I’ve thought about this particular Elmore Leonard work for years, and here it was, taunting me from the stacks at the Rohnert Park Library.
I think it’s the movie that captured my imagination. After seeing the movie, Roy Schneider and Ann-Margaret are burned in my brain permanently as the faces of the protagonists But I am looking forward to rereading the book version anyway!
Is it just me, or does Ann-Margaret exude sexuality for you too!?
I glanced back at the other Leonard book in my list – The Switch – and there’s are lot of similarities in the plots of the two books.
Both are about hard-working Detroit businessmen who for whatever reason start messing around with some 20-something cutie, and end up getting blackmailed by menacing bad guys.
The Book
Our businessman in this book is named Harry Mitchell (Roy Scheider). We meeet him in the first scene. He comes straight from work to the apartment he’s rented for his side-hustle, a blond named Cini. He’s on the phone with his foreman at work, because he always working.
Cini has vanished, and instead there is a big, shadowy black man and a skinny shadowy white guy. They tell Harry they need $105,000 of his hard-earned money.
Chapter 2, at his nice house in Bloomfield Hills, we meet Barbara Mitchell (Ann-Margaret) . She can tell something’s wrong (they always can 🙂 but doesn’t know what.
Ch 3 finds Harry at his office at the factory, telling his lawyer (O’Boyle) all about The Problem. The lawyer didn’t think Harry was this kind of guy, but here we are.
He tells O’Boyle how he met Cini. She worked at some kind of nude picture emporium that seems kind of quaint by today’s standards. Look at and take pictures of a nude girl, $15 for ½ hour. What a deal!
Ch 4 Harry goes straight at the problem, which we learn is sort of his superpower!
He goes to the nude picture place just to nose around. (It was a sporting goods store when he was a kid. 🙂 He doesn’t really learn much, but boy does he get the bad guys stirred up!
p 46 Bobby (the black bad guy) and Doreen (Cini’s friend and Bobby’s very cute black sidekick) shake down a tour bus! I don’t remember that from the movie!
The movie made a really strong impression on me back in the day. As we meet each of these characters in the book, I see a much younger version of this actor in my mind!
Harry takes it to ’em, they escalate
Alan goes to Harry’s house interacts with Barbara, and steals his gun and an old coat. He a creepy guy, and he starts having creepy thoughts about Barbara.
p 98 Harry continues to tell them to fuck off.
They actually kill Cini with Harry’s gun and use his coat as evidence.
The interesting thing here is that we kind of expect Harry to cave and pay them and such, but that’s not who Harry is. Harry instead starts stirring stuff up even harder!
p 122 Harry goes back to the peek-a-boo place where Doreen and Cini worked and leads Doreen into telling him everyone’s real names. Then he follows them:
- Alan to his dirty movie place.
- Leo to his office.
- He talks to each and convince each that he’s agreed to pay the other two and that they’re all lying to each other.
The bad guys (and Doreen) are all lying double-crossing criminals, so it’s not really that hard for Harry to convince each separately that they are getting screwed by the others.
- It gets creepy. Alan kidnaps Barbara, pump her full of herion and has his way with her.
- Bobby kills Leo.
- Alan kills Bobby and Doreen, who totally deserved it, but it was pretty slick how he did it.
- Alan was the brains, Bobby was the muscle, and Leo was just there.
- Alan calls Harry to tell him he has his wife.
- Parallel to this stuff there have been actual labor problems going on at Harry plant.
- His car was blown up.
- He decides to use this to his advantage.
- He gets dynamite from a guy.
- He rigs up the pay-off brief case with the dynamte
- There’s a lot of drama about it, but eventually he gets Alan to take the briefcase and get blown up.
And that’s the end of the book! The police with think it was more labor unrest, Mitch and Barbara go back to their lives. Mitch’s lawyer is pretty freaked out by he all, but he’s got privilege, so he’s not talking.