LaBrava by Elmore Leonard

First published: 1983

Type of plot: Detective and mystery

Time of work: The 1980’s

Locale: South Miami Beach, Florida

Principal Characters:

• Joe LaBrava, a freelance photographer of the Miami Beach street scene, formerly a Secret Service agent and Internal Revenue Service investigator
• Maurice Zola, an elderly hotel owner-manager who was a photographer years ago
• Jean Shaw, a former motion-picture star, Zola’s friend and business associate
• Richard Nobles, a sociopathic he-man, thief, and private security guard
• Cundo Rey, a Cuban expatriate, nightclub go-go dancer, and car thief

The Novel

LaBrava, Elmore Leonard’s tenth crime novel, takes place in the 1980’s in South Miami Beach, Florida, a resort that is a decadent remnant of its Art Deco heyday. Into this seedy milieu the author places a varied group of characters, including such grotesques as a hustler who preys upon women and a psychopathic Cuban refugee who is a go-go dancer and car thief. Joe LaBrava, the title character, an erstwhile Secret Service man who guarded former First Lady Bess Truman, is a freelance photographer in his late thirties who prowls the streets with camera in hand.

Through his friendship with hotelman Maurice Zola, LaBrava finally meets Jean Shaw, a fiftyish former film star with whom he recalls having fallen in love when he was twelve years old. When she is brought drunk to a county crisis center one night, LaBrava takes Zola there to get her released. Richard Nobles, a private security guard and all-around thug who comes there for the same purpose, challenges LaBrava, but the physically imposing hulk is no match for the photographer, who flattens him. After a quarter of a century, LaBrava is still smitten with Shaw, and they become sexually involved. Unclear, however, is whether he is attracted to the woman or to her film images, which he vividly recalls from childhood. Adding intriguing complexity to Leonard’s carefully woven plot and characterizations is the fact that Shaw herself often confuses film fiction with real life, seemingly reenacting old screenplays in actual situations.

By winning the battle over Shaw, LaBrava earns Nobles’s enmity. The sociopath starts tailing the photographer and eventually decides to kill him with his crony Rey’s assistance. (Rey already has killed Nobles’s vengeance-seeking uncle, who believed his nephew’s false testimony led to a son’s lengthy prison term.) LaBrava, meanwhile, also stalks Nobles, unnerving his prey by surreptitiously taking pictures of him, which he uses to forestall an attempt by Nobles and Rey to shake down local merchants. Paralleling this petty extortion scheme, which amounts to a few hundred dollars per store, is a much more ambitious plan. Nobles also has been preying upon Jean Shaw after she had encouraged his attention. Her attitude toward him is ambivalent, but they soon become partners in crime, although she may be setting him up for a big fall. This lack of certainty about Shaw’s motives and the ambiguous morality that is central to her character is an aspect of the illusion-versus-reality motif that Leonard develops throughout the novel. All of this adds depth and resonance to the novel, qualities not often present in crime fiction.

In the main story line, Shaw receives a crudely typed extortion note threatening her with death unless she follows subsequent instructions demanding the payment of $600,000. Since she barely has enough income on which to live, such a sum is far beyond her means to raise, so she looks to Zola. The police are certain that Nobles is a key player in the scheme and believe that, since he is an inveterate bumbler, their task of catching him in a self-incriminating act should be simple. Leonard, though, has laid the groundwork for necessary complications: the odd relationship between Nobles and Shaw, the focus upon her motion-picture career, and her tendency to infuse much of her conversation with lines from old films. In any event, LaBrava and the others realize, Nobles is neither orchestrator nor dupe, but rather accomplice and front man in a scam too complex for him to have concocted. Jean Shaw is the brains behind the alleged extortion, but rather than a product of her imagination, it is primarily a reworking of a plot from Obituary, a film in which she starred with Tyrone Power.

Leonard is full of surprises in LaBrava, not the least of which is his conclusion. Though Jean, it finally is clear, has double-crossed and tried to swindle Maurice, the two are going to get married. Maurice promises, “I’m gonna take good care of her,” which is precisely what he has been doing for years. Evidently putting her celluloid past wholly behind her and ready at last to embrace real life, Jean tells LaBrava, “It’s not the movies, Joe.” This statement can also explain the relevance of numerous minor characters and subplots that flesh out the novel. Inherently interesting, they do more than merely increase the number of perilous scenes, for just as Joe LaBrava’s photography eschews illusion in favor of raw realism, the minor players and incidents focus attention upon and enhance the reality that ultimately becomes the controlling force in the main characters’ lives.

The Characters

Maurice Zola describes Joe LaBrava as “one of those quiet guys, you never know what he’s gonna do next.” As a photographer, according to Zola, LaBrava “shoots barefaced fact. He’s got the feel and he makes you feel it.” The skills emerge from his keen understanding of people, because his eye, like the lens of his camera, penetrates to the essence of those he meets. These qualities, as well as his ubiquitous picture-taking, help him to solve the crimes that occur. LaBrava also inspires confidence and trust in people, such as canny Maurice Zola (who confides, “I’m going to tell you a secret I never told anybody around here”) and worldly-wise women like cosmetic salesperson Franny Kaufman and actress Jean Shaw. Although he lives in Zola’s Della Robbia Hotel and becomes deeply involved (sexually and otherwise) with its residents, LaBrava remains an outsider, fundamentally detached, and thus can credibly function as the moral center and conscience of the novel. He is a touchstone by which others are measured.

Maurice Zola, about eighty years old, has had several careers before settling upon hotel ownership and management. A onetime bookmaker and railroadman, in the 1930’s he was a photographer for the Farm Security Administration, “documenting the face of America during the Depression.” Part of the south Florida scene for half a century, he has experienced it all: women, scams, good times and bad. He has made a lot of money and lost some of it, but he still has plenty left. Given all he has been through, he retains a surprising amount of trust for people and looks out for the well-being of those he admires, especially LaBrava and Jean Shaw. Maurice’s knowledge of the milieu, his patience, and his sound common sense are vital to the former’s efforts and help to rein in the latter.

Jean Shaw, the onetime actress, who portrayed beautiful but dangerous seductresses (in the manner of Bette Davis, Mary Astor, and Veronica Lake), continues to live in a make-believe world, watching her old films and luring young men. Her motives for bringing to life an old film extortion plot are not fully clear but probably have as much to do with her obsession with reliving past cinematic glories as with her need for money. She may also be attracted to the scheme by the realization that Maurice, her devoted protector, could and would provide the payoff. Seen as vulnerable through much of the novel, she does kill Nobles in a coldly deliberate manner, but mitigating the shock is the fact that it is a precise replay of a scene from her film Obituary.

The real villains of the piece, Richard Nobles and Cundo Rey, are stereotypical hustlers, partners in crime but untrusting of and disloyal to each other. Though they possess the requisite fearlessness and determination of thugs, ineptness and lack of vision inhibit their dreams of grandeur. Big and muscular Nobles, in his mid-thirties, is a fellow LaBrava “knew by sight, smell and instinct” who “pumped his muscles and tested his strength when he wasn’t picking his teeth.” A brute who preys on women and boasts of having eaten a snake and an eagle, he has had a varied career and once acted as an informer against his cousin for the federal Drug Enforcement Agency. Cundo Rey, his sidekick, is a bisexual murderer whose criminality makes him a willing accomplice in just about anything, as long as money is to be made. One of his guiding principles is that anger is good if one can “use it right away” and “let it pick you up and carry you.” Ironically, he rarely exhibits the emotion, and the maxim more appropriately describes Nobles. Significantly, both men are undone by the same nemesis, LaBrava, who personifies calmness. In his climactic battle of wits and pistols with LaBrava, Cundo is dead moments after boasting, “I say to St. Barbara I believe this is my day.”

Critical Context

Elmore Leonard was a successful writer of Western fiction in the 1950’s and early 1960’s, producing five novels and many stories, including Hombre (1961), which the Western Writers of America named one of the twenty-five best Westerns of all time and which was made into a film starring Paul Newman. Thinking the market for Westerns was diminishing, Leonard turned to crime fiction, but numerous publishers rejected his first such novel, The Big Bounce, before it finally came out as a paperback original in 1969. Though he averaged a crime novel a year during the 1970’s, Leonard did not become a popular and critical success until Stick (1983) and LaBrava, the latter of which won the Mystery Writers of America Edgar Allan Poe Award in 1984. Widely praised, it secured his reputation as one of the major American crime writers, though he has said, “I think that I’m really writing novels, not mysteries, but I don’t want to sound pretentious.”

Leonard’s crime fiction stands apart from much else in the genre: His characters are less stereotypical and more substantive; he does not have a recurring detective who confronts cases in a predictable manner; and his locales and casts change considerably from book to book (though the Detroit area is the setting of a number of his novels, and LaBrava is the fourth set in the Miami Beach area). Partly by avoiding adherence to formula writing, he has advanced beyond the genre author label into the mainstream of American fiction.

One of his major influences is Ernest Hemingway, and Leonard has acknowledged that a close reading of Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940) focused his attention on the importance of dialogue and narrative point of view. Leonard has recalled being especially struck by how Hemingway “told so much just in the way a character talked.” Yet Leonard says that he differs from Hemingway in important respects, claiming to see more absurdity, to like people more, and to be more tolerant. In terms of attitude (sardonic humor, for example), Leonard can be compared to contemporaries such as Mark Harris and Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., both of whom he has praised; he also has spoken of the influence on his work of George V. Higgins’s The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1972), primarily for its use of dialogue and monologues as means of increasing realism, and of John O’Hara and John Steinbeck. He has disclaimed being influenced by the leaders of the “hard-boiled” school of American crime fiction— Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, and Ross Macdonald—but his depictions of urban realism and physical violence and his pervasive morality link him unmistakably to the hard-boiled genre.

Bibliography

Geherin, David. Elmore Leonard. New York: Continuum, 1989. The first full-length study of Leonard. Starts with a short biography and then summarizes and analyzes the novels and some stories. The last chapter, “Why Is Elmore Leonard So Good?”, makes a good case for Leonard as a major American writer, and the bibliography is a useful research tool.

Hynes, Joseph. “ High Noon in Detroit:’ Elmore Leonard’s Career.” Journal of Popular Culture 25 (Winter, 1991): 181-186. Hynes examines several books by Leonard, demonstrating that Leonard’s works are superior to mainstream mystery stories. Although Leonard is well regarded by his colleagues, some critics have awarded him a lower rating than he deserves.

Leonard, Elmore. “A Conversation with . . . Elmore Leonard.” Interview by Lewis Burke Frumkes. The Writer 110 (November, 1997): 22-24. Leonard discusses the writing process, revealing that he does not plot a novel before he begins to write. He also prefers to write from the point of view of various characters and makes use of dialogue to advance the story. Although it does not discuss LaBrava directly, this is a useful interview that offers interesting insight into Leonard’s thought processes as he writes.

Millner, Cork. “Elmore Leonard: The Best Ear in the Business.” Writer’s Digest 77 (June, 1997): 30-32. Millner points out that Leonard is a master at capturing the sound or voice of his characters. Millner discusses other aspects of technique, including developing an ear for dialogue.

Prescott, P. S. “Making a Killing.” Newsweek 105 (April 22, 1985): 62-64. Focusing upon Leonard’s belated emergence as a widely recognized popular writer, this article also provides a useful review of his themes.

Reed, J. D. “A Dickens from Detroit.” Time 123 (May 28, 1984): 84-85. Discusses LaBrava and then considers themes and techniques.

Shah, Diane K. “For Elmore Leonard, Crime Pays.” Rolling Stone (February 28, 1985): 33-34. A useful biographical as well as critical piece. Includes an interview with the author in which he is characteristically frank.

Yagoda, Ben. “Elmore Leonard’s Rogues’ Gallery.” The New York Times Magazine, December 30, 1984, p. 20. A well-informed and in-depth review of Leonard’s career and literary production. Yagoda’s emphasis is on Leonard’s crime fiction.