Book review: “Raylan” by Elmore Leonard

Elmore Leonard was a fan of human nature. He didn’t think in terms of us-and-them. We’re all us, each with flaws and moments of beauty.

How else could he write so well about strippers and lawmen, con-men and trophy wives, people just trying to get by and sociopathic killers, and even an amoral corporate lawyer such as Carol Conlan?

When Carol shows up halfway through Leonard’s last novel Raylan (2012), she has come to Harlan County, Kentucky, to smooth over a problem — a boulder that was pushed by an M-T Mining bulldozer over the side of the mountain so that it fell and destroyed the home of Otis Culpepper, an unemployed miner.

A few hours earlier, Otis had smart-mouthed a mining executive — well, and also pushed the guy’s face into the muck of a putrid, poisoned pond — so there was an element of payback.

So, tit for tat, Otis shows up with a shotgun that night and shoots out the windows of the company trailer where Carol is meeting with Boyd Crowder, one of many of Leonard’s characters who hover around the line of criminality.

 

“That’s sweet”

“Otis, you done?”

Otis and Boyd get to talking, and then Carol pushes Boyd aside and joins the conversation, trying to shut up the former miner.

“I was born and raised in Wise, West Virginia,” Carol said, “till I went away to law school.”

“Was any soot on you,” Otis said, “it’s gone now. My wife’s never been belowground, but she’s dyin of black lung, sleepin next to me forty-seven years breatin my snores.”

“That’s sweet,” Carol said.

Her sarcasm is petty and demeaning, but a further insight into Carol’s dark soul comes a few paragraphs later. She tries to goad Otis into firing the shotgun again and, when that doesn’t work, urges Boyd to shoot Otis anyway.

Boyd turned his head, raising his hands in kind of a helpless gesture, saying, “I don’t see the need, he can’t hurt us none.”

Carol took a step and yanked the Glock out of Boyd’s pants, shoved him out of the way, extending the Glock in one hand and shot Otis twice in the chest.

 

“Dumb as mud”

A thread that runs through all of Leonard’s novels has to do with the rich and powerful living lives far distant from the average folk — their arrogance, their cluelessness and their superficiality.

Consider the transplant surgeon at the hospital.

Raylan had stopped him earlier in the day to ask about nurses. Stopped him and committed his name to memory, Howard Goldman, that was it.  The doctor had no time for him, waved his hand in front of his face and kept going.

Or consider the rich guy, Casper Mott, who sold the top of his mountain to the mining company and got a lot richer. Raylan is talking to Reggie Banks, a former prizefighter who’s now Mott’s Black chauffeur, and there’s a tap on the window from inside.

“Time to let ‘em out,” Reggie said. “Man’s too wealthy to open the door hisself. Somebody told him he was a man of leisure; don’t have to do nothing he don’t want to. Dumb as mud he ain’t scheming with his money.  I wonder, does he put on being as simple as a child.”

 

Three stories

Raylan is Raylan Givens, a deputy U.S. Marshall who appeared in the earlier Leonard novels Pronto (1993) and Riding the Rap (1995) and who’s the center of this novel’s three interwoven stories.

The first one has to do with a scheme to cut out the kidneys of live doped-up victims to sell on the black market. A transplant nurse, tired of dealing with people like Howard Goldman, is behind the racket, and, if she’s had to deal with guys like Howard Goldman, she’s not completely unsympathetic.

The second is the cover-up of the killing of Otis and an effort by Carol to sweet-talk or, alternately, bully a savvy old backwoods pot-grower into signing over his mountain for coal mining. Raylan parts the hair of one of her thugs with a bullet to bring Carol’s machinations to a halt.

The third focuses on a 23-year-old female poker player, Jackie Nevada, who is in a game to win a million dollars, but it has side stories about three young strippers who rob banks under the direction of Delroy Lewis, and about a plan by Lewis to get revenge on Raylan by gunning him down, and about an effort by Carol to get Otis’s widow to sign papers to settle the boulder incident.

 

Couldn’t do charming

You’re right, that’s not three stories but a good several, and, yes, it’s probably too many for a novel. But Raylan was Leonard’s last novel — he died eight months after its publication — and he had been getting pretty loosey-goosey about plots for the past decade or so. And, truth be told, some of his books weren’t all that great.

A Coyote’s in the House (2004), Leonard’s attempt at a cute book for children, was a misfire. Leonard, it seems, couldn’t do charming. Djibouti which came in 2010, two years before Raylan, was a drag for the first 70 or 80 pages before picking up and hitting on all cylinders.

Raylan doesn’t crawl as the first third of Djibouti does, but it isn’t as tight as that book’s last 200 pages. Its interlocking stories are interesting enough although, as is usually the case, the characters are the ones who make Raylan so readable and fun.

Each of the three major stories ends with a shooting.  Well, you could argue that the third section ends with two. Or three. Well, let’s say several.

Two strippers are shot to keep them from talking to the cops.  A bad guy who is wearing drag clothes for the first time (and thinks he looks good in them) is gunned down before he can pull his Smith .357 from his purse.

 

“Her soul leavin her body”

But the important shooting takes place off-stage when neither Raylan nor the narrator is present.

It happens in the hospital room of Marion Culpepper, Otis’s widow, and it involves his shotgun. Arriving a few minutes later, Raylan asks a detective:

“How about Carol, Ms. Conlan?”

“She’s still lying where she fell. I think blown off her feet.  The slug hit her in the chest and messed it up some.  Nothing’s hardly been touched.  Mr. Crowder says the old woman fired the shotgun under her quilt and it set the quilt afire.”

Raylan thinks Boyd Crowder was probably the one who brought Marion the shells for her husband’s shotgun, but Boyd is cagey about that.

“I was at the table getting out papers for Marion to sign and bam, the quilt catches fire and I see Ms. Conlan fall against the nightstand knockin things over.  I believe her soul leavin her body before she hit the floor.”

 

“Almost a nice person”

Throughout Raylan, Leonard makes it clear that Carol is one of those over-bearing, pushy, bullying, oppressive rich and powerful people who make the lives of people like Marion so difficult.

Still, for Leonard, Carol was a human being, as Boyd noticed a short time earlier.

Boyd saw her smile in the mirror.  He believed she liked his carefree attitude, long as he didn’t take it too far.  She was almost a nice person when things pleased her.

That’s quite a compliment for one of the bullies of the world — “almost a nice person.”  And that seems to be something that Raylan felt as well. He tells Jackie:

“I knew her pretty well.  Enough that I didn’t much care for her.  She was the company and did whatever she wanted.”

“But seeing her dead,” Jackie said, “was different.”

“Killed with a shotgun.”

“By an old lady. You think she’ll go to prison.”

“I doubt it.  But you don’t know which one to feel sorry for.”

 

 

Patrick T. Reardon

4.22.25