Elmore Leonard book signing, July 26
ELMORE LEONARD, left, and PETER LEONARD
(Admission to the
event is free, but advance registration
is requested by calling 248-642-5800 ext. 171. The authors will sign copies of
their books bought at the event; for more information or to reserve copies,
call 248-968-1190.)
I haven’t read a
lot by Leonard the elder, and nothing by the younger, but I am a big fan of
“Justified,” which was inspired by Leonard’s short story “Fire in the Hole,”
featuring U.S. Marshal Raylan Givens, also incorporating a bit from the novel
“Pronto.” After seeing the show, I read both.
On “Justified,”
which Leonard doesn’t write but over
which he has some influence, Givens starts out as a super cop, reassigned to his
home region of Kentucky for being a little too eager to shoot a drug dealer in
“self-defense.” There he has a run-in with Boyd Crowder, a racist, smalltime
crook with whom he used to work in the coal mines. Boyd and Raylan are kind of
“the road not traveled”: they started out from the same place, in similar
situations, but one turned to the law and the other to crime.
The producers of
“Justified” decided to explore that relationship. While in the story “Fire in
the Hole” Boyd dies, in the series he survives and even claims to have a
religious awakening, professing to have found the lord and preaching to
Harlan’s outcasts. Raylan and the viewer is left to wonder how real this
conversion is, suspecting not very and that Boyd has some scam up his
sleeve. That’s season one. The
relationship shifts and changes over the next two seasons.
The main difference
between the Raylan of Leonard’s fiction and “Justified” is that print Raylan is
not quite as together a dude. He’s awkward, a bit of a schlemiel and, at times,
downright dumb. Half of “Pronto” is from the perspective of a loan shark who
Raylan’s trying to arrest, but who keeps outsmarting him.
Leonard doesn’t
usually write about supermen, but Hollywood likes them. Chilli Palmer in “Get
Shorty” is also smarter in the film version.
I like the Leonard
I’ve read a bit more than most of the Leonard adaptations I’ve seen, but I like
them both in different ways.
Elmore Leonard’s
latest is “Raylan,” a new novel about Raylan Givens. I don’t know if or how it
reconciles the print and TV versions of the character, but I’m curious to find
out.
1 Comments:
I actually enjoyed reading through this posting.Many thanks.
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