When The Women Come Out To Dance – Elmore Leonard, 2002 ★★★½

Keeping it Tight

This short-story collection by Elmore Leonard can get overlooked in his total output yet includes one of his most influential stories. It also displays how he owned the genre of crime fiction enough to deliver engaging, wry tales of life regardless of any degree of law-breaking.

The story of note, “Fire in the Hole,” would be better known to television audiences a few years later as the basis for the pilot of a long-running series, “Justified.”

While that is the most representative (and satisfying) example of Leonard’s tough-guy fiction in the collection, it’s far from the only thing worth reading.

Stirling’s Desert Raiders – Virginia Cowles, 1958 ★½

A Puzzling Legend

Can a single individual change the outcome of something as epic as World War II? This account of a pioneering British commando taking on the Afrika Korps in Libya, Tunisia, and Egypt would have you believe it not only possible, but true. If only it were more convincing.

David Stirling was the son of a Scottish laird who found himself early in the conflict looking for something more stimulating than regular military duty. The result: inventing the Special Air Service, a commando unit still active today, known for their elite professionalism.

In Stirling’s case, however, it reads more like adventurism. As described in Stirling’s Desert Raiders, there was no risk too great, no chance not worth taking. A raid was something he looked upon as “pure relaxation.” While men under his command died following orders that were highly reckless, he kept on his path.

The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1925 ★★★★½

Life with America's Most Wanted

The Great American Novel, it turns out, is a crime story. The Great Gatsby may be known now as refined literature or even worse, high art, but what makes it so immediate and enjoyable is the milieu it sprang from, of gangsters, flappers, body counts and bootleg gin.

That and the fact it is so much fun to read should divest it of any perceived responsibility for uplifting the mind. It has a message, deep if not especially brilliant, but the novel’s main takeaway is the setting and its people, aristocrats basking in the high life along Long Island Sound.

Nick Carraway is a striving bond salesman and Yale graduate who becomes enmeshed when his married second cousin Daisy takes up an affair with Nick’s rich neighbor Jay Gatsby. Gatsby is an enigma; no one seems to know how he got his money, only that he has a lot of it.

George Washington Slept Here – George S. Kaufman & Moss Hart, 1940 ½★

When the Well Runs Dry

Country life was a popular subject for American entertainment in the 1940s, with movies like Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House, comic strips like “Li’l Abner,” even paintings like Andrew Wyeth “Christina’s World.” Why not screwball comedy, too?

The writing team of Kaufman & Hart, enjoying enough success from their collaborative playwriting to afford new homes in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, decided to make their next play about the experience of country living. George Washington Slept Here was the result.

While a good idea, the play suffers from all the triteness and contrivances of the pair’s earlier work with fewer sparks of originality. Perhaps because country comedies were not so popular in the beginning of the 1940s as they became in the end, there is a potted, been-there done-that feeling about the thing which maybe it doesn’t quite deserve.