Rum Punch

by Elmore Leonard

From America's top writer of hardboiled crime, the novel that became Tarantino's hit film JACKIE BROWN.

Ordell Robbie makes a fine living selling illegal high-powered weaponry to the wrong people. Jackie Burke couriers Ordell's profits from Freeport to Miami. But the feds are on to Jackie - and now the aging, but still hot, flight attendant will have to do prison time or play ball, which makes her a prime 'loose end' that Ordell needs to tie up...permanently. Jackie, however, has other plans. And with the help of Max Cherry - an honest but disgruntled bail bondsman looking to get out - she could even end up with a serious nest egg in the process.

• ISBN10: 0062119826
• ISBN13: 9780062119827
• Publish Date: 18 October 2011 (first published 1 January 1992)
• Publish Status: Active
• Publish Country: US
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
• Imprint: Collins
• Format: Paperback (US Trade)
• Pages: 368
• Language: English

Reviews

[jamiereadthis]

I finally made it over to my winter stockpile of Rick Bass and was settling in. Getting used to the rhythms of it again (which takes no getting used to at all, for me). Letting the slow, deep, calm, quiet solitude fill up my soul. Then I was housesitting for a few days. There, I watched Jackie Brown. Then, I had to pull out Rum Punch.

I thought, oh boy. This can’t work. Rick and Elmore, Bass and Leonard? My two favorites but, so so different. I thought, what if one taints the other? What if one makes the other seem ponderous, boring? What if one makes the other seem flashy, cheap? Some things just jangle too much if they’re together. You keep your loves apart, sometimes.

But oh my God, no.

The very opposite of that, where I was sitting on couches and porches (the mild winter sun) with Montana in one hand and Palm Beach in the other. Back and forth I’d go for hours. The buried sea, the balmy beach.

And one didn’t taint or tarnish the other. Each deepened and expounded on it all. My two loves: the deep wilds of nature, the deep wilds of humanity. No moralizing to be found. Complexities galore. The crime and the hunt. The love and the mischief.

So if you want to get drunk on a fifth of Rick Bass and down chasers of Elmore Leonard? Here’s my stamp of approval, but: only if I get to drink along.

[The Rick Bass accompaniment was Where The Sea Used To Be, if that’s your kind of thing.]

[Boy howdy did I love the book more than the movie. How did Tarantino bloat the story and yet cut out the best parts?]