Leonard displays real talent in `Rum Punch’

RUM PUNCH, by Elmore Leonard, Delacorte, 297 pages, $21.

I stayed up too late this week, watching Elmore Leonard reruns on cable TV.

Strangely addictive, Leonard’s films and novels rush by so quickly that you find yourself wanting, at the very least, to start another novel or rent another movie once you complete the one in hand.

Leonard’s newest novel is “Rum Punch,” and it will soon take its rightful place in the high echelons of crime fiction along with his 30 other chronicles of man’s darkest side.

Leonard is a master storyteller, and “Rum Punch” grips the reader quickly into a page-turning frenzy that stops only when the last page disappointedly ends.

“Rum Punch” acts as a sequel, of sorts, in that we meet up again with Ordell Robbie and Louis Gara, a couple of Leonard’s bumbling best, in a new caper. (Leonard fans will recall the duo’s botched kidnapping in “Switch.”)

This time around, the quest is illegal gun running, and Leonard masterfully paints the sordid picture of desperation and despair that the author so bleakly splatters on his canvas story after story.

For Robbie and Gara, the scene switches from Detroit to Palm Beach and involves a beautiful flight attendant, Jackie Burke, and a disgruntled bail bondsman, Max Cherry. Leonard’s talent rests in his capacity to make the real bad guys look really bad, and the not-so-bad guys look good. Often, it is the good guys — in this case, the federal agents — who evoke no sympathy at all.

In “Rum Punch,” however, plot takes a back seat to dialogue, and once again the author displays his real talent: recording the spoken word as no one else ever has.

Regardless of tastes or preferences, Leonard fans will drink long from “Rum Punch,” content in the fact that it is splendidly spiked again with just the right mix of dialogue and action that have kept readers coming back for more time and time again.

DOUBLE DEUCE, by Robert B. Parker, Putnam, 224 pages, $19.95.

It must be fall because author Robert Parker brings Spencer back for hire, just in time to deal with gangs, drive-by killings, and a drug-infested Boston housing project.

Along with sidekicks Hawk and Susan, Spencer is rough, ready, and literate — he’s always literate — in his portrayal of the softest tough guy since Philip Marlowe.

Parker’s books have become cult-like. Boston is as much Spencertown as it is Beantown, and even the most casual of acquaintances to New England’s hub city feel delightfully at home on Boylston Street, drinking coffee from a Styrofoam cup and evaluating the quality of Spandex among female joggers along the Charles River.

Readers rush to Parker as much for ambiance as storyline, and like Leonard, Parker can turn a phrase with as little said as possible.

Parker’s success also rests in the timeliness of his tales, and this one will not disappoint: Senseless killings; disenchanted, city youth; a no-way-out mentality that translates into trouble and most certainly death.

Through it all, Spencer and Hawk do the honorable thing — always the honorable thing — and Parker once again leaves us breathlessly awaiting another fall, another book.

Ron Brown is a free-lance writer who resides in Bangor.