Call number
MYST LEO
Collection
Genres
Publication
Arbor House (1987), Edition: Book Club
Description
"Almost unbearable suspense. Leonard has produced another winner." --People A wild ride with "the coolest, hottest writer in America" (Chicago Tribune), Bandits has everything Elmore Leonard fans love: non-stop thrills, unexpected twists and turns, unforgettable characters, and the most razor-sharp dialogue being rapidly exchanged anywhere in the crime fiction genre. Leonard stands tall among the all-time greats (John D. MacDonald, Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain) and towers far above most of the writers currently plying the noir fiction trade. The master who created U.S. Marshal Raylan Givens, currently of the hit TV series Justified, is at the top of his game, ensnaring readers in an ingenious plot hatched by a former jewel thief and a radical ex-nun to scam millions from a sadistic Nicaraguan colonel. In fact, the Philadelphia Inquirer says Bandits "may well be his best." Read it and decide for yourself.… (more)
Subjects
User reviews
LibraryThing member michaelcruse
Meh. Not one of his better ones. Started out good, with an ex-con working in a funeral parlor conspiring with an ex-nun to rip-off a Contra colonel of the millions he was raising for his death squads. But it just sort of petered out, like he ran out of ideas.
LibraryThing member mikedraper
I've enjoyed the novels of Elmore Leonard and add this one to the list.
Jack Delaney has been working with his brother-in-law Leo since Leo arranged for Jack's early release from Angola.
Leo owns a funeral parlor and Jack is ordered to remove a body from a hospital dealing with people who had
Jack also finds that the man is in New Orleans to raise money, supposedly for his people in Nicaragua to fight Communists.
Instead, the ex-nun wants to get the money to build a hospital for lepers.
There is good humor and dialogue in this story, matched with another group of memorable characters from one of our best writers.
Recommended.
Jack Delaney has been working with his brother-in-law Leo since Leo arranged for Jack's early release from Angola.
Leo owns a funeral parlor and Jack is ordered to remove a body from a hospital dealing with people who had
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leprosy. Jack is asked to bring another person to the hospital and finds that this was an ex-nun and the person who Jack was going to remove as a dead body is really a young woman on the run from a Nicaraguan colonel who wants to kill her for attempting to infect him with leprosy.Jack also finds that the man is in New Orleans to raise money, supposedly for his people in Nicaragua to fight Communists.
Instead, the ex-nun wants to get the money to build a hospital for lepers.
There is good humor and dialogue in this story, matched with another group of memorable characters from one of our best writers.
Recommended.
Show Less
LibraryThing member uvula_fr_b4
Bandits by Elmore Leonard is a semi-humorous crime thriller set in the latter half of the 1980s involving the then-current US foreign policy entanglements with the Nicaraguan contras and their opponents, the Sandinistas (in full, the Sandinista National Liberation Front; in Spanish, Frente
Add to this already complex blend of conflicting motivations and murky politics a few more oddball Leonard characters, unexpected character interactions and character development, and, above all, dialogue, dialogue, dialogue, and you have the makings of a respectable entry in the "Dutch" Leonard oeuvre. (One quibble about that dialogue: every character here, whether from New Orleans or Nicaragua, says "suppose" when they mean to say "supposed.")
Bandits reads, at this remove, as a historical novel, filling in the memories of those readers who perhaps didn't pay quite as much attention to current events in the mid-1980s as they should have (although hopefully more than Jack and Roy do here...), as well as underscoring those memories of the time that did manage to stick with them. The proxy war that the US and the USSR fought in Nicaragua -- with the US backing the contras who fought to restore the deposed regime of Anastasio Somoza Debayle (although it should be stressed that Somoza was assassinated in exile in Paraguay in 1980, and his heir apparent, Anastasio Somoza Portocarrero -- derisively known as El Chigüín ["daddy's kid"] -- was, by the mid-1980s, not as attractive a figurehead to the contras as they might have wished for), and the USSR backing the ruling Sandinistas, either directly or through Cuba -- colored a good deal of political discourse in the US in the 1980s, and, in some circles, the 1990s, especially given the fact that some have pointed to the contras and their supporters as being a proximate cause of the epidemic of crack cocaine that afflicted California in the 1980s. Leonard does not mention the third Boland Amendment as being the reason that financial support for the contras went so far underground in the US from 1984 until October 1986; the actual activities of what would be dubbed the Iran-Contra Affair were winding down by the time Bandits was published, although news of the scandal didn't break until late in 1986. Iran-Contra would have a place at or near the top of the US news cycle from late 1986 until 1992, when Reagan's first Secretary of Defense, Caspar Weinberger, was indicted on two counts of perjury and one count of obstruction of justice in relation to congressional investigations into the matter. (Weinberger was pardoned by the outgoing President George H.W. Bush -- "Bush 41" -- on December 24, 1992, before he could be tried on these charges.)
Readers disinclined to pick up a political / foreign policy info-dump masquerading as a thriller need not worry: Bandits only imparts as much background as absolutely necessary for the characters to act. Indeed, Bandits can be seen as a master class in how to deliver highly condensed exposition almost entirely through a series of dialogues; Bandits reads so effortlessly that it's often only when one pauses at chapter breaks -- to grab a refreshing beverage, perhaps -- that one is apt to realize just how many details Leonard has given the reader. (An ancillary pleasure for me, as a fan of the work of John le Carré, is the sub-basement view of the world of espionage, and its frequent collusion with criminals of varying stripes. The entirety of Bandits can be imagined as taking up just about a chapter, no more, of one of le Carré's more celebrated novels.)
Most of the Leonard hallmarks are present in Bandits: the dry, sometimes off-color, if not out-and-out profane, humor; the quirky, though naturalistic, dialogues that both develop the characters and advance the plot; the unexpected character interactions; the organic behavior stemming from said interactions; and the equally unexpected violence. (Violence in Leonard's books usually doesn't transpire how one might expect, and its scale, whether for good or ill, also frequently surprises.) If Bandits isn't as suspenseful as, say, Killshot, it's certainly a fine entry in the canon, one to be savored as a more serious offering (compare Graham Greene's serious novels such as Brighton Rock, The End of the Affair, or The Quiet American with his self-labeled "entertainments" such as Stamboul Train, A Gun For Sale, or The Ministry of Fear), with a depth and maturity not popularly associated with Leonard's work.
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Sandinista de Liberación Nacional, or FSLN), and the scheme concocted by three unlikely partners -- Jack Delaney, an assistant at his brother-in-law's funeral home who served time for hotel burglary; Lucy Nichols, an ex-nun who spent nine years at a leper hospital in Nicaragua, whose father is an ex-oilman turned successful helicopter salesman to the oil industry; and Roy Hicks, an ex-cop turned bartender who provided Jack protection in prison -- to rob a contra colonel named Dagoberto ("Bertie") Godoy Diaz, who is in New Orleans with a testimonial letter from President Ronald Reagan (or, as some of us preferred to style him, "Ronnie Ray-Gun") to help him drum up donations to buy military equipment and materiel for the anti-Communist contras to retake the reins of the Nicaraguan government from the Sandinistas. Into this already busy scenario Leonard adds a cynical, déclassé CIA agent named Wally Scales; an even more down-at-the-heels IRA soldier-cum-recruiter named Jerry Boylan, who is interested in siphoning off some of the colonel's guns; a Cuban exile turned Nicaraguan associate of Bertie's, turned Miami-based drug smuggler, named Crispin; and a half-black Miskito Indian (probably a Miskito Sambu or Miskito Zambo: the racial term was immortalized in the late Victorian children's book The Story of Little Black Sambo) named Franklin de Dios, the muscle of Bertie and Crispin, who is treated by them, as the saying goes, like a rented mule, but who has reasons of his own to fight the Sandinistas. Add to this already complex blend of conflicting motivations and murky politics a few more oddball Leonard characters, unexpected character interactions and character development, and, above all, dialogue, dialogue, dialogue, and you have the makings of a respectable entry in the "Dutch" Leonard oeuvre. (One quibble about that dialogue: every character here, whether from New Orleans or Nicaragua, says "suppose" when they mean to say "supposed.")
Bandits reads, at this remove, as a historical novel, filling in the memories of those readers who perhaps didn't pay quite as much attention to current events in the mid-1980s as they should have (although hopefully more than Jack and Roy do here...), as well as underscoring those memories of the time that did manage to stick with them. The proxy war that the US and the USSR fought in Nicaragua -- with the US backing the contras who fought to restore the deposed regime of Anastasio Somoza Debayle (although it should be stressed that Somoza was assassinated in exile in Paraguay in 1980, and his heir apparent, Anastasio Somoza Portocarrero -- derisively known as El Chigüín ["daddy's kid"] -- was, by the mid-1980s, not as attractive a figurehead to the contras as they might have wished for), and the USSR backing the ruling Sandinistas, either directly or through Cuba -- colored a good deal of political discourse in the US in the 1980s, and, in some circles, the 1990s, especially given the fact that some have pointed to the contras and their supporters as being a proximate cause of the epidemic of crack cocaine that afflicted California in the 1980s. Leonard does not mention the third Boland Amendment as being the reason that financial support for the contras went so far underground in the US from 1984 until October 1986; the actual activities of what would be dubbed the Iran-Contra Affair were winding down by the time Bandits was published, although news of the scandal didn't break until late in 1986. Iran-Contra would have a place at or near the top of the US news cycle from late 1986 until 1992, when Reagan's first Secretary of Defense, Caspar Weinberger, was indicted on two counts of perjury and one count of obstruction of justice in relation to congressional investigations into the matter. (Weinberger was pardoned by the outgoing President George H.W. Bush -- "Bush 41" -- on December 24, 1992, before he could be tried on these charges.)
Readers disinclined to pick up a political / foreign policy info-dump masquerading as a thriller need not worry: Bandits only imparts as much background as absolutely necessary for the characters to act. Indeed, Bandits can be seen as a master class in how to deliver highly condensed exposition almost entirely through a series of dialogues; Bandits reads so effortlessly that it's often only when one pauses at chapter breaks -- to grab a refreshing beverage, perhaps -- that one is apt to realize just how many details Leonard has given the reader. (An ancillary pleasure for me, as a fan of the work of John le Carré, is the sub-basement view of the world of espionage, and its frequent collusion with criminals of varying stripes. The entirety of Bandits can be imagined as taking up just about a chapter, no more, of one of le Carré's more celebrated novels.)
Most of the Leonard hallmarks are present in Bandits: the dry, sometimes off-color, if not out-and-out profane, humor; the quirky, though naturalistic, dialogues that both develop the characters and advance the plot; the unexpected character interactions; the organic behavior stemming from said interactions; and the equally unexpected violence. (Violence in Leonard's books usually doesn't transpire how one might expect, and its scale, whether for good or ill, also frequently surprises.) If Bandits isn't as suspenseful as, say, Killshot, it's certainly a fine entry in the canon, one to be savored as a more serious offering (compare Graham Greene's serious novels such as Brighton Rock, The End of the Affair, or The Quiet American with his self-labeled "entertainments" such as Stamboul Train, A Gun For Sale, or The Ministry of Fear), with a depth and maturity not popularly associated with Leonard's work.
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LibraryThing member Verge0007
If you like your novels driven by mostly snap-crackling dialogue, you've found the master in Elmore Leonard and in this book published in 1987 at the height of the Nicaraguan conflict between the Sandinistas and the--then U. S. backed Contras. Mr. Leonard really shines. Then again I'm a fan so
Former Hotel thief Jack Delaney works as a morticians assistant, who's been sent to pick up a body but the body ain't really dead. Enter a former nun who used to work at a lepers hospital in Nicaragua and now wants to let loose and pinch some moola from ex-Coronel Dagoberto Godoy who's in New Orleans to collect funds for the war down there, from rich oil barons, and Republican politicos; armed with a sign and sealed letter of high praises from the champion of anti-communism himself president Ronald Reagan.
Despite the fact that this book was published a while back, the story has a fresh feel to it with believable characters that make for a very satisfying ride.
Reading this book in that unique style of his; Mr. Leonard reminds me that its all about the journey not the destination.
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yeah.Former Hotel thief Jack Delaney works as a morticians assistant, who's been sent to pick up a body but the body ain't really dead. Enter a former nun who used to work at a lepers hospital in Nicaragua and now wants to let loose and pinch some moola from ex-Coronel Dagoberto Godoy who's in New Orleans to collect funds for the war down there, from rich oil barons, and Republican politicos; armed with a sign and sealed letter of high praises from the champion of anti-communism himself president Ronald Reagan.
Despite the fact that this book was published a while back, the story has a fresh feel to it with believable characters that make for a very satisfying ride.
Reading this book in that unique style of his; Mr. Leonard reminds me that its all about the journey not the destination.
Show Less