reviews on Amazon.com: that each book of his is like every other, an interchangeable collection of hard guys and clever women who say funny things while circling each other like sharks looking for an opening to a big score.

Then I realize there are books of his like Rum Punch which fit into the hard-guy category snug as a bikini on a Daily Mail babe. Here’s a book where no one is on the level and everyone comes with his or her hidden agenda, all laid out in a salty argot with minimal descriptions and pointillistic characterizations. As you read through endless parades of quotations without attribution, you begin to wonder about the man’s celebrated approach to his craft, that whenever it starts to feel too much like writing, it’s time to shut it down. Sometimes writing things out is actually good.

Here’s the thing: Rum Punch is the sort of novel where archetypical Dutch Leonard is on his game playing to form. I’ve read books of his, straightforward ones like Riding The Rap and offbeat ones like Cuba Libre, where he plays to those expectations and you feel the strain. Here it’s all very natural.

He liked jackboys because they were crazy. They made their living ripping off street dealers for their blow and change and busting into crack houses with assault weapons. Jackboys liked Ordell because he was cool, not some homey everybody knew; the man was big-time from Detroit, had different women he stayed with as it suited him, and could deliver you a full-automatic on two days notice. So now some of the jackboys worked for Ordell, picking up special kinds of guns he needed to fill orders. The one who was getting him the car, Cujo, called him that Tuesday evening when he was staying with one of his women to say it was there waiting, an Olds Ninety-Eight, 12-gauge in the trunk.

Elmore Leonard had a firm rule about his craft: "If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it." Image from http://www.bluecatscreenplay.com/blog/elmore-leonards-top-10-rules-for-writers/.

That’s Leonard bringing us up on Rum Punch’s main instigator, Ordell Robbie, the trouble-making ex-con at the eye of the hurricane. Ordell is a black guy who we first meet bringing former prison pal Louis Gara to a Nazi demonstration. Ordell wants Louis to meet a skinhead whose gun collection Ordell has his eye on.

“I told him I’m for segregation of the races, so he thinks I’m okay,” Ordell explains.

Ordell is one of those Elmore Leonard villains who can be both frightfully direct and all lies. Ordell, we learn early on, is an untiring user whose only concern in life is looking out for himself. He’s the glue of Rum Punch, whose machinations not only set the plot in motion but bring together the other two main characters; a forty-something flight attendant named Jackie Brown whose sideline in smuggling for Ordell has put her at odds with the law, and a middle-aged bail bondsman with the felicitous name of Max Cherry who, in the midst of a tough divorce, falls hard for Jackie.

Max is the brains of Rum Punch; Jackie the heart. Maybe I have that the wrong way around.

Max and Jackie have what amount to a Leonard cute-meet when he arrives with the bond to spring her from prison. They connect after in a bar, passing snide remarks about the piano player butchering “Light My Fire” in another part of the lounge. Jackie is straightforward about her routine of carrying ten grand in her flight bag and asking no questions. She was as surprised as anyone, she tells Max, that two Florida Department of Law Enforcement detectives found 42 grams of cocaine in her bag as well. But she’s blasé about the money.

“Even ten thousand at a time,” Max said, “you don’t have to ask what he does to know he came by it illegally.”

“You’re right,” Jackie said. “I don’t have to ask, since I’m not with the IRS.”

Much of their talk centers on getting older; it seems a common theme of Leonard’s later novels. Jackie is in terrific shape but knows the clock is ticking for her. If she wants a good future, she’s going to have to work outside her comfort zone to get it. Max seems more sedate about life; he’s just happy to have met Jackie:

“I look in the mirror, I’m the same person I was thirty years ago. I see a photograph of myself – that’s different. But who’s taking my picture?”

While Max and Jackie feel each other out, Ordell is busy making sure the cops have nothing on him. This means getting proactive, whether by tricking one of his goons into harm’s way or preemptively silencing Jackie.

While he’s pretty much a rank idiot even in the low company of typical Leonard bad guys, you sort of need him that way. If Ordell was content to leave things be and stay low while the heat is on, maybe ditch the situation and leave Jackie to ride her smuggling rap alone, he would be a lot smarter and a whole lot less interesting. Instead, he keeps right on building up his main line of business, selling contraband guns. For this, he enlists his old buddy Louis for a deadly mission, ignoring warning signs that prison has dulled Louis’s edge.

Sometimes Leonard books get way too complicated; here he keeps it fairly simple with a lot of action and clever dialogue. There’s a solid framework to this one; even the random-sounding title is accounted for as it refers to the name of one of Ordell’s operations.

Like a few Leonard novels, Rum Punch has the distinction of having been made into a famous movie: Jackie Brown. It may be tied with Deathproof as Quentin Tarantino’s least-loved movie, but it still got made by QT and is celebrated for that. Jackie Brown also happens to be my favorite Tarantino film. I’m not his biggest fan, but I think it’s great.

I write that with a big caveat because when you compare it to the novel, the novel comes off a little lighter by comparison. That’s because the film winds up showcasing the same kind of sentiment Leonard avoids, at least here.

The major plot elements in the book are almost the same as they are in the movie. The courting ritual between Max and Jackie builds into a dance of distrust. After dropping her off at her apartment, Max discovers Jackie has taken his .38 Airweight revolver. We know why she does it, even why she has to do it, as we watch Ordell await her inside her apartment. But it’s Jackie’s reaction when Max comes back for his gun the next day that raises an alarm, responding in a casual way Leonard writes was “like going to get change for the paper boy.”

Jackie Brown (Pam Grier) and Max Cherry (Robert Forster) size each other up in a scene from the movie adaptation of Rum Punch, Jackie Brown. You should have a good reason for changing the title of an Elmore Leonard novel. Quentin Tarantino did. Image from http://thenewbev.com/blog/2016/10/jackie-brown/. 

What makes Rum Punch special for me is this element, how a basically decent person uses others so casually. It feeds into the suspense. Everyone is using everyone here; you are kept guessing all the time about their motives. Even Max has his angles. But only one person is really good at using people, and it turns out not to be Ordell.

Yet by playing this off as second-nature stuff, and not digging into how it might impact people emotionally, Rum Punch seems to miss a critical component of the Max and Jackie story that Jackie Brown nails. Even the Ordell-Louis relationship carries an emotional heft in the movie that’s almost completely lacking in the book. You come to see Ordell, as played by Samuel L. Jackson, as an almost tragic figure, not some dopey street punk, which gives Ordell’s fate lasting power. Pam Grier as Jackie may be Tarantino’s best female character, tough to a fault.

In the book, Ordell and Jackie play their parts, and work their games, and it’s all par for the course. It’s where Leonard’s tough-guy formula works against him, at least a little bit, and only for those who saw the film and remember its gut-wrenching ending. Do I dock Leonard for not going the same way?

No way. Rum Punch is a fun book straight through. In its gamesmanship and brisk efficiency, it delivers a fast read that lingers in the right places. You can see how a talented auteur took the same story and filled out its shadings for better results, but the framework around it is still terrific and that’s all Leonard.

In the end, I think Rum Punch for all its positives contributes to the misimpression that Leonard novels are all like it; they are not. That’s actually a good thing for me. He did have a heart. He was just strategic about using it.