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A review by rosseroo
City Primeval: High Noon in Detroit by Elmore Leonard
3.0
Having run a ton of Leonard's books, I feel pretty comfortable saying that, while having its charms, this is "lesser" Leonard. Although he's primarily known as a crime novelist, Leonard's first five books were Westerns, and then he moved back and forth between crime and westerns for about ten years before settling purely into crime. This 1980 book came at the tail end of that decade, and has the loose feel of an idea or project that he was trying but couldn't quite polish up.
As the subtitle ("High Noon in Detroit") makes explicit, the story takes the black and white stakes of a frontier lawman going mano-a-mano with a killer, and updates it to Detroit at the tail end of the disco-era. The characters are big and colorful as in most of Leonard's books, starting with an obnoxious local judge (based on the real life James Del Rio) and the killer, a "wild man" from Oklahoma who lives by his own code and definitely doesn't like disco. The supporting cast includes the killer's aimless girlfriend, a hangdog ex-con dope dealer, a clever lady lawyer, and an extended family of gun-toting Albanians.
The story zigs and zags, and there's plenty of his trademark sizzling dialogue, but it just lacks the spark and depth of his later crime books. It's certainly not bad, but there are ten other Leonard books that I'd suggest ahead of this one.
As the subtitle ("High Noon in Detroit") makes explicit, the story takes the black and white stakes of a frontier lawman going mano-a-mano with a killer, and updates it to Detroit at the tail end of the disco-era. The characters are big and colorful as in most of Leonard's books, starting with an obnoxious local judge (based on the real life James Del Rio) and the killer, a "wild man" from Oklahoma who lives by his own code and definitely doesn't like disco. The supporting cast includes the killer's aimless girlfriend, a hangdog ex-con dope dealer, a clever lady lawyer, and an extended family of gun-toting Albanians.
The story zigs and zags, and there's plenty of his trademark sizzling dialogue, but it just lacks the spark and depth of his later crime books. It's certainly not bad, but there are ten other Leonard books that I'd suggest ahead of this one.