Golf isn't doing it any more for Robbie Daniels. A few years back, he shot another man on a duck blind, killing him. Maybe it was an accident, maybe not, but part of Robbie Daniels enjoyed it and wanted to do it again. And Robbie has the time and money available to a man who has always been rich, the ungrateful beneficiary of his father's hard work. He never flies on an airline, preferring to catch a ride on someone's corporate jet, has never seen the inside of a Holiday Inn, can't remember the name of his maid. Steeped in the lore of trashy action novels, Robbie constructs a rationale for his killing: he will execute people who deserve it, people who are beyond the reach of the law. And yet his next victim is a Haitian immigrant who happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. In an incident that seems to come from today's headlines, Robbie kills the man and gets off scot free on the claim that he was defending himself and his home. Robbie is a complicated serial killer on a learning curve. His next move is to recruit a confederate."Walter Kouza" wanted you to think he was important," Elmore Leonard tells us, and that one sentence provides a lot of insight into Kouza's motives. A former Detroit cop with a reputation for being trigger happy, Kouza is easily manipulated with money, booze and--above all--flattery. Once Daniels has signed him on, he orders Kouza to call him "Mr Daniels" and to give up smoking. So every time Walter wants a cigarette he'll be reminded that he works for Mr Daniels.Angela Nolan is a reporter who writes about the rich and doesn't like them very much. "They don't know anything that's going on outside their own walled in life," she points out. But just as the rich are naive about everyday people, so is Angela in some ways naive about them.Homicide detective Bryan Hurd is Angela's lover, Kouza's former associate, and very interested in Robbie Daniels. He's a hard-nosed realist who always has his own unique take on a given subject. Leonard contrasts him with Robbie, who starts with desires and manufactures theories to justify them. And he contrasts Hurd with Kouza, putting him in the same situation with Daniels and not being tempted at all by the offer that bought Kouza's soul. "Listening to him (ie Daniels) was not exactly embarrassing, but close to it. The man didn't hear himself as he was." Angela tells Bryan that she disliked Robbie before, but dislikes him even more now that she has met Hurd. And when one of Daniels's final vicious crimes puts Hurd in the cliche position of injured party/avenger, he responds in his own unique and carefully thought out way.Reading Elmore Leonard is like sitting in a bar, and some old guy sits down next to you and starts telling you this amazing story in everyday conversational language. It's pretty much accepted that Leonard writes great dialogue; even better that his narrative reads like dialogue.
Coming off of The Reckoning, I needed something like an Elmore Leonard novel: dialogue-driven and page-turning. I’ve read around twenty of them, but never this one from 1981. This isn’t his best. The title epitomizes the book: didn’t he have an editor to tell him how clunky it sounds? It doesn’t roll off the tongue. And while the titles of Leonard’s books are like the titles of James Bond movies, this one falls flat. The other issue is that the plot revolves around a millionaire who wants to kill someone because … he wants to kill someone. I know, I know—any excuse for the dialogue—but I couldn’t shake the feeling of, “That’s it?” At least when the crimes revolve around revenge or money, the reader could understand the criminals’ motives. Here, the net result is a shrug of the shoulders. I finished it so I could say, “Right, good.” But it’s not terrible. There are a few funny spots and Walter Kouza, the ex-cop that Harvey Keitel was born to play, is a terrific Leonard type. Better weak Elmore Leonard than what Nabokov called poshlost>, the second-rate masquerading as first-rate. This one is from that period in Leonard’s career when he was still gritty (the superior Swag> was in 1976 and Stick was in 1982) but before he turned the corner and became more celebrated by the literati who assumed they were granting all of us permission to enjoy a book that was sold in drugstore racks. Not that there are “drugstore racks” any more, but anyone who likes Leonard will get the point.
What do You think about Split Images (2002)?
As is almost always the case in a book by Elmore Leonard, the characters in Split Images take precedence over the plot. Robbie Daniels made millions in the Detroit industrial company that he inherited from his father. But Robbie has little interest in being a captain of industry. He much prefers the role of Palm Beach playboy. He especially likes golf, women and guns. He also likes killing people.Robbie fantasizes about the idea of killing truly despicable bad guys who are beyond the reach of the law. He recruits Walter Kouza, a former Detroit policeman, to assist him in his mission. Walter has relocated to Florida, but he's bored with his wife and his life and he sees the opportunity of going to work for Robbie as his last chance at a better life, even if Robbie does have homicidal intentions. Angela Nolan is an attractive journalist who's interviewing Robbie for an article on how rich people live while Detroit homicide detective Bryan Hurd is vacationing in Florida, hoping without much luck, to get away from homicide for a couple of weeks.The four characters find their lives intersecting in a story that moves back and forth between Florida and Michigan. Each has his or her own objectives and inevitably this will produce complications. As always, it's fun to watch a master story teller at work as Leonard throws these characters together into the boiling pot and then stands back to see what might come bubbling up to the surface.
—James Thane
First published in 1981, "Split Images" is unmistakably Elmore Leonard. It also is without doubt not the same Elmore Leonard who was writing a decade later; or two or three decades later. He simply started out unique and became great. He got better and better, sitting in his writing room with a legal pad and writing."Split Images" is a beautiful love story, a crime novel, an exercise in letter perfect dialogue. Think we speak the same way now as in 1981? Read this and find out. ( We don't.)This was one of the rewards I received for helping clean out an old house. Used paperback. Not a First Edition. Not Signed. But a prized volume in its own right.Highly recommended.
—Dan Downing
What a relief! After reading Leonard's disappointing most recent, "Raylan", I thought my days of enjoying this master writer's works had come to an end. Fortunately he has written some three dozen or so books and I've only read about 20 of them so I reached way back (30 years!) for one he wrote in 1981 and found the same great writing that had originally made me a fan of his.Split Images deals with a wealthy young playboy named Robbie Daniels who is very clever and gets his kicks killing people he deems to be detrimental to society. He lives in Detroit and Palm Beach (locales for many of Leonard's books) and enlists the assistance of an ex-Detroit homicide cop now working in Palm Beach, named Walter in carrying out his fantasy killings. Walter too had a record for a large number of killings while working as a Detroit cop. Another Detroit cop, named Bryan Hurd, vacationing in Palm Beach, comes across Robbie and sees a connection between him and a murder in Detroit where Robbie's sidekick Walter had been involved. He starts putting things together and begins investigating Robbie and Walter. Things escalate out of control and the two killers make some serious mistakes thereby sealing their doom.As is the case for all of Elmore Leonard's books, his use of dialogue is so authentic and colorful that one needs little else in the way of description of the characters and settings. It frees your imagination and therefore reading pleasure.It's difficult to pick a favorite Elmore Leonard book since they have all been great. But I have noticed a falloff in their quality over the last two or three (Raylan, Djibouti) so I'm glad there is still a treasure trove of his earlier works to fall back upon.
—Michael
