The Hot Kid

by Elmore Leonard

[Michael @ Knowledge Lost]

Carl Webster was fifteen when he witnessed his first murder. Now he is the hot kid in the Marshall services; polite, respectful and can shoot a man driving away from 400 yards. He is on his way to being the most famous lawman of the 1930s. Jack Belmont wants to rob banks, become the most notorious outlaw and show his millionaire father he can live his own life. In the time of the Volstead Act comes The Hot Kid, a fast paced crime novel from a master of his craft; Elmore Leonard.

I love the Volstead Act; without it there may never have been organised crime in America and that makes for some interesting reading. Of course, love is the wrong word to describe the Volstead Act but I do have a huge interest in the era. For those who don’t know about the Volstead Act, it was the National Prohibition Act that became the Eighteenth Amendment, which established prohibition in the United States in 1919. This led to a surge in bootlegging and organised crime and made for some great stories for me to enjoy, from Boardwalk Empire (wonder if there are books that are like this show) to The Hot Kid.

I was saddened to hear about the recent loss of Elmore Leonard; though I hadn’t read anything by this crime master it really affected me. The very next day I reserved The Hot Kid from the library. I didn’t know where to start with this legend; he has written so many novels and they all looked good but a book set in the 1930s was right up my alley. Researching Elmore Leonard I realised that he was more successful that I thought. If you measure a writer’s success in adaptations (which I really don’t want to do) then you can’t go past some of his best adaptions like Jackie Brown, 3:10 to Yuma, Get Shorty, Killshot, Out of Sight and the TV show Justified.

The Hot Kid was a fast paced crime novel that I ended up reading in two sittings which is a big surprise because I feel like I’m a slow reader. I really enjoyed the way Leonard writes; it was so well plotted that he makes writing look so easy which I’m sure is very difficult to do. He is a prolific author with novels set in western times all the way up to the modern era. But I enjoy a time when organised crime reigns and tend to enjoy crime novels set there.

The only major issue I had with this book was that it never really felt like it was set in the time of speakeasies, tommy guns and organised crime. Every now and then I get a reference to the Volstead or a Thompson that pulls me back into the correct era. For the majority of the book I felt like Carl Webster was far too similar to Raylan Givens (from the TV show Justified) and that threw me off a little but didn’t really effect the overall enjoyment of the book.

Maybe this wasn’t the best place to start when exploring Elmore Leonard’s craft but I have no regrets. I will read the next book in the Carl Webster series but I think I might like to try something else by this crime master first. The problem I often face is the fact that I want to continue with an author but have so many other books I want to read and more often than not I never return to a writer I enjoy. But I’ve only been reading for a short time and I’m sure Elmore Leonard and the Carl Webster series will be read sometime in the near future.

This review originally appeared on my blog; http://literary-exploration.com/2013/09/12/book-review-the-hot-kid/