Book review: “The Big Bounce” by Elmore Leonard

It’s one of those wonderfully goofy moments that happen in an Elmore Leonard novel.

Jack Ryan is in the middle of what he thinks is a breezy, spontaneous spot of morning sex when the woman underneath him demands that he prove he’s Catholic:

“Say the Apostles’ Creed.”

“Aw, come on.”

“If you’re Catholic, you know the Apostles’ Creed.”

 “O my God, I am heartily sorry —”

 “That’s the Act of Contrition!”

It’s about midway through Leonard’s 1969 novel The Big Bounce, his first crime novel after making his name as a writer of western books and short stories.

Ryan, a two-bit burglar and former Class C minor league ball player, spends the novel in an intricate and, often for him, confounding dance with the wild, thrill-seeking nineteen-year-old named Nancy Hayes, the bored mistress of a rich food store owner.

But, at this particular moment, Jack, who hasn’t slept with anyone for a long time, thinks the woman in Cabana No. 5 is coming on to him.  That woman, Virginia Murray, however, is more than a bit flustered.

 

“She looked fine”

For the better part of a week, she’s been at the Bay Vista resort by herself and having warm, romantic daydreams about the hunky handman, Ryan, and bugging him to fix her stuck window.

When Ryan finally gets around to it, he comes at an inconvenient time — when Virginia, a virgin in her late twenties, is changing into a different bathing suit. She grabs her terry cloth robe but realizes that he will know she is naked underneath.

She had to hurry. She had to think. (Mother of God, help me!) She had to put something on. Something. Virginia reached into the closet. She pulled a dress from its hanger. Her light blue shift. My God, it was too thin. But she was going to wear it, because it was in her hand, because it was unzipped and she was stepping into it and zipping it up again, almost all the way, smoothing the dress over her hips and glancing in the mirror. She was amazed. She looked fine; she even looked calm.

 

“Ryan knew damn well”

In fact, to Ryan’s eyes, she looks very fine indeed, even if she was nothing like Nancy in the looks department.

He saw her stoop quickly next to the bed to pick up something and saw the way the dress stretched tightly but softly over her behind and smoothly across her back without the little ridge that brassiere fasteners make. By the time Virginia had raised the shade, standing against the morning sunlight coming in, Ryan knew damn well she didn’t have anything on under the dress.

So, Ryan begins to romance Virginia and then kiss her, and then his attentions go beyond the boundaries of her earlier misty daydreams and he begins to unzip her blue shift and they fall on the bed —

And, then, well, Ryan begins to realize that she’s struggling and she tells him to stop, “Because it’s a sin.” And that leads to her Catholic question, and, eventually, Ryan gets it right; “I believe in God…”

But that’s sort of beside the point, and she says, “Will you get off me, please?”

 

Loose ends

Most of Leonard’s novels have been turned into movies, but The Big Bounce was the only one to be made into a feature film twice — once, in 1969, with Ryan O’Neal starring as Jack Ryan and, again, in 2004, with Owen Wilson in the starring role.

In 2009, Leonard to the Los Angeles Times that the Ryan O’Neal version as “the second worst movie ever made.”

The worst was the Owen Wilson one.

To be fair, Leonard’s story, while it works as a low-slung, loping, wandering book, was never going to be easy to make into a film because too much happens and nothing much happens. It’s a novel where everyone is at loose ends. Its plot is filled with loose ends, and its ending is one huge loose end.  This is not the sort of story that a Hollywood studio wants to make.

 

“More fun after all”

In retrospect, Leonard showed a lot of chutzpah to write A Big Bounce as his first crime novel. The crimes are all small-time. Ryan does a bit of breaking and entering. Nancy is all over the place — sexually entrapping middle-aged men as a babysitter, driving a car of teenage boys off the road, shooting out picture windows and, with Ryan, throwing rocks through windows and a little bit of breaking and entering as well.

Nancy is looking for the big bounce, the big thrill, something to do that’s taboo and provides a real charge of something.  Adrenaline, maybe.

Then, of course, there’s the murder:

He was dead and she had killed him.

The trouble was, she wasn’t sure if windows weren’t more fun after all.

 

People being people

Over the next four decades until his death in 2013 at the age of eighty-seven, Leonard wrote thirty-nine more novels, and he stayed true to his vision of storytelling and humanity.

Most of those books had at least a bit more plot than The Big Bounce. Those were the ones that were easy to make into movies.

But all of them were about people being people, with all their idiosyncrasies and odd angles.

All of them had people like Nancy, men and women who never got that responsibility gene that most of us go through life with, men and women who aren’t able to and have no desire to see the other guy’s side, who will gyp you or break your window or kill you for a whim, who are, in short, sociopaths.

And all of them center on someone like Jack, an essentially good, competent guy who can take care of himself, operates near or over the line of legality but has a sense of what’s right and what isn’t.

He’s Catholic, after all.

 

Patrick T. Reardon

6.26.25