Tishomingo Blues [Hardcover]

Elmore Leonard (Author)

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.

Dennis is a daredevil and the girls love him. Things are going along okay with his 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. The killer looks up and says, "Let's see you dive." Suddenly, being a daredevil has lost its kick.

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 Marvin Pontiac 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, but like Dennis, Robert has a death-defying act of his own: he's sleeping with his boss's wife.

Thirty-seven miles from Tunica is the famous "crossroads" where Robert Johnson sold his soul to the devil for a style of funky blues that had never been heard before. Robert Taylor is about to introduce Dennis to a "crossroads" of his own. He has a secret agenda for taking on the Cornbread Cosa Nostra and wants Dennis in on it.

To complicate matters are the women. Some are dressed in hoop skirts, and all of them have plans of their own. Vernice lures Dennis with the whitest thighs he's ever seen. Diane comes to do a story on him 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, drawing Dennis into his game, that move the action through all kinds of unexpected twists and turns. Before he knows it, Dennis has agreed to join Robert in the battle reenactment, which leads to a showdown between the bad guys and the really bad guys.

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

From Publishers Weekly

On the advance reading copy of this novel sent to PW, the title appears in blue letters half an inch high. Leonard's name floats above the title in red letters a full inch high. A Leonard novel is an event, and for good reason. Over the past 40 years, this writer has evolved into the undisputed champ of the American crime novel, and he hasn't lost a step. His new (and 37th) novel is one of his smoothest, a return to the South of Out of Sight (1996) and numerous earlier Leonards though this is the author's first foray into deep country Mississippi, birthplace of the blues. Men and women who scrape at the margins of the American dream are Leonard's forte, and here he presents several such folk, all memorable, beginning with his hero, Dennis Lenahan, a high diver who contracts for a gig to perform at the Tishomingo Lodge & Casino. While setting up his rig, Dennis witnesses a murder by local members of the Dixie Mafia. So, perhaps, does a mysterious, very slick black guy, Robert Johnson, down from the North in his Jag to run a con on a local powerbroker or so it seems. But Robert, who befriends Dennis, and the Detroit mobster and moll who join him at the Lodge & Casino, have other, more complicated, more ambitious plans, for Tishomingo, for the Dixie Mafia and for Dennis, plans that come to a head during the Civil War battle re-enactment that provides the unusual and fascinating backdrop for the book's second half. As usual, Leonard's characters walk onto the page as real as sunlight and shadow; the dialogue is dead-on, the loopy story line strewn with the unexpected, including sudden flourishes of romance and death. Prime Leonard, prime reading. (Feb. 1)Forecast: Backed by a $250,000 marketing campaign and Leonard's ever-soaring rep, this title, his first with Morrow, could be his biggest seller yet, buoyed by a seven-city author tour and simultaneous HarperAudio (abridged and unabridged cassette) and HarperLargePrint editions.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: William Morrow; 1st edition (January 29, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0060008725
• ISBN-13: 978-0060008727
• Product Dimensions: 9.6 x 6.5 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (78 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,806,837 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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
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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
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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.