#Elmore Leonard - City Primeval: High Noon in Detroit

[ilovewhiteroses]

Hi darlings! As you all know, Justified: City Primeval is based on Elmore Leonard's novel, "City Primeval: High Noon in Detroit" (1980). I thought it would be interesting to pick out a few excerpts from it to get to know a little bit more of Clement Mansell, whom will Boyd portray in the series. Warning: contains sexual references and violence Spoilers, I guess:

- Clement liked views from high places after years in the flatlands of Oklahoma and feeling the sky pressing down on him. It was the same sky when you could see it, when it wasn’t thick with dampness, but it seemed a lot higher in Detroit. He would look up there and wonder if his mom was floating around somewhere in space.

- Clement sat back on the couch, exposing the pair of bluebirds tattooed above his pure-white breasts. When they had first met three and a half years ago at a disco, Clement had said, “You want to see my birds?” and opened his shirt to show her. Then he’d said, “You want to see my chicken?” When Sandy said yes he pulled his shirt out of his pants and showed her his navel in the center of his hard belly. Sandy said, “I don’t see any chicken.” And Clement said, “It’s faded out; all that’s left is its asshole.”

- ONE TIME CLEMENT WAS RUN OVER by a train and lived. It was a thirty-three-car Chesapeake & Ohio freight train with two engines and a caboose. Clement was with a girl. They were waiting at a street crossing in Redford Township about eleven at night, the red lights flashing and the striped barrier across the road, when Clement got out of the car and went out to stand on the tracks, his back to the engine’s spotlight coming toward him at forty miles an hour. Yes, he was a little high, though not too high. He was going to jump out of the way at the last second, turned with his back to the approaching train, looking over at the girl’s face in the car windshield, the girl’s eyes about to come out of her head. Instead of jumping out of the way Clement changed his mind and laid down between the tracks. The train engineer saw Clement and slammed on the emergency brake, but not in time. Twenty-one cars passed over Clement before the train was brought to a stop and he crawled out from beneath the twenty-second one. The train engineer, Harold Howell of Grand Rapids, said, “There was just no excuse for it.” Clement was taken to Garden City Hospital where he was treated for a bruised back and released. When questioned by the Redford Township Police Clement said, “Did I break a law? Show me where it says I can’t lay down in front of a train if I want?”

- Clement tucked Raymond Cruz’s business card into the elastic of his briefs and took hold of Sandy’s arms, sliding his hands up under the satiny sleeves and tugging her gently against him. He said, “What’re you nervous about, huh? You never been nervous before. You need one of Dr. Mansell’s treatments? That it, hon bun, get you relaxed? Well, we can fix you up.

- “That’s right,” Raymond said, “or he could be in that highrise over there, twenty-five-oh-four. If you remember Clement, he’s got very large balls. The papers at the time called him the Oklahoma Wildman, but he’s more like a daredevil, a death defier . . .” “Evel Knievel with a gun,” Herzog said. “That’s right, he likes to live dangerously and he likes to kill people.”

- Clement said, “Sugar, I told you I want a regular car. I ain’t gonna street race, I ain’t gonna hang out at the Big Boy; I just need me some wheels in your name till things get a little better. Now here’s seven one-hundred-dollar bills, all the grocery money till we get some more. You buy a nice car and pick me up over there—if I can make it across Telegraph without getting killed—where you see that sign? Ramada Inn? I’ll be in there having a cocktail.”

- Clement stared at his little partner, waiting for what she said to make sense. Finally he said, “Honey? . . . I want to talk to this man, I don’t want to dance with him.” “Well, what if he doesn’t want to go there?” “Hey, aren’t you with the good hands people?” Clement inched his own hand over as he said it and caught Sandy between her slender legs. “Aren’t you?” “Cut it out.” “Why, what’s this?” Clement closed his eyes as he felt around. “Whiskers? You growing whiskers on me?” “That hurts.” “Yeah, but hurts good, don’t it? Huh? How ’bout right there? Feel pretty good?” Sandy rolled toward him, pushing out her hips, then stopped. “I ain’t gonna do it less you brush your teeth.” “Come on,” Clement said, “we don’t have to kiss. Let’s just do it.”

- Clement grinned at him. “Well, it don’t matter. We’re here to talk about the basics of love anyway, aren’t we, partner?” He paused, cocking his head. “Listen. Hear what they’re playing? ‘Everybody Loves a Winner,’ ” Clement half singing, half saying it. “That’s a old Dalaney and Bonnie number.” “You’re sure full of platter chatter this evening,” Sandy said. “You ought to get a job at CXI and get paid for it.” “Well, I got nothing against work. I come a piece from the oil fields to the world of speculation, Clement said, seeing Sandy rolling her eyes as he tightroped along the edge of truth. “But I’d rather see my investments do the work than me, if you know what I mean and I think you do.

- “Clement, really, if you’ll stop and think for a minute . . .” His hands slipped inside the roughcotton garment, moved up her body and felt her elbows come in tightly, her eyes staring into his. “What you think I’m gonna do to you? . . . Huh? Tell me.” He moved his thumbs across her breasts. “Hey, your nobs’re sticking out . . . That feel pretty good? Juuuust brush ’em a little, huh? . . . They get hard as little rocks.” His right hand moved lightly down her side to her hip, their eyes still holding. “Now what am I gonna do? . . . That your belly button right there? . . . My, we don’t have no panties on, do we?” His voice drowsy. “Tell what you think I’m gonna do to you . . . Huh? Come on . . .” Clement drew his right hand out of the caftan, bringing it down past his own hip, curled the hand into a fist and grunted, going up on his toes, as he drove the fist into Carolyn’s stomach. Once he got her into the shower, the caftan off her shoulders, pinning her arms, Clement gave Carolyn a working over with a few kidney punches and body hooks, a couple of stinging jabs to the face before a right cross drew blood from her nose and mouth and he turned the shower on her. The job was trying to keep her on her feet, glassy-eyed and moaning, Clement doubting she had much air left in her. He gave Carolyn a towel and guided her back to the desk in the window bay, bright with afternoon sunlight. Opening the checkbook, Clement said, “Let’s see now how much you want to give me.

- “Clement’s only been to prison once,” Sandy said. “He’s been to jail plenty of times, but he’s only spent like a year in a regular prison. He says he won’t ever go back again and I believe him. God, he makes up his mind to something . . . but he’s so unpredictable.

[byjk]

Who is Wade?

I am a fan of Elmore Leonard. Love his books, his scripts, and his writing advice. Mr. Leonard’s death saddened me; losing the possibility of ever meeting him, and the end of his beloved writing. Sigh. My sympathy to his family and friends.  (Mr. Leonard died in 2013). 

For those uninitiated in Leonard’s work, you might be aware of movies made from his stories such as Get Shorty, Jackie Brown, 3:10 to Yuma, and television such as the FX series, Justified and now Justified City Primeval. My favorite was the short lived television series - Maximum Bob, title character played by Beau Bridges. 

But what does that have to do with ‘Who is Wade?’

Well,  should you be an original Justified fan from 2010- 2015, or a more recent Hulu viewer of the series, remember Boyd Crowder? He was played by the resurrecting Walter Groggins (Mr. Groggins, I am so sorry for this.) Boyd was originally supposed to die in the pilot episode, but producer, Graham Yost, pulled for the character to be a continuing part of the drama originated and executive produced by Mr. Leonard. As a baddie goes, I love Mr. Crowder. 

Not to down play Mr. Olyphant’s portrayal of the center character of Justified, Raylan Givens. The synergy of all the right people at the right time and with the right material still holds up as great fiction work all the way around. This series was based on the Givens character in one of Leonard’s short stories, Fire in the Hole. 

Many fans, like me, were stunned to hear of a reboot after Mr. Leonard’s passing. Mixed feelings and questions on the latest mini series went through my mind and heart. Justified City Primeval did not disappoint. No longer in Kentucky, this series begins first in Florida and then taking a nod to Elmore Leonard’s novel City Primeval: High Noon in Detroit settled in for the ride up north before ending . . . well, don’t want to give that away. The series  was enjoyable right up to the end. Our hero Raylan and daughter Willa, played by real life father and daughter Olyphants was genius, great work Vivian! In the last episode the phone rings and the scene cuts to –––– Crowder in prison being led out by guards. 

In my home watching this I am screaming “CROWDER!”  And for the life of me, don’t know where the name WADE came from but I kept calling out “WADE CROWDER!” My heart knew this was wrong, but I was so engrossed with watching, that my brain couldn’t function beyond a mild awareness that Wade was not the character’s correct name. After calming down, and a quick search online, an apology was said to the ceiling correcting myself to the character Boyd Crowder (and to Mr. Groggins). 

Sometimes my mouth and brain do not function well together. I think this must be what it feels like to call out the wrong name, at the wrong time. 

[beljar]

MEN who discussed murder in normal tones.

Elmore Leonard, City Primeval: High Noon in Detroit, 1980

[machetelanding]

Justified: City Primeval has been greenlighted at FX, with Timothy Olyphant reprising his role as U.S. Marshal Raylan Givens for the limited series.

Seven years on from the end of FX’s Justified, Sony Pictures Television and FX Productions are producing their latest Elmore Leonard adaptation, based on the author’s novel City Primeval: High Noon In Detroit. The development was teased early last year, at which point Deadlin revealed Fargo Season 4 star Olyphant was in talks to return.

Olyphant also is exec producing alongside showrunners and writers Dave Andron and Michael Dinner and original creator Graham Yost, with Dinner directing.

The show returns to Givens’ story eight years after he’s left Kentucky and now is based in Miami, balancing life as a marshal and part-time father of a 14-year-old girl. A chance encounter on a Florida highway sends him to Detroit and he crosses paths with Clement Mansell, aka The Oklahoma Wildman, a violent sociopath who’s already slipped through the fingers of Detroit’s finest once and wants to do so again.

I am so friggin’ ready!

[mitchipedia]

Timothy Olyphant is coming back as Raylan Givens in a series based on the Elmore Leonard novel "City Primeval: High Noon in Detroit." Sweet! https://www.cinemablend.com/television/justified-city-primevals-updated-cast-list-including-timothy-olyphant

[mopillow]

‘Justified’ Team Reunites to Develop Elmore Leonard Novel at FX, Timothy Olyphant Rumored to Return as Raylan Givens (EXCLUSIVE)

We're my boots?!?!?!

[randomizedfandom]

‘Justified’ Team Sets New FX Series, With Timothy Olyphant Rumored to Return as Raylan Givens – IndieWire

Yesssssssss.

[useyourblinker]

A new project in development might bring Raylan Givens back. It will be based on another Elmore Leonard book, City Primeval: High Noon in Detroit. Both Graham Yost and Timothy Olyphant are on board.

Elmore Leonard used the same characters in different novels throughout his writing career. One comes to mind: Michael Keaton playing FBI agent Ray Nicolette. Originally in Jackie Brown and then in Out of Sight. Both very good Leonard book to movie adaptions.

Deadwood (2004-2006) Justified (2010-2015) Fargo (season four, 2020) The Mandalorian (season two, 2020) 

type·cast /ˈtīpˌkast/ verb assign (an actor or actress) repeatedly to the same type of role, as a result of the appropriateness of their appearance or previous success in such roles.

[ilovewhiteroses]

Currently Me 💚 Tagged by: @spider-bren 💕

Last song: Darling Nikki by Foo Fighters

Currently reading: Nothing at the moment, but I want to read City Primeval: High Noon in Detroit by Elmore Leonard, because it looked interesting from the little snippets I read.

Currently watching: Will watch Justified City: Primeval

Current obession: I know I will obsess over Clement Mansell from Justifed😁

Tagging (no pressure): @thecorilove86, @i-like-the-eyes, @e-dubbc11, @ruflirtingwithme, @placeinthemiddleofnowhere, @merryandrewsworld and anyone who feels like it🥰

[enter21st]

Timothy Olyphant may return as Raylan Givens in new show from Justified team

Timothy Olyphant may return as Raylan Givens in new show from Justified team

The creative team that brought Justified to FX is making another show from the works of Elmore Leonard, Variety reported on Wednesday. This time around, the FX show will be based on the novel City Primeval: High Noon in Detroit. Variety also reports that Justified star Timothy Olyphant could reprise his role as Raylan Givens in the new series. The Leonard novel this show will be based on follows…

[how2to18]

I WAS IN the airport bookstore in Tallinn, Estonia, when I noticed a translation of Elmore Leonard’s Get Shorty. This was 2015. It had taken a while for him to reach the Baltics — 24 years, to be exact. That’s a long time compared to other American writers like Paul Auster and Charles Bukowski. Is there something about Elmore Leonard’s work that resists translation?

After reading Charles Rzepka’s Being Cool in paperback reissue (hardback 2013), I venture that there is. In this detailed and deep investigation of Leonard’s sangfroid, Rzepka lays out a number of factors that contribute to a more hermetic American-ness, one that just doesn’t offer foreign translators, publishers, or readers an easy grip on the author’s native charms. And it might matter that most of my translator friends in Estonia are women: I’ll get to that later.

Among the selling points of this study are useful snippets of Leonard’s biography, which Rzepka slips into his readings very dexterously. We learn that Leonard was the good Catholic schoolboy, the son of a General Motors executive, a skilled sand-lot baseball player, and a Seabee during World War II. He trained up as a writer at the Ewald-Campbell Advertising Agency in Detroit and after publishing a number of Western stories (relying on Arizona Highways magazine as his landscape guide), used its severance package to launch his full-time writing career. Although other writers have come up similarly (think of Kurt Vonnegut at GE, or Allen Ginsberg’s gig as a market researcher), Leonard was always very serious about his corporate work. In his fiction, Rzepka notes, “scenes of apprenticeship, mentoring, and testing” are “early versions of ‘being cool’ as a way of defending against self-dispossession by anger or panic.”

Rzepka dovetails this background of the “organization man” with Leonard’s self-schooling in the mechanics of the Western, showing the disciplined bones beneath early classics such as “Three-Ten to Yuma” (1953). There is great finesse here, not just the tricky plot reversals that strike us on first reading or viewing. By the time we reach an account of Leonard’s The Big Bounce (1969), his first crime novel, Rzepka has imparted a very modern sense of what the genre writer is. Like Cormac McCarthy, Leonard is above all a writer who does research, who knows that art is work and who works at it every day, who polishes his dialogue until not a word “sounds like writing” and strives to eliminate the “sharp elbows” in his plotting that might cause a reader to pause.

I myself came to Leonard with City Primeval: High Noon in Detroit (1980). I had just signed to write a book on Dashiell Hammett, so I was reading the two authors in tandem, and I found that Leonard had none of Hammett’s pop and repartee. But I could see that these were well-managed narratives, so I continued with Glitz (1985) and Freaky Deaky (1988). Then Carl Hiassen came into view and usurped this particular channel in my interests. And that’s another clue, I think, in explaining why Elmore Leonard has not traveled as well as Bukowski or Auster or Hiassen. His cool is hermetic.

Leonard doesn’t offer foreign readers what my academic colleagues would call affordances, a feature of visual design that tells you a doorknob is for turning or a ball is for throwing. If you are the translator of Raymond Chandler, you wait for his elaborate metaphors with relish; they are a challenge and a chance to have fun. Hemingway, meanwhile, is a par course and García Márquez a master class in syntax, while Bukowski sends you deep into the resources of your native slang. Leonard, by contrast, worked to make his presence invisible, to eliminate all the literary speech, to remove all the plot elbows. Translating him might be like recreating Amish chairs.

How Leonard achieved such seeming simplicity is what Rzepka calls his techne, Aristotle’s (and Thomas Aquinas’s) term for “skill.” The skills here are all in the service of “flow,” a being-in-the-moment sense that athletes know well: it is not timelessness, but such a high degree of practice that what comes next has been anticipated, has been set up so that there is no visible transition. According to Rzepka, this is what all of Leonard’s protagonists strive for too, but it took about a decade for the author and his heroes to meld style with character. The obstacle was that the style needed a certain amount of “flow” in order to avoid appearing wooden. The flow seems to readers to be improvisation, but actually it consists of subtle parallels, repetitions, and omissions: think of Joe Morello’s drum solo in “Take Five” by the Dave Brubeck Quartet. In this scene from Mr. Majestyk (1974), for instance, the protagonist almost sets his nephew straight about a certain woman:

“Listen,” Mr. Majestyk said then. “That broad on the phone —” “Yeah?” Mr. Majestyk smiled, self-conscious, showing his white perfect teeth. He shrugged then. “Why should I say anything — right? You’re old enough.” “I was about to mention it,” Ryan said.

Then there is Nancy, in the same novel, characterized — via free indirect discourse, says Rzepka — by her internal repetitions:

She sat quietly while Ray and his group whipped off to Chicago to attend the dumb meeting or look at the dumb plant and make big important decisions about their dumb business. Wow. And she sat here waiting for him.

Considering “cool,” of course, always leads back to Hemingway, for whom courage was “grace under pressure.” In his short story “Soldiers’ Home,” the character Krebs thinks about the lies he has been telling since returning from World War I. He has lost

all of the times that had been able to make him feel cool and clear inside himself when he thought of them; the times so long back when he had done the one thing, the only thing for a man to do, easily and naturally, when he might have done something else, now lost their cool, valuable quality and then were lost themselves.

That clearly includes killing people.

This is very close to what “cool” means to Leonard too, but Rzepka insists that his characters always feel at home in their skins, that these are not the intermittent “times” of Hemingway but a continuous flow, “never forgetting who you really were.” No Krebs’s moments of lying. This inspires the cool ones to “always dress well,” to “always be polite on the job,” and to “never say more than is necessary.” That some of these internal character rules are among Leonard’s rules for writing, leading to a synthesis of style and character, may be among the problems confronting translation.

While the reader of this book may flash back to Hemingway, it is impossible to read about Leonard’s dialogue without flashing forward to Richard Price. This is not a topic that Rzepka takes up, but the relation became explicit in a 2015 Washington Post interview with Price: “He admire[s] the great Elmore Leonard, perhaps the only writer in America that one could say surpassed him in street dialogue.” But Price does precious little research and admits to “making it up.” “I’m a good mimic,” he says.

Once you get the patter of how someone talks, you can replicate it. It’s not verbatim … It’s like after George Bush was president for eight years, if you told everybody in America to do Bush reading Shakespeare, everybody could do it. Maybe you’d [screw] up the Shakespeare, but you’d get the idea of how it would sound.

So perhaps it all does come down to craft: as the author of Clockers says elsewhere, “Realistic dialogue is interminable and goes nowhere. Good dialogue is about heightened reality, nudging it into a form that doesn’t really exist in the way people talk.” And the way people talk is gendered. If you are a translator, that’s another of your affordances, so that if you are a woman translating Hammett or Paul Auster, you can invoke and understand the gender gradations or oppositions that inform their worlds. Christine Le Bœuf once translated “The coot was stuck on her” in Auster’s The Book of Illusions as “Le vieux avait le béguin pour elle.” That’s gender genius because, while the contemporary meaning of “béguin” is “crush,” it was originally a hood worn in convents. The coot doesn’t get the girl in this novel, but the historic resonance of the word choice makes the French reader brake and shift gears. Le Bœuf told me that she worked on and worried about that word for several days.

But if “cool” has now become friction-free, then it’s more difficult to suggest the frisson behind the speech of Mr. Majestyk. Perhaps the foreign reader needs to know the films made from Leonard’s novels? But that’s not necessary with Richard Price, whose French translations read like sips of Grand Marnier. In Leonard’s A Coyote’s in the House (2004), the titular quadruped looks down on Hollywood and thinks, “It was their turf.” We understand the “cool” of that in American English, but there’s not much for a translator to work with. It becomes “C’était leur territoire” in French. And that’s not cool at all.

¤

William Marling, Professor of English at Case Western Reserve University, is the author of several books on the detective novel and, most recently, of Gatekeepers: The Emergence of World Literature (Oxford University Press, 2016).

The post In the Flow: On Charles J. Rzepka’s “Being Cool: The Work of Elmore Leonard” appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

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