Book review: “Fifty-Two Pickup” by Elmore Leonard

Bobby Sky, a wiry Black guy with a preference for action, in the sense of violence, and for action, in the sense of drugs, is walking out of Alan’s apartment building in Detroit with short fat Leo Frank.

The three men had this simple, foolproof idea for blackmailing a rich middle-aged, married factory owner named Harry Mitchell who was playing around with Cini, short for Cynthia, a 22-year-old nude model. Alan Raimy was the brains of the trio. Bobby was the brawn. Leo just happened to employ Cini at his nude photo parlor.

But, at every turn, Mitchell hasn’t followed the script. And, now, Bobby is saying to Leo:

“We finding out maybe the man ain’t so dumb either.”

You can almost see short fat Leo Frank shake his head in chagrin as he says:

“We picked the wrong guy. That’s the whole thing. We picked the wrong fucking guy.”

That will certainly turn out to be true by the end of Elmore Leonard’s 1974 novel Fifty-Two Pickup. But, even at this moment, Bobby and Leo don’t know how wrong things are.

 

$52,000

Not only is Mitchell confounding their expectations, but Alan is pulling a fast one on Leo and Bobby.

Alan has just told them that he’s seen Mitchell’s books — Mitchell willingly showed them to him in one of his many surprising reactions to their scheme — and Alan’s told Leo and Bobby that Mitchell has no money for a blackmail payment.  The government, Alan says, has tied up all of his money.

Alan actually has seen the books, so he knows what he doesn’t tell the other two — that Mitchell can’t pay the $150,000 the blackmailers are demanding but he can come up with $52,000 which he’s offering them, take it or leave it.

Alan’s figuring why share the fifty-two grand. Bobby is figuring something doesn’t seem right. And Leo, a loser from the word “go,” is clueless.

Eventually, Alan will drive to Mitchell’s plant to get the money. Hence, the title Fifty-Two Pickup.

A second present-day novel

Ffity-Two Pickup, published early in 1974, was only Leonard’s second crime novel set in the present-day, after the Big Bounce, five years earlier.

A prolific writer of Western short stories, Leonard published seven Western novels between 1953 and 1972 as well as a Prohibition-era book The Moonshine War in 1969.

Midway through 1974, he would publish Mr. Majestyk, another present-day story, a novelization of the script he wrote for the movie starring Charles Bronson. Many of Leonard’s novels were turned into films, but this was the only one in which the script was written before the novel.

By the time he died in 2013, Leonard had published 45 novels, and one of the things that distinguished them was his tendency to employ some pretty sociopathic criminals as characters.  They weren’t stick figure bad guys, however.  These stone-cold killers often had a compelling human side to their personalities, despite their general lack of empathy.

And, too, there was the snappy dialogue.

 

Sociopaths and snappy dialogue

Big Bounce had the snappy dialogue, and it had an interesting — and sexy — sociopath.  But not so much Fifty-Two Pickup.

Leo, a mama’s boy, even after the death of his mother, is sketched out better than Alan and Bobby, but Leo’s not at all a violent guy.  Bobby is a killer, but not much else about him is revealed.

Alan would seem to be the most interesting of the three, having learned accounting that he used to commit crimes and being something of a porn businessman and sex thrill aficionado. Indeed, he uses drugs to turn Mitchell’s wife Barbara into a sex slave and a negotiating chip.

So, yes, he’s a sociopath, but, no, the reader doesn’t get a sense of what makes him tick.

And none of the conversations in Fifty-Two Pickup is very clever.

 

Pressure-cooker

Instead, what Leonard is doing with the novel is to make it a pressure-cooker.

I can’t think of another one of his later books that focuses so much on the tension of the story — what Alan, Bobby and Leo are going to do and what Mitchell and Barbara are going to do in response.

Fifty-Two Pickup is an offbeat crime genre novel, innovative in its way.

The blackmailers, who eventually turn out to be murderers as well, are confused by Mitchell’s actions.  He’s not willing to sit still and let the blackmail happen to him. Instead, he goes out on his own to figure out what’s going on and to try to get the bad guys off his back.

There’s a vigilante aspect to this, but, given that the plot gets so totally convoluted, partly because of Mitchell’s actions, it’s not as if he could go to the police and expect to be believed.

Mitchell does what he can to nudge the three partners to distrust each other, but, in the end, he’s got to be willing to pay the $52,000 in order to get Barbara back. Or at least seem to be willing.

Later Leonard novels aren’t as intense as this one is.

But a lot of them are more fun.

 

Patrick T. Reardon

10.3.25