Up In Honey’s Room
Written by Elmore Leonard
HarperCollins
Mass Market Paperback
Price: $9.99
Release date: April 29, 2008

Elmore Leonard is God.

I’ve been saying it for years, but now I finally have definitive proof. It comes two pages into his latest, called Up In Honey’s Room (now in paperback). It’s a fart joke that actually gets a laugh. Think about that. If you can pull off a fart joke without actually hearing the fart or having someone in front of you tell you about it? You are possessed by divinity.

Leonard is, beyond the shadow of any conceivable doubt, the best crime writer the world has ever seen. This is not hyperbole, but rather critical consensus. But it falls into my own personal opinion that Leonard is one of the four best novelists alive today (the other three being Kazuo Ishiguro, Philip Roth, and Cormac McCarthy). Yeah, he writes about cops, robbers, and people on the low end of the spectrum, but so did Dickens and Dostoevsky. He possesses such uncanny insight into the way people think, act, see themselves, deceive others, lie themselves into trouble, shoot their way out, and (most importantly) talk, that it would make most so-called “literary” authors drool all over themselves in envy. That he’s so accessible anyone can read him is an asset, not a liability.

He’s been writing for over fifty years and he’s never written a bad book. He hasn’t even wasted a word. I know, because I’ve looked.

And Up In Honey’s Room doesn’t break the tradition. Devious bad guys suffering from delusions of grandeur, good guys walking on the edge of the same, women who don’t take any shit, cracker-jack plotting, and dead-on dialogue. A truly worthy addition to Leonard’s vast and formidable canon.

The last time we saw U.S. Marshal Carl Webster was in Leonard’s last novel The Hot Kid. Now he’s on the trail of two Nazi soldiers who escaped from a prison camp in Oklahoma and high-tailed it to Detroit. They’re hooking up with a fellow named Walter Schoen who’s a dead-ringer for head SS guy Heinrich Himmler. His ex-wife is a girl named Honey Deal from Kentucky, who takes a shine to Carl when she sees him. Throw in a lady German spy who drinks too much and a transvestite houseboy and you have one of Leonard’s explosive cocktails of violence and humor.

The brief synopsis of the plot should not, however, fool you into thinking that Up In Honey’s Room is somehow a straight-forward novel. Once the bodies start piling up, irony mixes with general incompetence and ego to create a muck that our bad guys can’t walk out of. And the reason I haven’t mentioned our antagonists by name is that everyone in the novel walks the same moral divide.

I should point out that this is not Leonard’s best novel. No, that prize goes to either Rum Punch (which Quentin Tarantino adapted into Jackie Brown) or 52 Pick-Up. But Up In Honey’s Room does, however, contain many passages that are indicative of the things about Leonard’s writing that make him so wonderful. There’s a scene where one of the escaped Nazis meets a Jewish con-woman in a bookstore and they start talking. Flirtation mixes with the risk of exposure on both sides, these characters just being themselves and daring the other to accept it or to pack up in run. It is, for lack of a better word, perfect.

Another thing is that Leonard’s characters don’t live in a vacuum. Much of what they do is not informed by who they are, but how who they are collides with how they want to be seen. They constantly refer to songs and movies and cultural archetypes in their minds to carefully craft an image for themselves. It’s almost as though you can tell the heroes from the villains by how good they are at being completely full of shit. Up In Honey’s Room contains an unexpected and almost sweet parallel to Ernst Lubitsch’s classic film Ninotchka. In that film we had a die-hard communist who wanted deep-down to be a high-class society girl. Here we have a Nazi who wants so desperately to be a cowboy.

And of course the dialogue is astounding. It’s just that every other reviewer brings it up and I just wanted to be different”¦ Sorry.

This comes as no surprise to proud acolytes in the cult of Elmore Leonard. The 82-year-old author has entertained for decades with the same laconic flourish and he shows no signs of slowing down. But if you’ve never picked up a Leonard novel, this would be a good place to start. And if you actually decide to believe my words? Plunk down the ten bucks at the supermarket or the Barnes and Noble for Up In Honey’s Room and have that be your introduction to a truly fantastic author? Then you have more than my approval.

You have my envy.