LaBrava

Joe LaBrava used to guard presidents; now he photographs South Miami Beach, the art deco hotels full of retirees, hustlers and heat, and his pictures are starting to get gallery attention he does not much want. Leonard's masterstroke is what he does to this ex Secret Service watcher: he hands him his own boyhood fantasy. Jean Shaw, the film noir actress LaBrava worshipped at twelve, the dark haired dame of a dozen fifties second features, is living out her retirement locally, still magnetic, still delivering lines with the old timing, and when she seems to need protecting, from an extortion scheme, a menacing redneck named Richard Nobles, a Cuban marielito hit boy who dances go go on the side, LaBrava steps into the frame beside her.

The joke, and the trap, is that Jean Shaw has read this script, because she wrote pictures like it: the scheme unfolding around LaBrava keeps rhyming with her old movies, the shakedown, the fall guy, the switch, and the novel becomes a noir about a woman applying noir as method, casting the men around her by type. Leonard conducts it all in the style that made him the era's most imitated craftsman, dialogue doing the work of chapters, lowlifes rendered with taxonomic delight, violence arriving casually and leaving fast.

Whether LaBrava is the hero or the mark is the book's suspended question, and the answer, when Jean Shaw plays her last scene, is the genre kissing itself goodnight.

Around two hundred and eighty pages.

Best for readers who want peak Leonard, Miami crime as screwball noir, and the best novel anyone has written about loving old movies unwisely.