Mixed Pickles - the Book log 2012

Elmore Leonard is, perhaps, the best dialogue writer in American crime fiction. Couple this with the fact that he writes believable, engaging characters and intriguing plots and you have an author who bears reading and re-reading.


"Comfort to the Enemy" is a linked series of two short stories and a novella, watching lawman Carlos "Carl" Webster over a span over twenty or so years of his life. Beware the cover - this makes you expect some kind of "White Heat", "Little Caeser", Chicago gangster affair, but the contents are a long way from that. Encounters with wannabe Dillinger sidekicks, cattle rustlers, hard-working men who turn to bank robbery out of despair, a German PoW who escapes and then returns to camp almost at will. There's no detection, as such, very little in the way of knock-down, shoot 'em up gunplay, but a portrait of a man growing older and wiser in his job. Recommended.