Raylan

by Elmore Leonard

[jamiereadthis]

I’ve been in such a malaise with reading these days. I’m grumpy with just about everything I’ve picked up. Every little grievance is obnoxious; I’m counting eyerolls and holding grudges. For each book I’ve read this month, I’ve chucked at least three more across the room.

So it’s to some extent hilarious that this is the book making me the exact opposite of grumpy. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not odd in that... well, shall we say my love for Justified is not undocumented or insubstantial. But this isn’t much of a book. More or less, it’s a funhouse mirror of one, loosely edited, the sketches Elmore dashed off after the first season of the show for the purpose of giving the writers new material to strip for parts. (Here’s the backstory I wrote out in a comment.)

And oh shit, it’s great. It’s ridiculous and badass and funny and ridiculous. Full of the usual screwballs and racists and nutjobs and criminals. There’s loose threads and left turns. There’s contrivances and shorthand. There’s so much of the meta-narrative here, the book begs for a forward. Not an asterisk, or excuse— it should be able to stand on its own, which is maybe the area it fails— but some sense of the context. That it’s a piece of a conversation. It’s just Elmore giving the characters room to play so the writers can run and play with it further.

Because what it isn’t, but what it looks like it should be, is the novelization of the show. Elmore’s not going to do the anger of Raylan Givens or the soul searching of Boyd Crowder. He’s gonna tip the Rube Goldberg contraption on some crazy crime. Write dialogue with all the licks and riffs of some backwoods jazz. Raylan’s the Raylan that’s still gonna say, “You can’t shoot a man, Bob, and tear up his patch. The man has to make a living.” Boyd’s not the Boyd of any recognizable incarnation, either of the show or really, of the original “Fire in the Hole.” In several places— mostly the Crowders— there’s a bookmark, Elmore saying “this? You guys can do this better than I can, now go do your thing.”

What I would normally nitpick, here doesn’t bother me a bit. Maybe that’s not fair. Maybe it should be judged as a marketable book, not a multi-layered meta-narrative. I don’t care. It had me grinning the whole way through. Turning pages. Reading it eagerly— and again— instead of chucking it across the room. Elmore’s DNA runs deep in the show and here’s a peek at the collaboration.

Or maybe that’s the big part of what zapped through my cantankerousness. It’s that rare and ridiculous thing: the love letter to the love letter of the original thing. Elmore, so typically and notoriously grumpy with the adaptations that get him wrong, is here so thrilled with what they’ve done with his Raylan, he not only goes back to the drawing board, he adds to his world some of what Graham & co. invented for theirs. Each the riff on the other, each their own separate thing.

For Graham and Tim, says the inscription. There’s the forward you need.

(If you count, though: there’s one storyline left untapped. Ms. Jackie Nevada. Guess who’s showing up this year? Bring it on, season 4.)

First read, October 2012

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February 2013:

Now we can add Jackie Nevada (and Kennet!) to the roster. There’s no more storylines left to tap. But my favorite part still: Dewey Crowe in the Black Pike Mining deal. (Sorry: M-T Mining, in the book.) If you’re going to have fanfic, have Elmore Leonard write your fanfic, yes sir.