Elmore Leonard has long been a standby author of mine—someone whose work I would pick up at random whenever I wasn’t reading anything in particular. For whatever reason, I hadn’t read a book by him in several years, so when I found a copy of 52 Pick-Up in a Little Free Library I grabbed it eagerly.
52 Pick-Up is classic Elmore Leonard, full of skeezy characters, excellent naturalistic dialogue, and crisp, effortless prose. Leonard never feels like he’s trying to impress, and thus always impresses. As far as the plot goes, I wouldn’t rank this among his best, but it’s certainly engaging. Harry Mitchell, a former soldier and autoworker who studied engineering and opened a successful auto plant, is captured by masked assailants and shown a porn film starring him and his mistress. They demand he pay up or they’ll leak the footage. Stubborn Harry refuses, and the ante is steadily upped, resulting in murder, kidnapping, and other Leonardy mayhem.
The characters are archetypal but distinct, filled with life through Leonard’s keen eye for detail and even keener ear for capturing spoken language. He has mastered the art of dropping words form sentences in a way that mirrors speech, something I see surprisingly rarely in other books (perhaps because it sounds hackneyed if done wrong)
I wouldn’t call 52 Pick-Up my favourite of Leonard’s novels (that’s Freaky Deaky, incidentally), and the title is incredibly arbitrary (referring, I assume, to the $52,000 in bribe money the perps settle on, a number I’m guessing he chose after he thought of the title), but it’s solid and worth reading.