Eric the Blue

Sitting at home with a bad cold and Swag, one of Elmore Leonard’s early crime novels. Favorite parts are those in which the lucrative trade of armed robbery brings the low-level criminal team into contact with similarly affluent young men and women who work in the legitimate part of the economy. After just a few small jobs the robbers move from a motel to an apartment complex described by Leonard as follows:

The third place they looked at was the Villa Monterey, out in Troy [a suburb of Detroit; Leonard’s fans sometimes refer to him as “the Dickens of Detroit”]: a cream-colored stucco building with dark wood trim, a dark wood railing along the second-floor walk, a Spanish tile roof, and a balcony with each apartment overlooking the backyard where shrubbery and a stockade-fence enclosed the patio and swimming pool. There was also an ice machine back there, a good sign.

Stick said he thought it looked like a motel. Frank said no, it was southern California. He told the manager, the lady who showed them the apartment, okay, gave her the deposit and three months in advance to get out of signing a lease, and that was it. They got two bedrooms, bath, bar in the living room with bamboo stools, orange-and-yellow draperies, off-white shag carpeting, off-white walls with chrome-framed graphics, chrome goose neck lamps, chrome-and-canvas chairs, an off-white Naugahyde sectional sofa, and three dying plants for four and a half a month, furnished. Stick didn’t tell Frank but he thought the place looked like a beauty parlor.

It hardly needs stating that Stick’s judgment, a cross between a motel and a beauty parlor, is the author’s. There are some “career ladies” among the residents who are cataloged upon being discovered by the new residents. For example:

There was a dental hygienist by the name of Donna who had a boyfriend but wasn’t going to marry him until he made as much money as she did. She told them how much a dentist with a good practice could make and referred to net and gross a lot. Donna was way down at the bottom of Frank’s list of things to do.

There is a kind of worldly weariness to the catalog:

There was a redheaded girl, frizzy red hair and bright brown eyes, who wore beads and seven rings with her bikini. Arlene. She was a little wacky and laughed at almost everything they said, whether it was supposed to be funny or not. Somebody was paying Arlene’s rent, a guy in a silver Mark IV who came twice a week, Tuesday and Thursday at six, and was usually out by 10:30. Arlene said he was a good friend.

Later, the criminals become acquainted with some of the male renters:

There was a junior executive group at the Villa, a few guys with friends who were always coming over. Sometimes in the evening, after they’d changed from their business outfits to Levis and Adidas, they’d sit on the patio and drink beer. If Stick was out on the balcony he’d listen to them, see if he could learn anything.

Usually it was about how stoned one of them got the night before. Or the best source of grass in Ann Arbor. Or why this one guy had switched from a Wilson Jack Kramer to a Bancroft Competition. Or how a friend of one of them had brought back eight cases of Coors from Vail. Then he wouldn’t hear anything for a minute or so–one of them talking low–then loud laughter. The laughter would get louder as they went through the six packs, and the junior executives would say shit a lot more. That was about all Stick learned.

So . . . that was about all an armed robber could learn from the junior executive group. Swag was published in 1976–seems about right considering the decor at the Villa Monterey. Leonard (and Stick) were ahead of their time in being unimpressed. The landscape is that of a moral desert, no one to cheer for, unless you count Stick, an armed robber and regretful killer who sometimes thinks of his young daughter back in Florida, where he used to work for a cement company. Maybe my favorite Leonard book, The Switch, came two years later and features a genuine hero, the wife of a wealthy a-hole. She’s kidnapped, which is fine with the a-hole, as he’s having an affair and considering what to do about her. Problem temporarily solved. One sign of his a-holery is that he’s a skilled golfer, the men’s champion of his exclusive country club. The world according to Elmore Leonard, where the women are often venal and the men often venal and stupid. I said The Switch might be my favorite: he wrote a novel a year for around 35 years and they’re almost uniformly terrific.