Glitz

Elmore Leonard In Atlantic City

Elmore Leonard's novel have many settings, including Detroit, Hollywood, Mississippi, Harlan, Kentucky, the Arizona territory, and more. His books manage to capture a sense of place as well as telling a story. Published in 1985, "Glitz" was the first of Leonard's novels to make the best-seller list. The book also shows Leonard finding additional settings. Most of the book takes place in Atlantic City but there are important scenes in Puerto Rico and Florida as well. Leonard follows the fortunes of the book's hero, Vincent Mora, a Miami homicide investigator as he chases down the book's villain, the fearsome mama's boy, Teddy Magyk.

When Vincent is sent from Miami to Puerto Rico on medical leave, he meets up with Teddy, whom Vincent sent to prison for seven years for raping an old woman. The vicious, vindictive Teddy has a long memory. The two meet up again in Atlantic City on the trail of Iris, a Puerto Rican prostitute who has been recruited to serve the high rollers of a casino. Iris soon meets her demise when she is pushed out the window from the 18th floor of a condominium, and much of the story involves finding her killer among many sleazy suspects in the Atlantic City underworld.

The title "Glitz" refers to the flashing lights and surface allure and glamor of Atlantic City which serves as a veneer for the corruption and violence underneath. The book captures the sense of casino life, with the high rollers, the Mafia that seeks to infiltrate the business, the ringing slot machines and the poor lost people who play them, the casino employees at every level and the redoubtable local police. The book is cluttered with characters and it is easy to get lost. But Leonard offers a convincing portrait of his milieu.

The portrait of Atlantic City becomes combined with the ongoing tension between Vincent and Teddy, whose mother lives in the Atlantic City environs and who has become disgusted at last with supporting her more than wayward son. Teddy would not know what to do without mama. But there is more. Vincent has been lonely since the death of his wife; while in Atlantic City he meets and begins a relationship with a young singer, Linda Moon. Linda, with all the glitz of Atlantic City, is serious about her music as she tries to forge a career in the less that serious atmosphere of Atlantic City nightclubs.

It is interesting in reading Elmore Leonard to find unexpected connections. Linda Moon appears in Hollywood in a much later Leonard novel "Be Cool" (2000) which in its turn was a less than fully successful sequel to Leonard's famous book, "Get Shorty" featuring loan shark turned Hollywood director, Chili Palmer. In reading "Be Cool" I found Linda Moon's story the most compelling part of the novel. I almost felt the same way in reading "Glitz" as the book shows her trying to make her way in a corrupt Atlantic City music business while she and Vincent fall in love.

The heart of "Glitz" is still the ongoing mutual pursuit between Vincent and Teddy -- there is a refreshingly unambiguous contrast between good guy and bad guy in the story and in how everything works out. But I also enjoyed meeting Linda Moon again and in noticing the connection. with the latter novel. The glitz of Atlantic City and Leonard's marvelous dialogue and sense of place and character are fully on display in this book. The novel is available in a separate paperback and in the Library of America volume of Leonard's work, "Four Novels of the 1980s".

Robin Friedman