Swag
By Elmore Leonard

Delacorte Press 1976

By ignore staff

Down the street, a 12-pack of Pabst costs seven bucks and a used, 229-page Elmore Leonard paperback is three and change. True, any album you need is free, but after finishing Swag—a devilishly simple, fit and sprinting work of crime fiction—let's say you glance it while grabbing your keys from a tabletop. For a second, you wouldn't be surprised if the book suddenly combusted or popped up in the air like a Mexican Jumping Bean. Three dollars and it is scary good. Like, if you recall the novel’s ending, you have to surrender to a grin. You realize that Leonard, now 82, would probably kill off your character before page 100. Reason: character has become inexplicably goofy.

Characters in Swag avoid thinking deeply and entertaining lustrous dreams unless a Miami getaway or a newly enriched car trunk predictably features in their journeys. No, that's not completely true; their capacity for imagination fills like an immoral balloon not when in front of a piece of paper or when resting on a pillow but while driving to a dark bar or casually entering a liquor store on a slow weekday. The civilized borders that exist in the public space—laws, mores, consequences, reputation, ethics—rise far into the sky like garage doors when they see a “good parking lot,” a convenient alleyway, a lack of cars or customers. These borders give way to easy money, but not too easy, no fun in that. Also, remember to always be polite.

Frank and Earnest—the cheesy, literary meaning behind their names is not lost on them—sit down at a Greek bar in gloomy Detroit and agree to be teammates in steady armed robbery. The fate of their professional and mutual bond hangs on paper—not as in the street term for bouncing checks quickly, but in reference to the 10 rules Frank has inked on cocktail napkins. For instance, rule six: Never count the take in the car.

Discovering Elmore Leonard on your own is a great thing. Over the years his endless accolades from even the most erudite of critics have deterred many of the people who should check his work out. This is enabled by the hesitation that comes with reading books generally labeled as “hardboiled.” And then there are the ho-hum film adaptations of Leonard’s work like Get Shorty, Out of Sight and even the recent 3:10 to Yuma—no desire to read those films. And with Jackie Brown, the appeal of Leonard’s early material took on the scent of one of Quentin Tarantino’s ramshackle idea heists. Oddly, the movie Swag most recalls is the unrelated 1978 Dustin Hoffman Eddie Bunker-tale Straight Time, check that out too if you haven’t.

Swag still connects today due to Leonard’s careful insertion of the criminal mind into two characters, who —while very different in their choice of fashions and their backgrounds and personalities and profiles—are simlarly slippery and dubious, but never blank, slates. Contrast this with how the fictional criminal in 2007 is depicted, ususally in possession of a mind that is like overcooked Shakespearian lasagna served up externally thanks to The Sopranos. Frank and Earnest (aka Stick) would never consider therapy, and it's as if the characters' subconscious is up to you (or is it?) as Leonard directs them down a zig-zaggy destiny like a long, nimble blade. For future reference, Leonard later picked up Stick’s life again in a titular 1983 novel.

In interviews, Leonard likes to respond to questions like “Why do you live in Detroit?” with “I just live there, you know?” This natural, no-bullshit guardedness is one of the greatest techniques he uses in Swag. The scenic details are incredibly sparse but effective. He lets a drink called an ouzo speak colorfully about the setting and mindset of the character ordering it. Swag's chapters are given a very light splash of street names and prison names that branch out across the page like cracks in pavement. It might sound bland and simple, but this tone mirrors crime: either you get caught or you don't, and if you don't, you continue on to the next. The rest if excessive filler.

As the duo’s short history of hold-ups surpasses two dozen like it’s no big whup, their pockets now fat, Frank and Stick spend their daylight hours outside the pool at their new “authentic California” Detroit apartment complex, chatting up the perky “Jewish career lady” residents, and their nights hosting parties at their place with 20somethings who are familiarly overconfident, arrogant, lost and shallow. Stick’s country-rock records are not met with approval by the semi-yuppies. Before the shadows of their stagnant, hungover lives and their fellow straight-laced apartment dwellers’ can fall on the wall and spell out “Now What,” Frank and Stick are at the next supermarket during closing hours, guns out, bags open.

As is his signature, Leonard doesn’t shy away from race relations. When Frank decides to set up a robbery with a few black residents who live near 8 Mile, Stick begrudingly riding along, the violence starts to flash around them and the bodies pile. The author’s witty dialogue is expectedly plentiful and masterfully structured, the language deftly capturing the time in which it was written and set with no hint of sounding dated or forced 30 years later. If you have recently found yourself underwhelmed by the latest novels and short stories, with structure and theme buried under a procession of dump trucks unloading thousand-dollar words, Stag’s effortless clarity will startle. It’s the rare book that, in a bit of anthropomorphism, could survive and thrive if it was an actual person. Arriving with three dollars and change in its jean pocket, it would make up the difference on a 12-pack of Pabst in two seconds. Swag would just walk up and, you know, have a couple words with Kavalier and Clay.

This discourse of Elmore Leonard's Swag was written by ignore staff for ignore Magazine, copyright 2007.