So close and yet so far

The New York Times has an article by Janet Maslin about Elmore Leonard:

Elmore Leonard’s “Road Dogs” starts with a trip to prison. Why not? No self-respecting Leonard character avoids the occasional legal infraction, and this new book resurrects a few repeat offenders. It flings together Jack Foley, best known as the guy George Clooney played in Out of Sight; Cundo Rey, a Cuban go-go dancer and entrepreneur shot by the title character of LaBrava; and Dawn Navarro, who appeared in Riding the Rap as well as in other past lives. More later about Dawn’s belief that she was once an Egyptian pharaoh.
Ordinarily the writer who turns to his own pages for inspiration risks looking lazy. But Mr. Leonard’s crime stories are packed with players who deserve curtain calls. And there’s nothing remotely wheezy about his way of throwing together Foley, Cundo, and Dawn (as they’re known in Road Dogs). Foley has the brains, Cundo the machismo and Dawn the shamelessness to make this one of Mr. Leonard’s most enjoyably sneaky stories.
“We road dogs, man, we do for each other no matter what,” Cundo tells Foley. In other words, they’re buddies. Best friends. Blood brothers. Well, fine: if Cundo wants to see it that way, the bank-robbing Foley isn’t going to argue with him. Cundo, who has put together a small real-estate empire in Venice, California, during his eight years of incarceration, pays for the “smartest chick lawyer” who helps get Foley out of jail.
Cundo wants only one favor in return. He wants Foley to keep an eye on Dawn, his sort-of wife, a psychic who got into a common-law marriage with Cundo for reasons of mutual exploitation. She liked the houses in Venice and saw Cundo as a wealthy mogul. He thought a fortuneteller could help him find other people’s fortunes. And as psychics go, Dawn is a hot specimen. A man won’t believe she can read minds “till I tell him to quit trying to picture me naked”, she says.
Once Foley is freed and goes to live in one of Cundo’s houses (or 'homes', as Cundo always calls them), picturing Dawn naked is really easy. That’s because there’s a great big nude portrait of her that she’s hung next to the bed. It was painted by Little Jimmy, whom Cundo calls 'the Monk' on the assumption that Jimmy would never lay a hand on Dawn, let alone paint her. Cundo is adorably deluded enough to believe that Dawn has been chaste while he has been behind bars.
An aside: Road Dogs is worth reading just for the way Mr. Leonard uses the word “chaste” in a gag line. When a gay gangster goes to confession for the first time in 27 years, this book concocts the following exchange: “‘Up to this time you’ve been chaste?’
“You mean, Father, by dudes? If I like the guy he don’t have to chase me.”
Anyway, when Foley meets Dawn, Cundo’s assumptions about buddyhood are immediately given the lie. It’s not Foley’s fault; Dawn will put the moves on anyone she thinks might be useful to her. Foley is so good looking (Mr. Leonard says he wrote with Mr. Clooney in mind) that he might even help charm the Beverly Hills widow who has hired Dawn to get rid of her dead spouse’s spirit. “I refuse to play the grieving widow and wear black the rest of my life,” this woman says. “I have de la Rentas in black, but give me a break.”
To the extent that it has a theme, Road Dogs is about what Dawn thinks of as 'the guy-thing': male loyalty. How much of Foley and Cundo’s friendship is authentic, and how much can it be dispelled by a woman who’ll do anything to advance her agenda? If Dawn, like some of Mr. Leonard’s other female characters, sounds like a misogynist’s dream, the Egyptian royalty angle does make her special.
So as Dawn looks in the mirror to put on heavy kohl eyeliner, she turns herself into Hatshepsut, the female Egyptian ruler who died in 1458 BC. And Dawn starts talking to herself in a language that is prime Leonardese. However widely imitated Mr. Leonard is by a generation of writers who can mistake terseness for talent, it’s unimaginable that any other stylist could come up with this image of red-hot malevolence or this syntax for Hatshepsut: “‘That was you,’ the Dawns said to each other, and thought, if you were pharaoh and a couple of hieroglyph rock chiselers were giving you a hard time... What would you do?”
Among the other hieroglyph rock chiselers scheming their ways through Road Dogs are the neo-Nazi bodyguard who works for Cundo only grudgingly (“I don’t care for the man myself”), the kid gangster who shot a salesman at Saks on Wilshire Boulevard because he didn’t like the way the man was selling him a pinstripe suit, and Lou Adams, the FBI bloodhound who wants either to catch Foley robbing a bank or to write a book celebrating Foley’s bank-robbing skills, whichever happens first. There is every reason to think that Adams, Foley, and Foley’s absent dream girl, Karen Sisco, the law-enforcement officer who shot him in the leg and is still on his mind, will each be given a victory lap in Mr. Leonard’s future work.
Mr. Leonard, now 83, still writes with high style, great energy, unflappable cool, and a jubilant love of the game. As ever, his scorn for fussy prose is best expressed through his own superbly lean locutions. One sentence is all he needs to show how Dawn feels about Cundo: “In a few moments she would be timing her breathless gasps and cute grunts to the little killer’s thrusts, hoping he wouldn’t cause her to break wind and disturb the performance.”

Rico says that Mr. Leonard is doing a reading from this book in Philly this week, but he can't get there. Guess he'll just have to buy the book unsigned...