Riding the Rap.

Elmore Leonard has been writing great crime fiction for years with the same cozy formulas, the same cast of South Florida rednecks and drug-runners and gamblers and cops and abused ex-wives. So it has been a little strange to see his profile rise abruptly in the past year, with highbrow critical praise, a big Hollywood film, even an appearance in the New, Yorker. One has to wonder sometimes whether all this attention is going to his head, making him too self-conscious. It has happened before: Dashiell Hammett never wrote a good line after Hollywood discovered him. But these fears are groundless. Riding the Rap is as good as anything Leonard has ever written.

As much as any contemporary fiction writer, Elmore Leonard has discovered a style of his own. His books consist mostly of dialogue, and even the descriptions sound like someone talking: clipped, fragmentary, familiar. It is the voice of someone looking in the rearview mirror, describing what he sees on a two-way radio. Definite articles drop out, as do adjectives and pronouns; everything occurs in a rolling, improvised present tense. Verbs give way to the participle: "Bobby watching the fortuneteller standing next to Harry in the recliner, the fortuneteller looking this way now, brushing her long hair from her face with the tips of her fingers, looking this way right at Bobby-Bobby sure of it, the woman calm, still looking this way...." This style can be hard to follow at first, because the point of view drifts between characters, like a cloud of exhaled smoke, without ever seeming to settle on anyone in particular.

Leonard's brilliance consists in having matched his style to his subject perfectly. These are not characters who would bloom into life in the hands of a more sophisticated writer. They are complete, because they are shallow. Their lives are rootless, transient, a blur of violence and get-rich schemes and failed relationships. Yet they are comic, because they do not dream of anything better than the next heist. They reinvent themselves all the time, using whatever materials come along. Louis Lewis, for instance, one of the bad guys in Riding the Rap, "was originally from the Bahamas ... he could sound Bahamian if he wanted to, but preferred being African-American and worked at it. A popular variation, he tried an Islamic name, Ibrahim Abu Aziz. till Chip started calling him Honest Ib and then Boo for Abu and Louis decided that was enough of that shit."

Leonard's characters live through TV and the movies. In Riding the Rap an aging gambler named Warren "Chip" Ganz has decided to make money by kidnapping people and forcing them to come up with a way to make the payments. Only he wants it to be exactly like the hostage crisis in Lebanon, which he saw on TV. He wants a basement, "full of spiders and roaches crawling around, pipes dripping. his hostages huddled against the wall in chains .... he told Louis and Louis said, `Where we gonna find a basement in Florida?'" Their first hostage is Harry Arno, who spent Leonard's last novel (Pronto) being chased by Italian gangsters. This time he is left blindfolded in an upstairs room at Chip' s place, while the bad guys sit around downstairs channel-surfing between Harry (on the house video-surveillance system) and "Oprah." The video system monitors the driveway too, so the main action of the novel becomes (for Chip and Louis) a TV show. When U.S. Marshall Raylan Givens arrives at the house looking for Harry, they recognize his "outdoor good-guy look" from the cowboy shows they've seen. And when the inevitable showdown comes, Louis can't get over the correspondence: "We like in the movies. huh""

Raylan. no TV junkie, models himself on the real thing, the handlebar-mustached sheriffs of the old Western frontier. Like most Leonard heroes, he is fortyish and tough, having struggled up from poverty and a bad marriage. Unlike the bad guys, he retains some connection with his past, though he doesn't like to talk about it. Born in an Appalachian mining town, he still remembers vividly the day when company thugs broke into his mother's house to get to his uncle, a striker. And now. without a warrant but knowing that Harry is held hostage in Chip's house, he remembers how, his mother told those company men that you do not walk into a house uninvited: "Her words hadn't stopped them. No, what they did was stick in Raylan's mind - her words. her quiet tone of voice - and stop him. more than twenty years later, from breaking into this man's house."

Raylan also struggles to justify his calling to his girlfriend Joyce, who cannot forgive him for having shot two mobsters back in Pronto. Raylan is no philosopher. but his stalwart fatalism redeems the black comedy of crime that is all around him. Transporting a violent redneck to prison, he tells him: "What you'll have to do now is ride the rap, as they say. It's all anybody has to do."

This stoic acceptance of a world of violence. alternating with an ironic. TV-borne detachment from it. is the baseline of Leonard's sensibility. There is something profoundly cheering about it, because it seems to bring a frightening world closer without lessening its glamour. In this respect Leonard is kin to Pulp Fiction filmmaker Quentin Tarantino, who gets a nice allusive compliment in the first few pages of Riding the Rap. Reading Leonard is in fact a little like watching a film, though no filmmaker has yet matched his pacing or reproduced his laconic humor on screen. And the dialogue might wilt in the mouths of actors. It is tempting to say that no one writes as authentically as Leonard, but I have no idea whether people in South Florida talk like that. What really matters is that after reading one of his novels I want to talk the way Elmore Leonard's people do.