Reviews: e-books and audiobooks - Elmore Leonard, E.L. James, Mitch Cullin
For your listening pleasure this week: Leonard short stories, E.L. James' rewrite of Fifty Shades of Grey from Christian Grey's point of view, and the meaning of life explained by an ageing Sherlock Holmes.
This is a collection of 15 stories by one of the most distinctive and influential crime writers. Leonard's imprint is seen everywhere from Quentin Tarantino to Martin Amis to David Foster Wallace. In the introduction, his son, Peter (also a writer), notes that most of the stories were written in the 1950s while Elmore wrote Chevrolet ads at the Campbell-Ewald agency. Some like the title story, Charlie Marzt, are westerns, Leonard's first love. It is fun if conventional: "Howdy, mister. You sure pick a hot time of day to come callin'. You come far?" Leonard did go far, a long way from these enjoyable but imitative tales of Americans abroad, Civil War parables and by-the-book genre pieces such as Siesta in Paloverde: "If you'd asked all of the boys in the Four aces that afternoon if they had a feeling that something out of the ordinary was going to happen, you'd probably have gotten some pretty sour replies with a few colourful ones thrown in."
Extras: an introduction by Elmore Leonard's son, Peter.
Charlie Martz and other Stories (e-book) By Elmore Leonard (Orion)
