Mr. Majestyk

by Elmore Leonard

[jamiereadthis]

My first Elmore Leonard, back in the day, was the westerns. My dad loved Three-Ten to Yuma, the movie, and so I read Three-Ten to Yuma, the story. Within the month we had both read our way through the whole big volume of westerns, trading the big hardbound book back and forth. Sneaking it away from the other when we couldn’t wait. It’s taken me years to dig into Leonard’s later stuff— and why, I don’t know. Thinking, maybe, Miami crime and Detroit crime wouldn’t be my thing. That it was best to stick with the westerns. HA. I couldn’t have been more wrong.

But, still. It can be Kentucky, it can be Jerusalem or like this one, rural Arizona: the ones I love most have all that DNA of the early old west. Short and sweet, simple, delightful. The gas to the floor on an old yellow pickup. Barreling into all kinds of trouble, powder-kegging what little you have left before giving an inch of ground away.

This one, I don’t know why I wasn’t expecting it but it took me by the best kind of surprise. It’s Moonshine War, it’s Three-Ten to Yuma. What made me fall for all this in the first place, right here.

“Where do you want to go?”
“I don’t care. Anyplace.”
“We going to get married first?”
“Yeah, you want to?”
“I guess we might as well, Vincent. Soon as we get some time.”
Looking down the slope he said, “Here come a couple of friends of ours.”
They watched the two cars pass below them on the winding road.
“Now what, Vincent?”
“Now we give them a kick in the ass,” Majestyk said.

First read December 2012

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January 2013:

Once more, with feeling. I had to go right back to this one. Man, it’s a good one.