Customer Reviews

Bandits

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(9)
3 star:		(8)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Elmore Leonard gets religion (and philosophy) in "Bandits," one of his least satisfying works. He recycles his classic character types: Jack Delaney, the cool, collected ex-con having a hard time adjusting to civilian life; Sister Lucy, the good girl/bad girl who claims to be a nun but isn't above criminal intent, and a Nicaraguan heavy who is pretty much a carbon copy of the Dominican heavy from "Cat Chaser." Through a slug-paced story that lacks the usual Leonard crackle, we get ample doses of Catholic philosophy, superficial New Orleans 'atmosphere,' a "will they or won't they" tease that ends up being boring after awhile, until the usual Leonard fireworks end the tale. If you are going through the Leonard canon, I recommend leaving "Bandits" at the bottom of your "to-read" list.

Elmore Leonard has been lauded as America's greatest living crime writer and having read all of his crime books, I can see why. However, Bandits is clearly not one of Leonard's better works. Leonard claims that he never knows how his books will end, that he lets the characters lead him. In the case of Bandit's it they do not lead him to any strong finish. The characters are always the best part of any Leonard novel, and this cast is rather boring.

In an earlier review, a reader commented that this was an "issue" book and cited both Pagan Babies and Cat Chaser as being in the same category. While Pagan Babies (an excellent read) and Cat Chaser (also good) may have both had issues or causes woven into the story, neither of these suffered from the boring cast of characters and slow moving plot that Bandits did. Fortunately this kind of disappointment is rare with Leonard's works.

Superficially, "Bandits" is a caper novel, and not a particularly good one. What saves it is Leonard's characters and especially their dialog. Ignore the plot -- Just sit back, relax, observe, and in particular listen to the characters.

Drawn by the setting of New Orleans, I gave this one a shot. Decent refernces to businesses and landmarks, but HORRRIBLE plot line. (Unless, again, I'm missing something here...) Seems like Leonard had a gun to his head to finish this book, quickly! I've read Delillo, Pynchon, Sandford, etc...and recommend ANY of them over what I saw from Leonard here.

Remember that scene where Bill Murray is talking to himself, kind of doing an interview with himself, the crazed Vietnam vet approaching the T in the Masters being played in his head? It's brilliant. Funny. Perhaps even ad libbed. Murray gets kudos for it. We mimic it. Commercials 15 years later copy it. We remember that scene, and to paraphrase another great movie line, 'in all the excitement, I kinda' forgot' the name of the movie myself. That's how good the scene is. It transcends the rest of the movie.

That's why I read Leonard, because of the quirky scenes. No. I don't unsderstand the conflict between the Contras and the Sandanistas. I'm still confused about Reagan and Ollie North. But I love the conversations that Jack has with his brother-in-law in the funeral home, and the conversations he has with Lucy. Will she? Does she want to? Is she an ecstatic?

One of the editorialists above writes that Leonard is sui generis, the latin description of an anomaly loosely translated to mean 'one in a million.'

That's kind of how I see him write. The plot need not be the most important thing. He doesn't shy away from violence nor does he embrace it. I think he's brilliant. He writes about the dumb things that people say to eachother and the even dumber things that they think about. And once in awhile about the truly remarkable, Homeric, beautiful things that they do.

I gave it 4 stars because it does bog down a little with the ecstatic-nun-random acts of kindness-political issues-Irish freedom fighters-loopy ex-cons in the middle, but all in all, vintage Leonard.

I had read maybe eight or ten Elmore Leonard novels before I bought this one, and each had been a real page-turner. This one, though, tends to drag well before we're half-way through the book and I'm not sure why. Maybe it's some of the superfluous minor characters, maybe it's that the theme of moral ambiguity gets a little heavy-handed (we already know the Contras are no angels and neither are the Sandinistas), maybe it's the kind of blah ending, I don't know. But something's just a little off here. The dialogue shines through as always, though a little less brilliantly than in, say, "Pagan Babies" or "Swag." The locale just isn't as colorfully drawn as in "Maximum Bob." The bad guys are nowhere near as scary as the pair in "Killshot" (one of my favorites). The plot's thinner than "The Switch" or "Get Shorty." And Leonard handles the religion/morality/what-are-we-here-for thing far better, to my mind, in "Touch."

I'd have to rank this one somewhere around the level of "Be Cool," another one that kind of left me a little indifferent. Put it this way -- it took me the better part of 10 days to get through this one. Leonard's best can be read in just a couple of evenings. Still, Elmore Leonard on his average days is still better than most people writing today on their very best ones.

Let's not beat around the bush: Bandits is flawed. But flawed in the same way that the Mona Lisa's smile is somehow not quite right, not quite natural. OK, let me back off a little. I'm not going to tell you that Bandits is high art, but it's quirky. In a good way.

It's quirky because Elmore Leonard is stretching the boundaries of crime fiction here. All the Elmore Leonard basics are there - the girl, the ex-con, the heist, and that absolutely authentic dialog that perhaps more than anything else is Leonard's trademark. But underneath the skin Bandits is a psychological novel masquerading as a political statement masquerading as plot driven crime fiction. Or maybe more the mixed race love child of the three. Whatever it is, it's vintage Elmore Leonard, with a twist.

The ex-con is Jack Delaney, former jewel thief, currently embarked on a new career as a funeral home assistant with his brother in law, at the persuasion of the parole system of the state of Louisiana. After three years Delaney's just not finding a whole lot of fulfillment in his new profession, and when he crosses paths with hot babe and former Sister of the order of Saint Francis of the Stigmata Lucy Nichols on a trip to pick up a body from the nearby church hospital, he starts getting antsy.

The novel is set in the late 80's, during the period of the conflict between the Sandinista government and the contras, and Lucy's just back from a ten year stint ministering to the needs of lepers in a Nicaraguan hospital. She's not a nun anymore, but she doesn't know what she is instead yet.

Part of her identity crisis evolves out of a little reality therapy administered to her while she was in country by contra Colonel Dagoberto Godovy, or Bertie as he likes to be called, who's in the US raising money from wealthy Republicans to fund the contras. It turns out that besides being an stereotypical short guy with a temper and an attitude problem, Bertie has a few other unreedeming social qualities, like a tendency to act out by chopping up lepers and pregnant women with a machete.

The action revolves around Lucy and Jack's efforts to relieve the colonel of the warchest he's collected, and put it to better use than killing, maiming, and torturing innocent civilians so that they can be free of the scourge of communism. In the process they lead each other to unexpected discoveries about who and what they really are.

There are a few weaknesses. The plot jerks around sometimes like a squirrel trying to get across the road, but it's always engaging. Leonard is also a little fanatical about dialog, so much so that he sometimes transitions between chapters with it in what stands out as being unwieldy amidst otherwise fairly seamless prose.

And finally there's the ending. I won't go into details except to say that resolving one character's crisis at the end to my mind violated an honor that should have bound thieves.

But as always Leonard delivers on solid entertainment, and the novel's other elements integrate it and give it a deeper authenticity.

The formula for an Leonard thriller has a powerful jerk or jerks using a couple of oddball crooks to perpetrate a scam. A middle-aged semi-retired proffesional gets caught up in the scam and sleeps with a woman who's also caught up in the scam. It's the voices of the characters that keeps you reading more than the plot-twists, but his characterization is usually dead-on and sympathetic to all sides. This one keeps the pot boiling but isn't up htere with LaBrava,Freaky Deaky, 52 Pick-up etc.,etc.

Elmore Leonard has an ear for character. He usually starts with a bad good guy and immediately adds a 'good' and very desirable woman. Then we meet one or two really bad guys and a couple of less good good guys. There's usually a not-so-good desirable woman and one or two totally off-the-charts whackos.
This is not to say that Leonard writes to a formula. It's just that he, like Jimmy Breslin and Vladimir Nabokov Walter Moseley and a few dozen others, returns to the people he loves.
His characters in this book are well-drawn. Jack and Lucy are the heart of the matter-the bad good guy and the good hot woman. They are involved with sleazeleeches who are hustling American right-wingers for cash under pretext of fighting communists in Central America. The action is a bit slow, but the characters and the suspense make up for it.

Lynn Hoffman, author of Bang Bang

Elmore Leonard is one of the master craftsmen of modern crime writing, and every now and then, he slips in an "issue" book. Back in 1982 it was "Cat Chaser", which wove in U.S. backing of death squads in the Dominican Republic in the '60s. In 2000, it was "Pagan Babies", which wove in the in Rwandan genocide. This book, which was originally published in 1986, weaves in U.S. support for the Contras in Nicaragua. I haven't read "Cat Chaser", but both "Pagan Babies" and "Bandits" seem to suffer in comparison with Leonard's more traditional crime capers. Certainly the elements are in place: a heist caper with a likeable ex-con, a tough pretty lady, supported by a duo of misfits (AARP-eligible ex-bank robber, moody tough-guy ex-con bartender) taking on a thoroughly evil and disgusting bad guy. And yet the pacing just isn't quite right, perhaps because the book seems to be more character-driven than plot-driven. It doesn't help that the book is set in New Orleans, an atmospheric city that never comes to life on the page.

The gist of the plot is that ex-model, ex-con Jack is sick of working at his brother-in-law's funeral home. When the pretty nun Sister Lucy enters his life, enlisting his aid in helping a woman escape from a Nicaraguan Contra colonel, he's willing to listen when she proposes a scam. It seems the leper hospital Lucy worked at in Nicaragua was wiped out by Contra forces under the colonel's command, and she's looking for some payback. And since the colonel is on a fundraising trip through the southern U.S., he's going to be loaded... Alas, despite lots of coming and going, things proceed rather slowly. Some of the supporting characters are much flatter than one expects from Leonard, for example the enigmatic Indian Franklin de Dios, and the CIA agent. Meanwhile, other more vivid ones are entirely extraneous to the story, such as the IRA operative who walks into and out of the book within pages.

So, while I applaud Leonard's occasional effort to bring to light some of the nasty goings on around the world, these books, while enjoyable enough, just aren't written at the same level as most of his work.

PS. There's a cute little moment where the main character busts on the 1969 film version of Leonard's book "The Big Bounce". I hate to think what he would say about the latest version...