My dad is cleaning off his bookshelves and giving away as many books as he can bring himself to. He asked what types of books I like, and after listening patiently to my very long and very specific answers, he apparently walked away with "mysteries" stuck in his mind. In any case he's been bringing me everything in the mystery/intrigue/thriller category, along with everything set in Berlin or Prague. It's an interesting subset of my dad's brain that I've got stacked on an end table now. I'm pacing myself as I already had, let's be honest, a year's worth of books picked out on my own. Anyway I picked up this one and got a few pages in before I realized I was reading Jackie Brown. Cool, dad. ( )

Set in the South Florida cities of West Palm Beach and Miami, Rum Punch follows Jackie Burke, a forty-four-year-old stewardess for a bottom-rung airline, who has been smuggling illegal cash into the U.S. from Jamaica for small-time gunrunner and aspiring crime boss Ordell Robbie.

Can't go wrong with Elmore Leonard. This one really ranks up at the top. In case anyone doesn't know, this book was the basis for Tarantino's Jackie Brown movie. ( )

i never saw jackie brown so i’m interested to see how it all moves to california ( )

I recall someone saying how Elmore Leonard isn't old school `cause he built the school. Very true. My favorite Elmore Leonard novels are Tishomingo Blues and Pagan Babies; Rum Punch is my very favorite, thus this review. Also, in addition to reviewing the book, let me plug the audiobook read by Joe Mantegna. The voice of Joe Mantegna is pitch-perfect, his rhythm and inflections capturing each of the characters, male and female, as well as the mood and charged atmosphere of the entire story.

Perhaps readers know that Elmore Leonard listed his own `Rules of Writing'. You can easily find them with a quick Google search. Here is how Leonard follows his own rules in Rum Punch:

Rule: Never open the book with the weather or a prologue.
The novel's opening line: "Sunday morning, Ordell took Louis to watch the white-power demonstration in downtown Palm Beach." ----- A gripping scene right from the start; not a prologue or mention of the weather in sight.

Rule: Never use a verb other than `said' or an adverb modifying `said' to carry dialogue.
A snatch of dialogue from the first page: ""Young skinhead Nazis," Ordell said. "Look, even little Nazigirls marching down Worth Avenue. You believe it? Coming now you have the Klan, not too many here today. Some in green, must be the coneheads' new spring shade. Behind them it looks like some Bikers for Racism, better known as the Dixie Knights. We gonna move on ahead, fight through the crowd here," Ordell said, bringing Louis along.
"There's a man I want to show you. See who he reminds you of. He told me they're gonna march up South County and have their show on the steps of the fountain by city hall. You ever see so many police? Yeah, I expect you have. But not all these different uniforms at one time. They mean business too, got their helmets on, their riot ba-tons. Stay on the sidewalk or they liable to hit you over the head. They keeping the street safe for the Nazis."" ----- Right on, Elmore. No need for ornamentation here since Ordell's words speak for themselves.

Rule: Avoid using exclamation points (in other words, Leonard is telling us to let the action itself communicate power and excitement).
Vintage Elmore: "He saw the two bikers standing in kind of a crouch with their rifles, shoulders hunched, looking this way, nearer the house now than the gun range. He saw them out there in the open, cautious. Saw them both look toward the driveway at the same time and start to turn in that direction, raising their rifles. Louis heard the sound of automatic weapons, not as loud as he heard them in Ordell's gun movie or in any movie he had ever seen, and watched the two bikers drop where they were standing seem to collapse, fall without firing a shot, the sound of the automatic weapons continuing until finally it stopped. Pretty soon the jackboys appeared, the kids with their Chinese guns, curved banana clips, looking at the men on the ground and then toward the house."

Rule: Use regional dialect and jargon sparingly.
Elmore Leonard wrote to be read. When he writes dialogue, it doesn't matter if the speaker is from the inner city or the rural hinterlands, you can read it. Case in point: ""All right, go ahead," Simone said. "You find any other guns, or you find something else and you take it? The man's gonna come after you. Understand? Man that has more guns'n you ever saw in your life." ----- True to the character, in this case an older Black woman, but, again, you can read it. Every piece of dialogue in Rum Punch is equally clear.

Rule: Avoid detailed descriptions of characters and don't go into great detail describing places or things.
Here is how the author describes bail bondsman Max Cherry, one of the main characters, through the eyes of Ordell, another main character: "The man himself appeared neat, cleanshaved, had his blue shirt open, no tie, good size shoulders on him. That dark, tough-looking type of guy like Lewis, dark hair, only Max Cherry was losing his on top. Up in his fifties somewhere. He could be Eyetalian, except Ordell had never met a bail bondsman wasn't Jewish." ----- That's it-short, crisp, a few telling details.

Rule: Cut out parts the reader tend to skip.
The hardback edition of Rum Punch is 297 pages. I've read the novel three times, never skipping a page, ever. Why would I skip pages? What happens and what is said on every page drives the story.

Rule (the last and most important rule): If it sounds like writing, rewrite it.
Rum Punch does not sound like writing. That's a fact. A Victorian romance, it isn't. What Rum Punch sounds like - regarding dialogue - is a verbatim transcript from living, breathing people. And the world the characters inhabit is described in enough detail that we get a clear picture.

If you haven't read any of Elmore Leonard's 45 published novels, Rum Punch is a great place to start. ( )