New Elmore Leonard book a bit of a crime

Very few literary reputations have ever stood higher than Elmore Leonard's did at his death, in 2013. Among his fellow crime novelists he was an acknowledged master, but writers usually unconnected to genre fiction were eager to claim him, too: "Leonard did more than merely validate the popular crime thriller," Martin Amis wrote, "he stripped the form of its worn-out affectations, reinventing it for a new generation and lifting it to a higher literary shelf."

And so now we enter the period of assessment and consecration that follows the death of such an esteemed writer – a surprising outcome for someone who started in the pulps.

The latest offering of this post-mortem phase is Charlie Martz and Other Stories (** out of four), a collection of Leonard's unpublished early work. It's an odd volume, extremely uneven, its author groping toward the subjects he would eventually command.

New readers would be far better off beginning with Four Novels of the 1970s, which the Library of America published last year. That felt like an essential book, a series of sure-handed, funny, thrilling tales about the lives of small-time criminals in the inner city, Leonard's most important milieu.

Charlie Martz, by contrast, is all over the place both in terms of subject and quality. Its stories include a Graham Greene pastiche, a lot of ersatz Hemingway (bullfighting, boorish Americans abroad being quietly judged by the locals), several preposterously weak Westerns about a quick draw named Charlie Martz, a few moody set-pieces about working class men and women, a morality play set in the Civil War.

This is detritus, in other words. Even the introduction, by Leonard's son, is hesitant to promise more than "glimpses of Elmore's greatness to come." These are present as well, it's true, early flashes of the author's wit, his preternatural ear for dialogue, his powers of observation. In "The Line Rider," a cowboy is "all points: his chin, his hawk nose, even his hat brim the way it was curled and funneled in front, everything pointing forward and nodding gently with the easy walking motion of his horse."

But even the best of the stories, such as "The Trespassers," about a young Michigan veterinarian protecting his land and his wife, have serious defects. They nearly all show a taste for the kind of easy irony and cheap reversals, for instance, which Leonard's later work, so finely ambiguous in its moral judgments, moved light years beyond. It's not even the best of his early stuff, either; that was gathered in a collection of his Western stories, during his lifetime.

Which means that there are two ways to look at Charlie Martz and Other Stories. One is that every word by Elmore Leonard should be published, because even the failures of a genius are interesting. The other is that this is a money grab: shiny cover, huge name, recent death, decent hook. Either position is fair. But I think I know which of the two Leonard's own later heroes, flawed, illusionless, and clear-eyed, might pick.

Charlie Martz and Other Stories

By Elmore Leonard

William Morrow

2 stars out of four

Charles Finch writes the Charles Lenox mystery series.