Tishomingo Blues CD [Abridged, Audiobook] [Audio CD]

Elmore Leonard (Author), Paul Rudd (Reader)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 29, 2002

"Dennis Lenahan the high diver would tell people that if you put a fifty-cent piece on the floor and looked down at it, that's what the tank looked like from the top of that eighty-foot steel ladder."

Things are going along okay with Dennis' gig at the Tishomingo Lodge & Casino in Tunica, Mississippi, "the Casino Capital of the South," until the day he looks down from the high-dive platform and witnesses a mob hit -- Dixie style.

Turns out there was a second witness, Robert Taylor from Detroit, who carries a picture of his great-granddaddy's lynching along with a gun in a briefcase and listens to Delta blues while cruising the back roads of Mississippi in his black Jaguar. Robert works for a man from up north who has come to play General Grant in a Civil War battle reenactment, and like Dennis, Robert has a death-defying act of his own: he's sleeping with his boss's wife.

Adding further intrigue are the women. Vernice lures Dennis with the whitest thighs he's ever seen. Diane comes to do a story on Dennis and wants to take him to Memphis. And still another comes along to give Dennis the surprise of his life. But it's the scams Robert Taylor plays that move the action through all kinds of unexpected twists and turns.

Tishomingo Blues rings true with the bestselling author's dead-on dialogue, capturing the flavor and rhythms of the South, and finds him plotting at his unpredictable best.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Take a high diver who witnesses a murder from his perch 80 feet above a Mississippi casino. Add a cooler-than-thou con artist from Detroit who's out to take over the Dixie mafia's lucrative Gulf Coast drug business. Throw in a crooked deputy sheriff and an honest state cop. Put them all in costume along with a bunch of other "reenactors" bent on refighting an important Civil War battle, season with plenty of historic detail, and you've got all the classic ingredients of an Elmore Leonard novel--except for drama, suspense, or mystery, that is. This is a rib-tickler in the Carl Hiaasen/Dave Barry tradition rather than the kind of thriller Leonard wrote before Hollywood discovered him. As the author himself explains, his intent was to entertain himself by gathering an odd assortment of characters, building a story as they bump heads, and seeing what happens. And as usual, he carries it off with style, wit, and brio. Readers will be casting the inevitable movie in their heads (Samuel L. Jackson is a lock for Robert, who glides into town in a flashy Jag and gets the action going) as they chuckle their way to the last hilarious page. --Jane Adams --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

The high quality of this polished, entertaining production comes as no surprise, as Leonard (Out of Sight; Get Shorty; etc.) is one of the most highly esteemed crime writers working today and Muller one of the most seasoned audiobook performers. The story centers on Dennis Lenahan, a high diver who lands a job performing at the Tishomingo Lodge & Casino in Tunica, Miss., but finds himself in hot water in the midst of an organized crime power struggle. As befits a Leonard novel, the proceedings are peppered by an interesting cast of characters making do on the fringes of conventional society. Muller ably portrays their many eccentricities and has the rare knack for performing the parts of the opposite sex in a way that sounds completely natural. He also captures the discerning, jazzman cool of Detroit gangster Robert Taylor; the thick, adenoidal twang of various members of the Dixie Mafia; and the comically ostentatious boastings of the hotel's resident celebrity, a former pitcher named Charlie who claims to have played in the 1984 World Series. The tension between them all builds toward a climactic Civil War reenactment, and listeners will find themselves alternately amused and intrigued by the many turns Leonard is able to muster.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Audio CD
• Publisher: HarperAudio; Abridged edition (January 29, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0060011165
• ISBN-13: 978-0060011161
• Product Dimensions: 6.4 x 5 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (78 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,126,704 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #18 in Books > Books on CD > Authors, A-Z > ( L ) > Leonard, Elmore

More About the Author

Elmore Leonard has written more than forty novels, including bestsellers Up in Honey's Room, The Hot Kid, Mr. Paradise, Tishomingo Blues, Pagan Babies, and Glitz. Many of his books have been made into movies, including Get Shorty and Out of Sight. He lives with his wife, Christine, in Bloomfield Village, Michigan.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

19 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Reading this won't give you the "Blues.", January 29, 2002

By 

David Montgomery "Book Critic" (davidjmontgomery.com) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Tishomingo Blues (Hardcover)

Elmore Leonard, King of the Crime Novel, returns with a new publisher for his thirty-seventh book. This time out the author heads for the Deep South, probing the dirty doings in the Delta Blues area of Mississippi. With casinos comes corruption, and Tunica, Miss. has its share of both -- thus giving Leonard an excellent setting to work his magic.

Dennis Lenahan is a high diver, one of those daredevils who jumps off an eighty foot tower into a plastic swimming pool with a foot of water in it. As you'd expect, he's one cool customer. Cooler still is his new friend Robert Taylor, a jive-talking gangster from De-troit who's gone down South to run a con based on a hundred-year-old postcard of a lynching -- or so he says, anyway.

As you'd expect from Leonard, the wit is sharp, the characters are delightfully bent, and the dialogue is honed to a razor's edge. Robert is one of the author's best creations, his sporty Jag and penchant for the Blues tasty accents to his wise patter.

The plot of "Tishomingo Blues," though, lacks the mystery and intrigue of a typical Leonard novel. Most of the time this reads more like a Carl Hiaasen "buncha whackos" story than the crime gems that we've come to expect from Dutch.

Even if the plot isn't his best, however, all the other Leonard elements are in place, and that makes "Tishomingo Blues" a book well worth reading.

Reviewed by David Montgomery, MysteryInkOnline.com

19 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Where does he get the plots?, February 23, 2002

By 

Frank J. Konopka (Shamokin, PA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Tishomingo Blues (Hardcover)

Elmore Leonard has to be the king of weird plots and characters among authors currently writing. Who else could combine a high diver, a Native American ex-professional baseball player, Civil War reenactors, members of the Dixie Mafia, and other assorted oddballs into a coherent narrative, and make it work? It's almost impossible to relate the plot of this book, for sometime I wonder if he just wasn't making it up as he went along, and didn't know where it was going himself until it got there, but I was laughing out loud a lot of the way through this work. I found it so well written that I read it almost in one sitting, just to see where Mr. Leonard was going with some of his outrageousness! I hope you will enjoy it as much as I did.

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars High Divers and Civil War Re-Enactors -- Typical E. Leonard, September 24, 2002

By 

John Standiford (Cypress, California) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Tishomingo Blues (Hardcover)

Once again, Elmore Leonard has managed to put together a wonderfully delightful book featuring the antics of bumbling criminals and flawed heroes all in a strange backdrop of unique characters.

This time the setting is a casino in Mississippi and our hero is a high diver who is hired by the Casino as a sideshow to attract gamblers. Along, the way, our hero will encounter alluring women, murderers, conmen, tough drug dealers, the FBI and crooked businessmen. Like almost every Elmore Leonard book, the story is almost impossible to describe because it takes a number of strange turns that are impossible to predict. You aren't always sure who are the good guys or the bad guys and sometimes the status of a hero or bad guy changes rather quickly. Of course this all happens thanks to great dialogue and a snappy writing style that makes it hard to put the book down.

The strangest part of this book regards the "hobby" of Civil War Re-Enacting which becomes a critical part of the plot. If you aren't familiar with this endeavor, I suggest you read Confederates in the Attic by Tony Horwitz.

In any case, pick up this book and enjoy it. As usual for Leonard, this book won't win any awards for being serious literature but it is fun to read and I hope that it is treated well by Hollywood when they option the book.