In ''The Hot Kid," Leonard merges the Western and the urban crime novel. The result is a rousing tale of desperadoes robbing banks, hiding out in whorehouses, and shooting peace officers during the rat-a-tat-take-that-you-dirty-rat early '30s, when Charles ''Pretty Boy" Floyd supposedly once took his family to town so they could watch him rob a bank, a Harvey Girl waitress would ''get recognized on the street like a movie star," and glimpsing Amelia Earhart in a Kansas City hotel was a possibility.

Far from being an exercise in nostalgia, this book reinvigorates what Mr. Leonard might have experienced at his most impressionable: the mythmaking process that turned commonplace crooks into figures of folklore. And he is able to bring a remarkable form of double vision to the events described here without sacrificing the deadpan verve that is his trademark.