The Big Bounce – Elmore Leonard, 1969 ★★½

Kicking Off a 40-Year Crime Spree

Late in The Big Bounce, our protagonist watches a pitcher on television and thinks to himself: “The son of a bitch was good, but he sure could get into trouble.”

It’s funny because the pitcher on the TV is Denny McLain, who kept finding trouble after his playing days ended, and because the sentiment also applies to our protagonist, Jack Ryan. Jack’s a small-time burglar who meets his match when he hooks up with beautiful young Nancy Hayes, who likes to smash things. Jack and Nancy have fun, but as the craziness mounts, he begins to wonder what he got himself into.

Elmore Leonard was most famous in his life for writing contemporary thrillers about easy-going criminals making scores and sometimes getting set up in the process. It wasn’t always so. Back in the late 1960s, his specialty was westerns, short stories for the most part, which sometimes became successful movies. The Big Bounce was Leonard’s own big bounce away from that genre into a more modern, streetwise milieu. Tough-nosed and enjoyable, the novel nevertheless carries with it all the tics that trigger his critics to this day.

Thin stories – Leonard could and did produce some beefy storylines that merit novel-length treatment. The Big Bounce isn’t one of them. It’s that other kind of Leonard novel, where three fistfights and a sprinkling of gunplay get stretched out with a lot of small talk and lengthy go-nowhere descriptions of settings and characters. There is a plot here, but hardly central to the story. Much happens in a largely random way.

Taciturn writing style – Leonard was famous for avoiding verbiage, ironic given how the guy could type away about stuff for pages without getting to the point of anything. But when it came to exposition before something serious went down, Leonard often opted for the less-is-more school. Take an early moment when Ryan contemplates the aftermath of a burglary he committed: “In time this would be past him and he wouldn’t worry about it or think about it again. Look at all the things you’ve done that you never think about anymore, he said to himself.” Tangy, elliptical, suggestive, but rather sparse in terms of any thought process, like an Eagles song. Want violins with your mayhem? Don’t look to Dutch Leonard.

Casual approach to violence – The Big Bounce is Exhibit A for this. When we first see Jack Ryan, his image is being projected on a police station’s movie screen, as we watch him whale on his former foreman with a baseball bat after quitting a job picking cucumbers in Michigan. The cops are trying to figure out what kind of case to make against him. The justice of the peace, one Mr. Majestyk, is asked for his opinion: “I think he’s got a level swing, but maybe he pulls too much.” The rest of the novel follows a similar line of thinking, as violence and the threat of same often amuses but seldom changes anything, for better or worse.

Self-references – Leonard often made narrative references to the many film adaptations of his work; this was established in The Big Bounce, the first Leonard novel set in the motion-picture era. In one scene, after Jack is recruited by Mr. Majestyk to work at the latter’s resort (told you he was casual about violence), Ryan spies Mr. Majestyk watching a western. And not just any western: The Tall T, a classic Randolph Scott vehicle directed by the great Budd Boetticher and based on a short story by our own Mr. L. Ryan spends a long time contemplating what fine entertainment this is, specifically praising the direction. Leonard didn’t always like how his stories were made for screen, so you notice this when you know the background. Amusing, but kind of obtrusive, too.

Female trouble – Chicks are often up to no good in Leonard novels, in ways that trigger feminists and others with modern PC views. To be fair, this did change over time, as readers of Rum Punch and the Karen Sisco stories can attest. But designing women were signature roles of early Leonard, and you get a dousy here in Nancy Hayes, a rich-girl-gone-bad who’d be a more entertaining character if she weren’t so one-note about it.

Nancy (Leigh Taylor-Young) makes an impression on Jack (Ryan O'Neal) in the 1969 film version of The Big Bounce, which went into production before the novel itself was published. Image from http://www.cultfilmfreaks.com/2018/05/checkbounced.html.

Actually, Nancy’s something of a sociopath with a predilection for shooting at windows and cars for fun. She also is “looking for the bounce,” as she calls it, namely making off with a migrant workers’ payroll and enlisting Ryan as her accomplice:

“There’s a difference,” Ryan said, “between breaking and entering and armed robbery.”

“And there’s a difference between seventy-eight dollars and fifty thousand dollars,” Nancy said. “How badly do you want it?”

I’m here not to bury Leonard, but praise him. He wrote some poor novels like Riding The Rap and Cuba Libre, but more often good-to-great ones like The Hunted, Freaky Deaky, and Tishomingo Blues. It’s just that in terms of the genre we have come to know as the Leonard novel, The Big Bounce came first and established what would be the format for everything after. So I want to call out how it sets the template.

The Big Bounce set the Leonard template in another way, too: It was made into a movie. Twice, actually, the first coming out the same time as the book. Neither that version – starring Ryan O’Neal, Van Heflin, and Leigh Taylor-Young – nor a 2004 remake starring Owen Wilson, Morgan Freeman, and Sara Foster won over moviegoers or the box office, but you see why producers went in thinking otherwise.

Owen Wilson as Jack Ryan and Sara Foster as Nancy Hayes in the 2004 remake of The Big Bounce. In addition to changing up the plot, the film moved the setting from Michigan's Thumb region to sunny Hawaii. Image from http://de.fanpop.com/clubs/owen-wilson/images/212422/title/big-bounce-photo. 

As a novel, The Big Bounce establishes Leonard as a savvy follower of the modern scene, able to dial into characters and establish them quickly for both humor and suspense. Like I say, the story is thin – as George Armitage, director of the remake, told Film Comment in 2015 “the book, when you break it down, is basically an act and a half. It’s not three acts.” But its ambiance and tone is pure Leonard.

Take for example Bob Rogers Sr., the rich guy who runs the cucumber operation, thinking his wife might discover his serial adultery:

…he knew his wife wasn’t going to make a case out of this one. He was busy, he traveled a lot, he had interests in several companies in addition to Ritchie Foods; his wife had a $150,000 home, live-in help, clubs, charge accounts, their one child in a good school and she could believe whatever she liked.

Or the way Nancy, at the moment shacked up at Bob Sr.’s hideaway as his weekend squeeze, sizes up Jack after their first meeting:

Nancy had a feeling about Ryan. Not an emotional feeling, a girl-boy feeling, but a clearly focused zeroed-in feeling, a seeing-him-and-knowing-right-away feeling that Jack Ryan, or someone just like him, was the answer: her way out of here with a lot more than furniture and a few clothes.

A key problem with The Big Bounce is that nobody in it is very likable. After seeing him club that foreman, we next watch Jack take two migrants along for a quick burglary of a beach house where fraternity alumni are gathered for a boat-and-swim outing. After stealing a number of untended wallets, Jack blows off his accomplices and goes off on his own, where he meets Mr. Majestyk, who likes how the guy handles himself and offers him a job.

You get the feeling you met these guys before, in later Leonard novels. A few years later, Swag featured robber Frank Ryan, while the more famous Out Of Sight introduced burglar Jack Foley. There’s even a Leonard novel called Mr. Majestyk, though the title character there is not Jack Ryan’s sponsor here.

Why does Mr. Majestyk take such a liking to Jack? Like so much else, this isn’t explained. The 2004 movie provides one motive, but that character is not at all like the guy in the book. Points one and two, he’s played by Morgan Freeman and has a different name; point three, his big line about God being “just an imaginary friend for grown-ups,” feels out of place for the religious-minded Mr. Majestyk of the book.

Young Elmore. Before becoming the most famous crime novelist of his time, Leonard drafted copy for a Detroit ad agency in the 1950s while writing short-story westerns on the side. A decade later, the success of his early novel Hombre (1961) gave him a chance to do what he wanted. Image from https://www.nytimes.com/news/the-lives-they-lived/2013/12/21/elmore-leonard/.

Leonard plays around with religious ideas for awhile, Jack being a lapsed Catholic. One subplot involves a pious guest at Mr. Majestyk’s hotel, Virginia, who fantasizes about Jack but falls apart when he makes a move on her. The awkwardness of the near-rape for today’s readers may not have been entirely lost on Leonard, who wanted to establish his character’s outlaw nature. It gives Jack an opportunity to show some minor, redemptive remorse later on, but this subplot reads more like Leonard filling pages.

The story as it comes together centers on Jack and Nancy, and his suspicions about their relationship. “He had the feeling he shouldn’t move too fast – like reaching out to pet an animal that might take his hand off if he didn’t do it gently.” Jack is right to worry as Nancy sells him on her big payroll-theft scheme.

But as my interest in Nancy’s dangerous personality began to flag with a third of the book still to go; I found myself needing more than I was getting. Leonard seemed to sense this, and flips the script a bit – those wallets Jack stole come back to haunt him – but not in a riveting way. You pick up a Leonard novel expecting suspense, but The Big Bounce rambles instead.

Sometimes it does so pleasantly, like with the baseball stuff. Baseball was Leonard’s favorite pastime, and he cleverly uses Jack’s interest in the sport (he was a former minor-league pitcher) to give our protagonist a means out from the dangerous action happening around him. It’s not much, but I enjoyed it.

I can say the same for The Big Bounce itself. As the keystone for Leonard’s magnificent late-inning career as crime novelist, it certainly sets up some fantastic reading journeys to come. As a stand-alone, it entertains more around the margins than in the main, but that was sometimes Leonard’s modus operandi, too.