Customer Reviews

Tishomingo Blues

5 star:		(24)
4 star:		(24)
3 star:		(16)
2 star:		(8)
1 star:		(6)

 

 

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

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.

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.

Plot synopses aside, you will find most of the things here you want in a Leonard novel: an understanding that evil goes way past banal, and far into kitsch; a lively mix of characters who don't fall neatly onto anyone's side but their own; and an ear for dialogue that is unmatched in the genre. So far, so good.

Unfortunately, what begins at breakneak speed and lures you in with a compelling situation (can Robert Taylor's brillian confidence man lure Dennis Lenahan to "sell his soul" to a particular Tishomingo devil?), turns lazy about two-thirds of the way into the novel. Leonard's portrayal of Robert Taylor is so dazzling that the nominal protagonist, Lenahan, becomes boring by comparison. Leonard throws a number of southern hotties in Lenahan's path, but the one that he chooses by the end is not so much surprising as simply unmotivated--an amor ex machina. The interesting relationship is Taylor's clever seduction of Lenahan throughout the bulk of the book. The speed and ease with which Lenahan meets the girl of his dreams and solves his moral crisis at the end deflates all the tension Leonard so skillfully builds beforehand. And, as one character points out in the last pages, the ease with which all the nasty characters take care of each other is almost too convenient. No, it is too convenient. Leonard should have been less in a hurry to see this on bookstands and sell the film rights; a little more care in the last 50 pages could have made this a sparkling read from beginning 'til end.

Somewhere in the United States there are schools that teach "Leonard Dialogue" in their writing courses, don't you think? Because clearly nobody writes dialogue like Elmore Leonard.

He doesn't really require much of a plot and frequently doesn't bother giving us one. He can be in Cuba at the time of the Maine or Rawanda 10 years after the genocide. It doesn't really matter. Leonard writes about people, not necessarily good people, and what they say to eachother. And the thing is, as we traverse life's highways, even if we've been lucky to avoid hit men and racist scoundrels and drug traffickers, scammers, con men and con women, we end up believing that if we had known such people, this is what they would say to eachother.

Here we have another collection of oddballs bent on an entire panoply of various goals. Dennis wants to keep diving the 80 foot board and fall in love, probably not in that order, and Robert wants to love the wife of his boss and make a lot of money, probably not in that order. And involved with them is a cast of the usual suspects, villains, idiots, lost souls, alcoholhics, exiled lovers, misplaced wives and bad guys. And girls.

With Tishomingo, we get a course in Delta Blues Music, con games, and falling in love. A little violence, a little sex, and the best dialogue being written today. The heroes aren't that heroic and the choices are vague and ambiguous. And the stories that are told and the promises made are usually lies.

But it's enjoyable and a must read if your a Leonard fan. And I will read him again. And probably again, in that order.

Who but Elmore Leonard could tie together Mississippi Gambling Casinos, a daredevil high diver, Civil War reenactors, redneck meth dealers, a self promoting washed up major league pitcher and a slick Detroit wheeler-dealer who has a picture of his lynched great-grandfather that he uses pretty much as a calling card. The wheeler-dealer, Robert Taylor, crisply delivers lines, and you can picture Delroy Lindo playing the part in the film. You can almost here him say the lines as you read the book. Taylor is certainly one of the most interesting of all of Leonard's charecters. Dennis Lenahan, the diver, plays his straight man, or is it the other way around? Taylor plays the other charecters like a puppeteer. The twist and turns takes the reader through the plot's ups and downs like a roller coaster ride. Leonard's creativity and humor has never been better. Enjoy.

this has all the Leonard character trademarks. It's Quirky, dangerous, sleazy, funny etc... same with the dialoge,unsual plot and intermittent violence. but it lacks anyone to care anything about. The main character, Dennis, could be someone to relate to but he's just not enough of a presence. And I didn't find myself caring one way or another about the rest. As for plot, you really don't get any kind of handle on what's happening or is going to happen untill around page 180. By then its all so messy you just don't care. I'm not the kind of reader who needs to be led hand in hand from one point to the next, but I just found myself asking too often "what's the point?" Its Leonard allright, just not enough.

Elmore Leonard is the king of weird characters and strange plots. This one centers around a high-dive artist and a Civil War reenactment.

Aside from the unique setting, this book is your basic Elmore Leonard. The good guys are shady, but likeable, and the bad guys are just plain bad. Leonard's dialogue is always the best part of his writing, and that doesn't change here.

It took a while for things to get rolling in this book, and once they did, the end seemed to fall together a little too fast. I was wondering what was going on and what the whole point of story was 200 pages into a 300-some page book. There is, however, enough wrapped up in the plot and the strange setting to keep the reader interested, if for no other reason than to see how all this weirdness runs together. Also, the final female character was lobbed in at the last possible moment in kind of an odd fashion.

Like most of Leonard's books, this isn't a literary masterpiece expounding on the meaning of life, but one can always rely on Leonard to be entertaining, and he certainly acheives that here.

I looked forward to this novel being familiar with the author and the fabulous review snippets on the inside on the front cover. I found the plot to be shallow and every charachter a stereotype. What does the long digression into "blues history and theory" have to do with the plot? Why do the antagonists wait for a civil war reanactment to have their battle, why not just have a shoot-out in the bar? The main character, Dennis, is strangely passive and loved by all, for no apparent reason.
Southernors are dumb, blacks are hip and mexicans street smart.
Read some of Leonard's early works not this one.

Dennis Lenahan performs from an 80-foot tower, diving into a puddle of water. Right now, he is performing at Billy Darwin?s Indian gambling casino in Tunica, Mississippi. For an opener, his derelict rigger Floyd gets killed. Dennis watches this from the top of his tower and also knows who the two killers are. And now things become complicated. We have ex-deputy Arlen Novis who, with his sidekicks, runs the local drug trade. Trying to muscle in is Robert Taylor, recently arrived from Detroit, where he used to run a youth gang. With him is Germano ?Jerry? Mularoni, specialist in blowing up things. Commentary from the sidelines is given by Charly, a former baseball player. Now it?s everybody against everybody, with Dennis in the middle. Even state cop John Rau becomes involved.

How do we sort it out? By having a re-enactment of the Civil War Battle of Brice?s Roads. Everybody dress up in authentic costume, and let the battle start.

Both author and reader have a lot of fun with this story. It is a magnificent sendup of Dixie and its hard core Civil War followers. Mr. Leonard has done it again..