Elmore Leonard has topped himself with ‘The Hot Kid’

Over the decades, Elmore Leonard has shown us a thing or two: that he writes the best American idiom since Ernest Hemingway, better dialogue than George V. Higgins, more entertaining crime stories than, well, maybe anybody ever.

When you’re this good, there’s no one left to top except yourself. And now, at 79, he’s done that, too. Leonard’s 40th book, “The Hot Kid,” is his finest.

In some respects, it is a throwback to his early crime novels like “Mr. Majestic” (1974) and “City Primeval” (1980) – grim and violent tales of vengeful vigilantes and heroic police officers.

In the 25 years since, Leonard has emerged as one of our finest humorists, the black comedy emerging from his wickedly sharp portrayals of human nature: the wisecracking cool of Chili Palmer in “Get Shorty”; the greedy scheming of Harry Arno in “Pronto”; the psychopathic stupidity of Armand Degas in “Killshot.”

In “The Hot Kid,” the humor is gone, and the grim violence is back.

In another respect, the book represents a new direction for Leonard – his first attempt to combine the genres of hard-boiled crime writing and the historical novel.

“The Hot Kid” is set in Dust Bowl-era Oklahoma, where Leonard grew up. He portrays it as an anything-goes time of moonshiners and speakeasies; of oil wildcatters, coal mine strikes and the Ku Klux Klan; of Chesterfield coats, pillbox hats and snap brim fedoras; of fast LaSalles, Studebakers and Essex coupes.

It was a time when bank robbery was the national pastime, and Pretty Boy Floyd, as Leonard would have it, actually invited friends to pop downtown to watch him pull a job.

Floyd makes a cameo appearance in Leonard’s tale, as do Baby Face Nelson, Machine Gun Kelly and John Dillinger, along with such notables as Will Rogers, Amelia Earhart, Count Basie, and Andy Kirk and His Clouds of Joy.

The hero of the tale is Deputy U.S. Marshal Carl Webster, who starts off one day by slipping handcuffs into a raincoat pocket: “He didn’t like the hard metal feel of the cuffs on the back of his belt. Spare rounds were always in his suitcoat pocket. What else? His wallet, change, a pack of gum, the keys to the Pontiac Eight sedan they were letting him use. Nine minutes later he pulled up in front of the Mayo Hotel. In the lobby, he glanced at himself in the mirror, lifted his hat and eased it down a bit closer on his eyes, the brown hat working, Deputy Marshal Carl Webster looking good.”

He’s just 15 when we first meet him, and it is a moment neither Webster nor the reader will ever forget. The boy is eating a peach ice cream cone in Deering’s drug store in Okmulgee when a famous bank robber named Emmit Long strolls in for a deck of Luckies. On a whim, Long robs the place, shoots down a policeman who walks in on him and, for good measure, swipes Carl’s ice cream cone.

Years later, Carl is still picturing Long with an ice cream streak in his mustache when he finds him and guns him down. Before he does, he gives Long a chance to surrender, telling him: “If I have to pull my weapon, I’ll shoot to kill.”

Like Dirty Harry’s “Go ahead, make my day,” it becomes his tag line, one he theatrically delivers almost every time he plugs a bank robber – which he does from cover to cover with some regularity, his exploits chronicled in purple prose by the ever-present Tony Antonelli of True Detective magazine.

Carl’s chief nemesis is a psychopath named Jack Belmont, whose goal in life is to become Public Enemy No. 1. Together, these two superbly drawn characters drive the plot.

But it is through Antonelli, whom both Carl and Belmont seek out to have their exploits told, that Leonard’s true purpose is revealed. Perhaps for the first time in his writing life, Leonard is striving to do more than entertain. This time, he has something deadly serious to say.

“The Hot Kid” is a subtle and provocative exploration of myth-making, of how America makes common criminals – and, sometimes, the brave men who track them down – into the stuff of legend.