I have been sort of weepy recently, so I need to read macho books in order to get it together. I just finished an Elmore Leonard book and if had any idea how to do this or whether I would get mean ceast-and-desist e-mails from Leonard’s people, I would insert the awesome photograph of craggy, squinty, stubbly, sunglass-wearing Leonard from the back of my copy from the library. I mean, this is a man who has probably never burst into tears because he smashed his head on the kitchen counter while crutching around his house looking for something to wear.
As far as I can tell (this is the second Leonard book I’ve read; he’s written like 5 million and 3 million of them are hit movies) it actually takes longer to watch one of the moves made out of his books than to read one of them. The dialogue is snappy and funny and he doesn’t have to waste much time on character development since they are all characters who can be easily summed up in one sentence. In this book, the villains are two ex-radical hippies who served time for blowing up a federal building, and now are trying to extort money from the two rich ex-hippies who they think turned them in. There is a hard-boiled, morally ambiguous detective and an ex-black panther who is now a Driving Miss Daisy houseman waiting for his rich simpleminded employer to die so he can inherit lots of money. There is a sweet little Southern actress who gets mixed up in the whole affair.
It made my train ride go pretty fast, and it was sort of soothing feeling like I already knew all of the characters from their stereotypes in my culture. Another funny thing about Elmore Leonard: his stories feel like the kind where everything is going to go to hell at the end, or at least be sort of mournful and ambiguous. But in both books I’ve read (and also in Jackie Brown and Get Shorty, now that I think of it), there is a happy ending. It’s fun. It sort of makes you feel like you are getting away with something.
OK, now I am reading two books at once: an extremely trashy Jackie Collins book (appropriate for weepy girls on pain pills, but more boring than it has any right to be) and a semi-scholarly biography of Jesse James (mas macho!). Clearly, I should focus on the Jesse James in order to keep a stiff upper lip and hopefully it will not turn me into a racist criminal.
Stationer's Review 
My dad grew up in St. Joseph, MO, where the house that Jesse James was shot to death in has been made into a mini-mini-mini ‘museum.’ Last time I went was well over a decade ago, and it cost all of 50 cents and the tour through the two rooms of the house lasted about 15 minutes. The high points of the tour are the bullet hole in the wall and the dent in the floor where James’s head hit. Both of these are covered in glass because souvenir seekers had the nasty habit of taking a splinter here and there, a practice that was in danger of reducing both the dent and the bullet hole to nothingness.