[books] Elmore Leonard, Rum Punch (1992)

I've decided that I don't particularly like ensemble casts in books. Or maybe it's just this particular cast of characters. Elmore Leonard, known currently as the man who wrote Get Shorty, likes these "tricking people out of money that someone else is getting tricked out of" stories, if this is any indication. I think that my problem with this book is similar to my problem with Shorty, and that is that no one character takes charge. Who are we supposed to be following here? Is it the smooth-talking gun-running Ordell Robbie? Is it his old buddy and new partner in crime Louis? How about Jackie Burke, the flight attendant walking the tightrope between Ordell and the ATF agent out to get him? Finally, Leonard breaks with tradition by replacing the overly trite dime-store detective with...hold on to your hats...a dime-store bail bondsman, with his mildly interesting mid-life crisis. This book was frustrating in that none of these characters seemed terribly compelling.

The obvious yardstick for this kind of work is Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction, which had a lot of characters that you cared about, that you wanted to see what happened to. Rum Punch has a bunch of people running around, but without any good reason. I couldn't even really tell who won in the end. Everyone who was still alive was still running around, without said reason. Which doesn't give me any reason to read any other Elmore Leonard novels.