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While working at my desk through (a) Rhonda Byrne's dire The Secret and a stack of essays about it, (b) F. LaGard Smith's bizarre Out on a Broken Limb (1986), in which a Biblical Fundamentalist assails Shirley MacLaine for being a bit wacko in her ideas (the funniest moment is when he berates her for accepting this crackpot "evolution" stuff), and (c) Martin Gardner's jolly The New Age, taking notes here and there as I've been going through all three, my scant intervals of leisure-reading time have been occupied by Elmore Leonard's 1990 novel Get Shorty.
This is, I think, only the second of his novels that I've read, the other being Out of Sight (1996), which I devoured last fall . . . discovering as I did so that this was the basis for a movie I'd already seen and liked on cable at some stage, starring J-Lo and G-Cloo. (I'd known the movie was based on a Leonard novel, but I'd long forgotten the movie's title.)
Chili Palmer is a Mob debt collector in Miami. When things go awry in the Mob hierarchy, Chili pursues Leo, an obsessive gambler who managed to swindle an airline's insurance company and lit out for Las Vegas, neglecting to pay his debts to the Mob before his departure. In Vegas, Chili gets back the money but promptly, tempted by the environment, loses it all gambling. By the time he realizes his folly, he finds Leo has fled again, this time to Hollywood. The remainder of the book is taken up satirizing the movie industry, as Chili -- along with sleazoid producer Harry and ex-scream queen Karen -- attempts to sell a major studio and a major star (who happens to be Karen's ex) on a script Harry's gotten hold of. Except what inadvertently happens is that Chili, who don't hold with no posturing thespian assholes, manages to sell everyone on the notion of making a movie about a Mob debt collector in Miami who pursues an obsessive gambler to Vegas and . . . You get the drift.
To be honest, I preferred the 1996 novel to Get Shorty. That's not to say I didn't find Get Shorty plenty of fun: I did. But Out of Sight seemed to have a story to tell -- and a good one -- whereas Get Shorty, even though it included a plethora of excellent scenes and setups, somehow didn't. Nonetheless, with its zinging dialogue and its wry sense of irony (jeez, I sound like a blurb writer all of a sudden; sorry for the lapse), the novel has certainly put me in the mood for some more Elmore Leonard, down the line. Of course, depending on how bright I feel post-op, for the next few months my "leisure" reading is going to have to be largely devoted to those Bogus Science-related tomes that don't demand to be read at my desk. Next up, a slim vol on the afterlife by Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, oh joy.
