Elmore Leonard (1925-2013), sometimes known as “Dutch”, was an American novelist and screenwriter. Born in New Orleans, but having spent his high school and college years in Detroit, Leonard began his career in the 1950s publishing Western short stories and novels. In 1969 he published his first crime novel, The Big Bounce, and from then on worked mostly in that genre. Maximum Bob (1991) is one of several Leonard novels set in and around Palm Beach, Florida. His tales of sleaze and mediocre scheming are well adapted to the tropical climate.
Maximum Bob is Circuit Court Judge Bob Isom Gibbs, so nicknamed for giving maximum sentences to Palm Beach’s many small-time offenders. The novel’s dedication is for “the Honorable Marvin”, a judge with lots of stories whom Leonard knew. Gibbs got his nickname from an article in Newsweek, and he enjoys his notoriety, but he’s beset by problems: there are several local crooks with motive to have him killed, and he has a wife he met at the aquarium—she was working there as a mermaid—whose psychiatric quirks exasperate him. A young probation officer, Kathy Baker, is assigned Dale Crowe, Jr., just sentenced by Bob for punching a bouncer. Dale’s brother Elvin, just out of jail for murder, was put away by Bob, too. Elvin’s prison squeeze Sonny takes the fall and the sentence for a murder which was really to be blamed on one Dr. Tommy Vasco, who’s just lost his license and been put under house arrest, again by Bob. An alligator shows up on the front porch of Bob’s country home, and not long after, someone’s shooting at him from the garden. Among the cops trying to protect him, there’s a good ‘un in a neat navy-blue suit, Gary Hammond. Kathy and Gary have to figure it all out before Bob gets the whack, working mostly from a pizza box left in the judge’s garage and some informative murmurings from a crack-addicted prostitute named Earlene.
In Leonard’s prose, looseness can be a good thing. Here is Leanne, Bob’s wife, recalling a presaging incident with an earlier alligator at the aquarium: “She remembered placing herself in profile to the audience, so they would see what she was doing, raising her chin slightly as she took a bite, began to chew . . .” And Kathy by the holding cell at the court: “Mostly black guys in there, they’d ask how she was doing.” Sentence fragments abound, often forming efficient description, as when Kathy looks at Bob across his desk: “A farmer or an Okeechobee fishing guide dressed for town in a short-sleeve white shirt and red patterned tie.” Elsewhere the fragments are appositives and continuations of thoughts: “That was what got him confused. Trying to talk and listen to her at the same time.” And more distinctively, they sometimes make progress in the narrative: “But then reached over and turned down the volume.”
Leonard has to switch perspectives frequently to tell the story the right way, to reveal things in the right order. It’s primarily between Bob, Kathy, and Elvin Crowe, sometimes Leanne as above, and very briefly, he narrates from the point of view of an alligator. The gator’s privileged moment is oddly reminiscent of the Benjy sections in The Sound and the Fury: “She sniffed and air came through it into her nostrils, bringing a strong scent of the thing she liked.” When he hasn’t limited himself to the reptilian brain, Leonard is expert in free indirect discourse. The scene in Bob’s office, which is from Kathy’s perspective, sees him failing to seduce her: “‘You can call me Bob, or Big, if you like.’ No she couldn’t.” It’s a free indirect quip, really, beautifully shared between Leonard watching the scene, and Kathy experiencing it.
This kind of curt cynicism is all over Leonard’s fiction, and here it’s Kathy’s defensive habit, her play at dignity. Leaving a useless ex-husband to his blonde mistress, she says, “He’s all yours.” There’s less of this talk as Kathy and Gary are getting romantically involved. We only read Kathy’s side, and there is a kind of sentimentality to it. “He looked like . . . a nice guy,” she thinks. Later there’s more dimension to the word “nice” as “In the shower she wondered what Gary saw when he looked at her with his nice eyes.” Finally she knows what she wants, and it’s very simple: “She wanted him to touch her and they’d kiss.” This sentimentality, it should be explained, is achieved through contrast. Most of the other men in the story lust after Kathy and tell her so without delicacy. Bob considers the prospect of an affair with her in his own balanced, judicious way: “If she was Cuban, so be it; there was a lot of it going around.” This is the semi-colon not just as punctuation but as a comic device, Leonard’s invention so far as I know. When Kathy and Gary get back to work, the cynicism has returned, and Leonard gives her the jaded detective routine, but he also acknowledges it as such:
“He’s an offender, Gary. They’re dirty once, they can get dirty again.”
“You sound like a twenty-year cop.”
She gave that a moment. “I do, don’t I?”
The suspense in Maximum Bob is worked well, but just as much of the enjoyment is found in the colloquialisms, both in dialogue and in free indirect discourse. The crime novelist James M. Cain wrote in his preface to Double Indemnity that “the average man, from the fields, the streets, the bars, the offices, and even the gutters of his country, has acquired a vividness of speech that goes beyond anything I could invent.” Leonard shares in this appreciation, and has that extra-literary talent, the quick way of understanding slang and knowing how to use it. Kathy’s learned from some of her perps the phrase “beam up”, meaning get high, and crack addicts are called “rockheads”. Someone is told not to “piss off” but to “kiss off”. Elvin knows at least the streets, the bars, and the gutters better than any other character, and his language is the richest; the Elvin role would be the opportunity for a “bravura performance” in a film adaptation. He is the most dangerous character, and surely Elmore’s favorite, if giving him such wide verbal license means anything. In jail, Elvin says, one has to be tough, “salty”. He also uses “buck” and “booger” as racial epithets, “dink” to mean idiot, “pokey” to mean slow. His talk sometimes verges on extravagant, channelling what Cain called “the logos of the American countryside”, as when he excuses himself at the bar by saying he has to “go shake the dew off my lily”, or when he’s proud of a new outfit but figures Dale Crowe Sr. thinks he looks like “blue shit tied in a bow”. If there’s an occasional western twang to Elvin's rangy speech, it’s connecting Maximum Bob to Leonard’s fictional wild west, and that’s where reckless Elvin seems to think he lives: “In prison you couldn’t do whatever you wanted. Out in the civilian world, though, he’d always felt you could.”