When The Women Come Out To Dance

I was inspired to pick up Elmore Leonard’s short story collection When The Women Come Out To Dance after learning that the story “Fire In The Hole” inspired FX’s great new TV series Justified. It is a fine story that was well cannibalized for the pilot. Apparently, the main character Raylan Givens makes his first appearances in the novels Riding The Rap and Pronto. The collection was published in 2002, but one of the stories were originally printed in 1982, it seems most of the others were written in the 90s. Leonard is master of realistic and colorful dialogue-no to mention an economy of style in which he can sum up characters and situations with a minimum of description.  In addition, I’m also a great fan of Stephen Soderberg’s adaptation of Leonard’s novel Out of Sight and one of the main characters from that novel, Karen Sisco, gets a story here, “Karen Makes Out.” It seems that Soderbergh and his screenwriter Scott Frank adapted scenes from the story and put them in the novel I’ll have to listen to their commentary for the film again, because I recognized some scenes like how Karen shoots her bank-robbing boyfriend after she finds out the truth and he tries to run, and bank robbing descriptions, etc. I have to say that I enjoyed all 9 stories especially the last one “Tenkiller” which should get it’s own treatment-Hollywood stuntman, tough guy comes home to Oklahoma and runs the con men off his papa’s property (it actually bears more than a passing resemblance to “Fire In The Hole”-but entertaining nonetheless). The title story was also a standout. I like how Leonard’s sometimes infuses his writing with pop culture references for short hand. For example, in the story “Sparks” he uses compares a character’s appearance to that of Linda Fiorentino and references the modern day film noir film I first saw her in, The Last Seduction (directed by Montana son John Dahl-I need to re-watch that one highly entertaining as I remember). There’s a historical-based story of a black soldier, “Hurrah For Capt. Early,” as well as some stories that feature American Indian references like “The Tonto Woman,” “Chikasaw Charlie Hoke,” and the aforementioned “Sixkiller.” There’s not dud in the bunch. I’m looking forward to reading more Leonard and I’ve got his two Raylan Givens novels sitting on my bookshelf, so it won’t be too long before I treat myself to some more Leonard.