He converts to Islam in jail, to al-Qaeda on the outside, and meets his hero, Qasim, in Djibouti. An instantly recognizable type from numerous Leonard novels - the sharp, funny, ruthless operator - James is nevertheless fresh. This was how James Russell came to Coleman FCI in the middle of inland Florida to hang with Muslims, a means of surviving in here, twenty years old doing his first fall."įrom the moment James appears, Leonard's pirates and terrorists and even Dara herself seem to fade by comparison. Then, midway through the novel, there it is: "Before he was Jama Raisuli or Jama al Amriki he was James Russell, pronounced Russell: picked up twice on suspicion of armed robbery and released. But Leonard's voice seems absent, and we miss it. This cleverness wears thin, however, and we begin to fear that Leonard, like Xavier, is a little in love with Dara.įortunately, other engaging characters materialize: Billy, the Texas billionaire who is sailing the world with his test-wife, Helene Harry, the shady, Oxford-educated, half-Saudi investigator for the International Maritime Organization Idris, a strutting pirate captain and Qasim, an al-Qaeda leader. Leonard cleverly shifts back and forth between what Dara is viewing on her computer and what actually happened as she filmed. In the early chapters, though, the action is muted as Dara and Xavier review the footage they've shot offshore among the pirates. But grifters, it turns out, are grifters whatever the scam, and Leonard portrays some doozies here. The pirate story seems an odd one for Leonard: too big, too exotic and too political.
"I said to one of 'em I'm talkin to in a club last night, 'You always high you out to sea?' The man say, 'If we not drunk, what are we doin in a skiff and think we can seize an oil tanker?' " Soon he and Dara meet the swaggering pirates who make millions hijacking ships, "the bad boys with AKs and. But it is Xavier's world-weary eyes that take in every detail on this alien African terrain crowded with terrorists and assorted criminals. Dara is a familiar Leonard character, the hot ticket with brains (and, in this case, a strong resemblance to real-life film director Kathryn Bigelow). They're in Djibouti, a tiny country in the Horn of Africa, to make a documentary about Somali pirates. "It's too bad you're an old man," says filmmaker Dara Barr, flirting with 72-year-old Xavier LeBo, her longtime assistant from New Orleans. Indeed, in his new adventure novel, " Djibouti," Leonard casts an amused eye on male aging and on male vanity, a weakness that he has lethally skewered in his fiction for decades. Elmore Leonard, at 85, is unlikely to be described as writing at the height of his powers, and that fact must surely make this master of irony smile.
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