Brass-Knuckle Cool

Cool. That's Elmore Leonard. Not kid cereal cool, or Saturday morning cartoon cool, or Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure cool; but Cool. The kind of pure, simple Cool that runs like a knowing thread from blues to bebop to beat, Hank to Johnny to Waylon, quintessentially American Cool.

And if Cool is the man, then Cool must be the man's world: spotting Cool, playing Cool, being Cool enough to get someone to blow their cool. The man's men and women either have it or don't. And woe be those who don't.

Cool backs the action in Tishomingo Blues, Sir Elmore's 37th (count 'em) romp through the mythology of American Crime. It is a mythology he has played a large part in creating.

Foresaking his hometown of Detroit ("Cleveland without the glitter") and his much made of mean Miami streets, Leonard descends into a Delta almost as foreign - and as brutal - as the Rwanda of his brilliant Pagan Babies. The place: Tunica County, Mississippi, a big muddy swim from Arkansas, where poverty is next to Godliness. Or used to be anyway, before the casinos came a callin'. Now that there's gambling in them thar hills things have taken on a whole new meanin' - money. And with the grab bag comes the crooks, kooks and otherwise exploitative characters.

Tishomingo BluesAnd oh what a terrific blend of high-living low life. In no particular order Tishomingo Blues boasts a weathered - but Cool - carny high diver; a slick, smooth and crafty D-Town hustler (Cool, natch); a poor honest soul made whole by unlucky love and Jenny Crank diet plans; a half-bit ex-con former Sheriff's Deputy and his inbred Dixie Mafia sidekicks; an Outfit chieftain and his two-timing trophy girl; and last but never least, Chickasaw Charlie, a once dim light of big league backlots, who makes a sore point of providing innocuous running commentary from his low rent hustler's perch - a pitching cage.

Then of course there's action, brass-white-knuckled action. Leonard pits the cornbread Cosa Nostra against the breakaway Motor City mobsters on a field reenactment of some obscure Civil War battle and creates another a showdown worthy of Peckinpah.

Come to think of it, it's a wonder Peckinpah never made motion picture magic of Leonard's work - nearly everyone else has. Frankenheimer, Ferrara, Tarentino, and Soderbergh are but a few who struck celluloid gold filming Leonard's more modern shoot 'em ups. While any of the early wild westerns - 3:10 To Yuma (Glenn Ford, 1957), Hombre (Paul Newman, '67) and Joe Kidd (Clint Eastwood, '72) - are the stuff of gunslinger legend.

In Tishomingo Blues, the legend continues, a legend of lives lived hard and fast. In fact, bluesman Robert Taylor (after the "Homes" in Chicago?) talkin' about Roy Scheider doing Bob Fosse in All That Jazz, best sums-up the Leonard legend as thus: "the man living every minute of his life till his very way of living kills him. Beautiful."

In an America where bootstraps conceal pistols and Horatio Alger robs banks, Leonard is the perfect chronicler, the master mindful of the various shades of grey, but determined to keep the fight between black and white. What's cool is that Leonard's patented brand of black and white fight is not a brawl between good and evil but between smart and dumb, an angle that provides hope to bad guys everywhere.

Perhaps this is why Leonard is without question the con's favorite author. Not only does he know cons - how they move, how they think, and especially how they speak - he knows too that not all cons are bad. In other words, he's not afraid to let a bad guy win every once in awhile; providing of course they keep their Cool.

Note: This article was first published online in the now defunct Bully Magazine. Supplied with immense thanks to Ken Wohlrob.

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