City Primeval: High Noon in Detroit (edition 2002)

And again a book that snuck into my book case without being seen. This one arrived in 2010...!

A friend heard I'd never read a book by Elmore Leonard. He knew I'd been reading the Parker series by Donald Westlake, who wrote them under the name Richard Stark. I was up to number nine in the Parker series, when a package arrived in the mail -- two cheap paperbacks of Leonard novels, the sort of slim volumes that fit easily in the back pocket of a pair of jeans -- sent by my Leonard-liking friend. I dove immediately into City Primeval, which is subtitled High Noon in Detroit.

I'm only really just beginning to read novels like the Leonard books, and the Parker series. After a life in literary fiction and science fiction, I'm making my way through hardboiled fiction -- mysteries, crime, thriller. It's been a lot of fun. I'm not totally new to this stuff. I'd read some Mickey Spillane in college, under the influence of John Zorn, who wrote a great suite in Spillane's honor. I read a lot of the Black Lizard crime novels as they were being reissued, especially enjoying Jim Thompson, Paul Cain, Charles Willeford's Burnt Orange Heresy (which is a hardboiled novel that arts critics should read), stuff like that. I've read (or listened to unabridged audio books of) pretty much all of John le Carré, up until the last two or three of his books.

And that's just novels, a point I'll get back to at the end of this, a point that was very much on my mind as City Primeval was making its pleasures clear to me. For when it comes to television and movies and comics, this fictional mode that I mostly avoided in written work is something I actively seek out in visual storytelling. So by the time I got to Elmore Leonard, I was already a fan of heists and criminal pursuits and urban detection. I just have, in the past, consumed it not as a novel but as The Wire, or NYPD Blue, or The Shield, and so on. Hong Kong action flicks. Hollywood crime thrills, like Steven Soderbergh's Out of Sight, itself based on an Elmore Leonard book.

Anyhow, as for City Primeval, it's subtitled High Noon in Detroit for a reason. That's what the book is -- a long tense plot with limited violence, leading up to an all-but-inevitable confrontation. The confrontation will, it seems like, be between the two main characters: Cruz, a recently divorced cop with a penchant for being clean cut despite his city's high scum quotient; and Mansell, a self-proclaimed wildman who, as put by one person who knows him better than she would prefer, was born about 100 or so years too late. You know how Sawyer, in an early episode of Lost, says that he's no longer in civilization; he's in the wild? That's how Mansell acts, even when he's in civilization. (Yeah, another TV reference from me.)

The book opens suddenly, with Mansell unwittingly killing a prominent and much-hated Detroit judge after a bad case of road rage on both their parts. It's a brief tour-de-force, moving back and forth quickly between the points of view of the judge and Mansell. That taut format is then expanded for the rest of the book, which cycles with ease from Mansell to Cruz and back again, making stops along the way for the viewpoints of Mansell's girlfriend and lawyer, Cruz's fellow detectives, and some criminals with their own reasons to want Mansell off the streets.

Leonard keeps things moving, which is especially to his credit since omniscience is rarely in the favor of a thriller. We, the reader, know just about everything. There's one point toward the end where the cops clearly know what they're going to do, and he keeps this from us, but otherwise, we know pretty much everything -- most importantly that Mansell didn't single out the judge. It was coincidence that the guy Mansell killed was a notable part of the justice system. That's a red herring that keeps Cruz and his peers off course for quite a stretch. Watching Cruz track Mansell and trap him is great fun, and I'm sure this won't be my last Leonard book.

Back to TV for a moment, I've long wondered why The Wire wasn't as popular as The Sopranos. After reading City Primeval, I guess I know why. There's so much of the Wire in City Primeval, that it's clear to me that as new as The Wire was to me, it wasn't to everyone. Perhaps it wasn't the series' much-praised complexity but its familiarity that caused it to be less special to a broader audience. There are, simply put, far more city-crime novels packed with characters than there are mafia novels disguised as family dramas.

I picked this book up at a library sale about a month ago. I was not familiar with this one. It was published in 1980. A gritty crime novel set in Detroit, this is classic Elmore Leonard. I believe this might have been one of his early forays into crime fiction, after mainly writing Westerns. However, this was a pretty good read. It is a bit dated. Music, clothing styles and language are out of time, but the story was fast paced, tense, and of course had Leoanord's wit and humor.
Clement, a sly criminal cheats justice, then turns around and kills an unpopular judge and a woman that was with him. Raymond Cruz, a homicide detective is determined not to let Clement escape justice again. Thus, a cat and mouse game begins Clement and Raymond. The other characters involved are also classic Leonard style. Quirky and offbeat, we have Sandy, Clement's girlfriend and Carolyn, Clement lawyer.
A solid crime thriller in the hardboiled tradition. One word of caution- the language and attitudes of the time might be offensive to some. Overall a B ( )

Group M1

This is one of Leonard’s early novels about a Detroit detective tracking a sociopathic murderer who knows all the moves. It has a Western feel to it, and, it is structurally quite similar to [No Country for Old Men], going back and forth between the characters to the final confrontation. I enjoyed it, but I have enjoyed most of Leonard’s work so far. ( )