Glitz by Elmore Leonard

First published: 1985

Type of plot: Detective and mystery

Time of work: The 1980’s

Locale: Puerto Rico and Atlantic City, New Jersey

Principal Characters:

• Lieutenant Vincent Mora, a Miami police detective
• Iris Ruiz, a beautiful, sexy Puerto Rican prostitute
• Teddy Magyk, a psychopathic killer and rapist
• Verna May Magyk, Teddy’s simple-minded mother
• Linda Moon, a talented musician
• Tommy Donovan, the owner of hotels and casinos in Atlantic City and Puerto Rico
• Nancy Donovan, his wife, the real brains of the business
• Jackie Garbo, the manager of the Donovans’ Atlantic City casino
• DeLeon “Moose” Johnson, Garbo’s gigantic African American bodyguard

The Novel

Glitz is a story about police, criminals, and the people who inhabit the demimonde in which police and criminals usually operate. It portrays the fashionable resorts of Puerto Rico as well as the island’s slums, where people live on rice and beans. It contrasts the glitzy new Atlantic City, built on greed and suckers’ money, with the decaying Atlantic City of the past, where seniors dread the bulldozers that tear paths for more and yet more gambling palaces.

Vincent Mora goes to Puerto Rico to recuperate from a wound received in a shootout with a junkie in Miami. He becomes emotionally involved with Iris Ruiz, who does not like to be considered a prostitute but who lives by accepting monetary gifts from men who make love to her. Vincent does not know he is being stalked by Teddy Magyk, who plans to kill Vincent for sending him to prison seven and a half years earlier. Teddy shows his viciousness by murdering a Puerto Rican cab driver who becomes curious about him. Vincent eventually uses his contacts with the Puerto Rican police to frighten the stalker into leaving the island.

Coincidentally, Iris is leaving at the same time. She has been offered a job as a “hostess” by Tommy Donovan, an alcoholic multimillionaire who operates resorts in Puerto Rico and Atlantic City. Her career ends abruptly when she is thrown off the eighteenth floor of a luxurious new Atlantic City apartment building.

When Vincent hears of Iris’s death, he decides to investigate. He is handicapped by the fact that as a Miami police officer he has no authority in New Jersey. Not unlike Sam Spade in Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon (1930), who comments, “My way of learning is to heave a wild and unpredictable monkey-wrench into the machinery,” Vincent creates paranoia among the Atlantic City underworld figures. Ironically, Vincent’s intrusion was unnecessary, since it was actually the cunning Teddy Magyk who killed Iris, knowing her death would lure Vincent to Atlantic City.

Vincent becomes involved with Linda Moon, a gifted musician who performs in Donovan’s casino. Vincent also makes friends with DeLeon Johnson, a gigantic former professional football player who works as a bodyguard for Donovan’s vulgar casino manager, Jackie Garbo. Linda and DeLeon help Vincent with his investigation. Meanwhile, Teddy has committed another murder, this time a hapless elderly slot-machine addict who is naïve enough to let Teddy entice her under the famous Atlantic City boardwalk. He has found it easy to rob, murder, and sometimes rape lonely elderly women in the past. Nearly broke, he needs money to continue stalking Vincent. He is even thinking of murdering his own doting, brainless mother, who has been supporting him but not giving him as much as he wants.

Unable to solve Iris’s murder, Vincent returns to San Juan to deliver her ashes to her impoverished family in a barrio called Dulces Labios (Sweet Lips). He is accompanied by Linda and DeLeon, who have lost their jobs because of their friendship with the trouble-making detective. A short while later, Vincent is confronted by the deranged Teddy, who brags about having murdered Iris.

Luck and coincidence, rather than detection and orthodox police procedure, always play a big part in Leonard’s crime novels. Vincent is having a déjà vu experience. When he was shot by the junkie in Miami, his arms had been encumbered with bags of groceries. In Puerto Rico he is on his way to rejoin Linda with a bag containing wine, scotch, rum, and Coca-Cola when he finds himself facing another gun.

By chance, though, Linda has forgotten something. When she runs to the balcony to call to her lover to bring back cheese and crackers, she sees what is happening below. She has never handled a gun before, but she hurries downstairs holding Vincent’s heavy automatic. Teddy dies, but Vincent is wounded in the shootout and has no choice but to extend his paid medical leave in balmy Puerto Rico with his beautiful mistress.

The Characters

Although Elmore Leonard has always been a category-fiction writer, his sophisticated technique and attention to characterization have won him acclaim from literary critics. He has devoted much time and attention to studying the kinds of people he writes about. He has frequently been praised for his gift for writing dialogue, and has been compared with such masters of the American vernacular as Hammett and Ernest Hemingway. In Glitz, Leonard not only captures the essence of American cop and gangster language but also delights in showcasing the Puerto Rican English of Iris Ruiz as well as the subtleties of African American English in the street-smart, soft-spoken, potentially lethal DeLeon Johnson. Good dialogue not only conveys information to the reader and advances the plot but also characterizes the speaker. Leonard’s ear for dialogue has helped make him rich and famous.

Leonard is far more interested in character than in plot. His method of writing is to invent a cast of characters and then let them work out the story among themselves. He takes pains to invent a whole cast of contrasting types—male and female, young and old, good and bad, intelligent and stupid, rich and poor, black and white, foreign and native. Each character becomes more vivid by contrast with a different type.

Leonard had a devastating drinking problem and finally solved it by joining Alcoholics Anonymous. In describing his recovery, he said, “The key is getting out of yourself.” At about the same time, he “started to realize that the way to describe anywhere, anywhere, was to do it from someone’s point of view . . . and leave me out of it.” Glitz was the first novel in which Leonard demonstrated that he had perfected his technique of “leaving himself out of it,” which is another way of saying that he lets his characters work out their own destinies.

The essence of Leonard’s sophisticated storytelling technique is his shifting viewpoint. In each scene, the reader is usually observing through the point of view of a different character. For example, DeLeon Johnson may be watching and judging Vincent Mora, while later the detective will be studying DeLeon. Naturally the viewpoint character is characterizing himself or herself at the same time, because all points of view are colored by such complex factors as age, intelligence, education, worldly experience, social status, prejudice, sexual attraction (or revulsion), and selfish personal interests.

The typical category-fiction writer is content to describe his characters once, often giving a character a “shtick”—a cane, a pipe, an eye-patch, a foreign accent—to help the reader remember him or her. Leonard, however, never stops characterizing; he is always hidden in one of his characters’ points of view. It is this sophisticated, complex, and demanding technique, more than any other factor, that has brought Leonard recognition as an important modern fiction writer.

Critical Context

Elmore Leonard started as a writer of Westerns but switched to urban crime when the public became surfeited with cowboys and Indians during the 1960’s, when the airwaves were saturated with such serials as Gunsmoke and The Rifleman. Most reviewers tend to ignore genre fiction or to treat it with contempt, but Leonard became a notable exception. Because of his talent, his originality, his conscientious craftsmanship, and his avant-garde technique, his novels are reviewed with the respectful attention customarily given to “quality literature.” After the publication of Glitz, Leonard’s novels appeared on the best-seller lists and stayed there longer than most more “literary” or “mainstream” fiction.

What is most important about Glitz—and about all Leonard’s subsequent crime novels—is what he termed his “sound.” His writings demonstrate the strong influence of such writers as James Joyce and William Faulkner, who introduced stream-of-consciousness narration. Leonard’s use of constantly shifting points of view may be compared to modern filmmaking techniques in which scenes are shot simultaneously by several cameras and selectively spliced together.

Leonard’s works include a number of screenplays, both originals and adaptations. Reading a Leonard crime novel can make one feel as though one is watching a movie. His novels contain the ingredients of good films: strong characterization, crisp dialogue, and interesting visual effects, making the traditional third-person narrative technique seem antiquated. His mature technique offers fascinating tools for telling stories. Fiction writers worldwide are influenced by Leonard because of his ability to impress critics while reaching a huge audience.

Bibliography

Bloom, Harold. “Elmore Leonard.” In Modern Crime and Suspense Writers. New York: Chelsea House, 1995. Bloom provides an introduction to Leonard’s life and works, with lengthy quotes from articles by eleven critics. Valuable bibliographical information.

Geherin, David. Elmore Leonard. New York: Continuum, 1989. The best single source of information about Leonard. Includes a brief biography, a critical evaluation of his technique, and detailed discussions of his novels of the 1980’s, including Glitz.

Most, Glenn W. “Elmore Leonard: Splitting Images.” In The Sleuth and the Scholar: Origins, Evolution, and Current Trends in Detective Fiction, edited by Barbara A. Rader and Howard G. Zettler. New York: Greenwood Press, 1988. Suggests hidden psychological and sociological implications of Leonard’s writing. Identifies three distinguishing features of Leonard’s novels: no detection, psychopathic killers as villains, and plots determined by chance.

Skinner, Robert E. The New Hard-Boiled Dicks: A Personal Checklist. Madison, Ind.: Brownstone Books, 1987. Discusses the recent history of hard-boiled crime fiction, with one chapter devoted to Leonard’s novels, including Glitz. Praises Leonard’s realistic female characters.

Wholey, Dennis. “Elmore Leonard.” In The Courage to Change: Personal Conversations About Alcohol with Dennis Wholey. New York: Warner Books, 1986. Leonard describes his drinking problem and explains how his recovery influenced his technique and choice of subjects.

Willett, Ralph. The Naked City: Urban Crime Fiction in the USA. New York: Manchester University Press, 1996. Contains many references to Leonard as one of the writers most adept at analyzing and depicting corruption in American cities.