Four Novels of the 1970s: Fifty-Two Pickup / Swag / Unknown Man No. 89 / The Switch

by Elmore Leonard, Gregg Sutter (Editor)

Blending gritty toughness and unpredictable violence with wild humor and an uncanny ear for the rhythms of ordinary speech, Elmore Leonard was the most widely and enthusiastically admired crime novelist of his time. His genius for scene and dialogue led Time magazine to describe him as “a Dickens of Detroit,” and Newsweek called him “the best American writer of crime alive, possibly the best we’ve ever had.” Now The Library of America inaugurates a three-volume edition of Leonard’s greatest work, prepared in consultation with the author shortly before his death and edited by his long-time researcher Gregg Sutter.

Leonard began his career in the 1950s as a writer of pulp westerns, but switched genres at the end of the 1960s and slowly but steadily achieved recognition as a fantastically inventive storyteller and a one-of-a-kind stylist. For all the dazzling complications of his plots—often involving brilliantly elaborate scams, of which he was a master—it was the people who mattered most in his books, people from every walk of life and every social byway.

The four novels collected in this first volume re-invented the American crime novel and cemented Leonard’s reputation. All are set in his hometown Detroit, a hard-working “shot and a beer” kind of place whose lawless underside becomes a stage for an unforgettable cast of rogues, con artists, and psychopaths. Fifty-Two Pickup (1974), fast and sharply written, is an insidiously brutal book about an adulterous businessman who runs afoul of a crew of murderous blackmailers. Swag (1976) finds Leonard moving for the first time into the more comic mode that would become his signature, as he charts the small-time criminal careers of an amiable ex-con and an ambitious car salesman who share a bachelor pad and pursue their hedonistic dream of the good life through a string of armed robberies. Unknown Man No. 89 (1977) spins a complex web of crisscrossing rip-offs and con games, with process server Jack Ryan, a typically laid-back Leonard protagonist, caught in the middle. In The Switch (1978), one of Leonard’s funniest books, Mickey Dawson, a discontented housewife held for ransom, manages to turn the tables on her kidnappers while exacting overdue revenge on her scheming husband.

This volume also contains a newly researched chronology of Elmore Leonard’s life, drawing on materials in his personal archive, and detailed annotations, which include as a special bonus a scene from the typescript for Swag that did not appear in the published book.

Genres: Fiction, Crime, Literature, Classics, Detective, Humor

809 pages, Hardcover

First published September 4, 2014

About the author

Elmore John Leonard lived in Dallas, Oklahoma City and Memphis before settling in Detroit in 1935. After serving in the navy, he studied English literature at the University of Detroit where he entered a short story competition. His earliest published novels in the 1950s were westerns, but Leonard went on to specialize in crime fiction and suspense thrillers, many of which have been adapted into motion pictures.

Father of Peter Leonard.

Reviews

[Heronimo Gieronymus · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have been cognizant of Elmore Leonard's existence for the majority of my life, and certainly became aware during Quentin Tarantino's rise to meteoric celebrity in the wake of PULP FICTION that the Los Angeles video store employee turned populist auteur was outspoken about his high estimation of Leonard, who he would regularly declare his favourite writer when doing press. I was as fond of Tarantino in my early teens as was it seemed pretty much everybody else, curious about his influences, and had a tendency to pursue independent study inspired by his tastes, which brought me, for example, to Howard Hawks' RIO BRAVO as a youngster, as well as various Asian genre films of note. Etc. Still, aware of him and curious, I never did get around to reading Leonard. I have always had a certain predisposition to the disreputable rewards of good crime fiction, James Ellroy's KILLER ON THE ROAD especially serving as a major influence on me in my teens. I would go on to be a huge fan of Jim Thompson, James M. Cain, Raymond Chandler, Patricia Highsmith, Georges Simenon, and other masters of that stripe. Though I never got around to reading Leonard, two film adaptations did favourably impress me, namely Tarantino's 1996 masterpiece JACKIE BROWN, adapted from RUM PUNCH, and Steven Soderbergh's OUT OF SIGHT from the following year. Unlike the majority of Leonard adaptations I have encountered, uniformly pretty weak as I have found them to be, the Tarantino and the Soderbergh both feature dynamic, fully-realized characters inhabiting recognizable fringe worlds, engaging in sprightly repartee and enmeshed in lively machinations of plot which keep the viewer in a highly excited state, never quite certain where things are going. Character, milieu, dialogue, plotting: these, in a nutshell, are Leonard's forte. Also just a generally expressive, though minimalist, use of language. This is a writer in whose work, by way of example, to shoot someone with a shotgun is to “pump and bust him.” The fact that Michael Keaton plays the same character in both JACKIE BROWN and OUT OF SIGHT, clearly something of a sly move on the part of Soderbergh, means that the two films taken together also inform us that characters do recur from one Leonard novel to the next, and that the specific world he conjures in his novels, so often set as they are in Detroit, spreads across his body of work, a fact attested to in the Library of America edition of a selection his 1970s crime novels, which not only has characters the appearance or mention of whom will recur in separate novels, but which concludes with SWITCH, a novel featuring the characters Ordell Robbie and Louis Gara, who will appear again as major players in RUM PUNCH (played respectively by Samuel L. Jackson and Robert De Niro in JACKIE BROWN). If I have had reservations about Leonard, sufficient unto themselves to prevent me from reading him until now, they probably have something to do with intuitions instilled in me both by film adaptations of his work and by the nature of the accolades it has provoked. I think I was expecting a kind of hep genre fiction suffused with a bit of an antic Looney Tunes whimsy. Half too-cool-for-school hard-boiled, half Porky Pig. It is perhaps also worth noting that at times I found his public advocacy for no-nonsense streamlined prose style somewhat off-putting, believing as I always have that there are any number of ways to skin a cat, and that a writer should be beholden to his or her or what-have-you's personal métier above all else. If I am passionate about James M. Cain, well, I am equally passionate about James Joyce. So, yes, reservations, and I am finally getting to Leonard already nearly a man of forty, a pursuit perhaps made more high-mindedly palatable by the introduction onto the market of these Library of America editions, conferring as they do upon the work something like the aroma of class. And guess what? These four novels from the seventies, from the first Library of America collection I have read (it won't be my last), are truly great. They also represent unabashedly a kind of divine trash culture. That is not a knock. Trash culture, the sordid paperback, tabloid titillation, pop art. I don't know if Andy Warhol, producer of the movie TRASH, was a Leonard fan, but, Christ, man, how could he not have been? Repurposed crime scene images, popular entertainers as graven silk screen images, isolated cans of Campbell's soup popping in negative space. Kinship, there is a kinship. Trash, of course, can be sacred, only the worst sort of snoot would beg to differ. It helps that Leonard is a hellaciously gifted writer with as finely tuned an ear for cant and lowborn lingo as any popular American novelist has ever possessed. What is it his books do? They take genre conventions and attendant tropes, the stuff of trash, and they usurp and subvert. With gusto. With verve. He has a great lesson for us, far greater than his "keep it simple stupid" prose ethos: plotting hinges on human behaviour, both should be unpredictable. Storytelling is about disarming, unmapped journeys. The storyteller ought grip you tightly, keep you guessing, ultimately delivering you to a series of destinations contrary to those you expected, destinations you could not possibly have surmised. This is Leonard's conjurer act. That and local colour. Local as in Detroit, more or less his adopted hometown, where all four of these novels are set. Local colour in addition to plotting. He makes us believe in the reality of the surroundings, the humanity of his chess pieces. It's right there immediately in FIFTY-TWO PICKUP, with its psychopathic band of unfeeling no-goddamn-good kidnappers: greasy quasi-hippie porn impresario Al, “this skinny puff-mouth little dude with the hair,” burdened with a pretty dire pair of co-conspirators, “A fat-ass juice head who was liable to melt with a little heat and a bad-ass spade gunslinger who blew fifty bucks a day on his highs.” FIFTY-TWO PICKUP is incredible. So is the closer, THE SWITCH, the title, which Leonard did not like, its having been imposed on him, suggesting something about the ending, which is kinda unfortunate, but also about its author's points of identification, issues related to conceptualizing women in the pulp landscape. There is a kinked kind of irony in Leonard when it comes to race and gender which makes him a kind of subversive, though it doesn't prevent him from remaining something of a swinging dick. Yes, the first novel and the final novel here are a delight, but to my mind it is the two middle ones that attain utter sustained sublimity. SWAG and UNKNOWN MAN NO. 89. God, I love these two. SWAG is about a pair of guys who meet through criminal happenstance and embark on a partnership as discriminating armed robbery urban banditos. And then get in over their heads. It's Motor City in the mid-70s, and “you couldn’t tell the cops from the hackers and stalkers anymore.” Leonard likes his double-crosses, triple-crosses, ad infinitum, and boy oh boy can he wind that shit up. “So if he sets me up, why not set you up, too? Two birds. Two dumb fucking dumb white birds.” His characters are dumb, to be sure, also often kind of smart, both at once in fact, of varying degrees of moral nobility; it is the combination of stupidity, intelligence, nobility, and venality that makes a person both whole and a foil for the common tragedies that fill our newspapers and dime novels. Leonard sets up his pieces with delicacy and casual deliberation. Once everything is perfectly in order, a character in SWAG muses, ending a chapter: “I think the clowns are about to come out and put on a show.” This cannot help but put a smile on the face of an already delighted communicant. UNKNOWN MAN NO. 89 is probably the most logistically dense of the four novels, worthy of note when it comes to a writer whose gifts regarding plotting are a huge part of his appeal. It is also the novel that means the most to me personally, because of its peripheral focus on alcoholism and recovery, my being a recovering alcoholic myself, as was Elmore Leonard. This is only one element, however, in a glorious tapestry. It is a tight and efficient novel not afraid to allow Virgil, a black killer who wears a kind of stylish pimp stetson, to take a moment, breaking into a hotel room so as to steal all of a man’s papers and documents, to throw into the suitcase with the spoils of the raid "a painting on the wall he liked of a cat out in a sailboat with the mast broken off and this terrible motherfucker storm coming at him. Virgil sat down and had his scotch and coke drink, wondering if the cat made it, then wondering where the cat had got the sailboat, if it was his or if he’d stolen it someplace and was trying to get away, shit, when the storm got him.” Bad guys up to bad business, but always this presiding, good-willed attention to the presiding human comedy. Thrumming genre fiction, trash art, mixed with legitimate bemused insight into the human condition. This is the alchemist's gift of being able to make art of popular things. Martin Amis, as attested to in this volume's very useful chronology of Leonard's life, once said that Leonard was the closest thing America had to a national writer, the way Dickens was a national writer, and in a way that is so uncommon as to appear practically a phenomenon extinct. That's hyperbole, to be sure. But is it wrong? Probably essentially wrong. But probably not all that wrong. Goddamnit, he is kind of like Dickens.

[Justin Partridge · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Ordell looked at Mickey. “You mad at anybody?”

“Not really,” Mickey said.

“You not mad at us?”

“No, I think it’s kinda interesting.

And with the 5 ⭐️ “The Switch” in the pocket, my journey through Elmore Leonard’s Detroit comes to a thunderously funny and satisfying conclusion. And we get an extra layer of neatness thanks to the fascinatingly frank back matter this Library of America volume provides; an imprint I am quickly becoming uncomfortably obsessed with. It’s like Criterion set for books, I mean CMON

And further, just getting to see a master grinding it out and finding an entirely new vibe, tonality, and rhythm. It’s like, you know he’s competent, boarding on full-on good when you first read his westerns, then one novel and BANG you’re in it. But even having that experience and being the Raylan Givens girlie I am, getting this whole new scope and experience out of someone I love a lot really makes/made the whole read just a treat. Like I was shocked i got through it as quickly as I did, it does NOT read like the doorstop it is.

It’s almost superlative to say the novels therein are good too. Of course they fucking are. They are written by Elmore Leonard! Even the roughest of the four, the opening Fifty-Two Pickup, flints interestingly and starts to gather up an energy that just refines and tests out as the novels continue. Just the coolest possible shit doing with relatively simple crime set ups. And they actually get funnier and funnier too, even as they get meaner and meaner, it’s wonderful stuff. And he’s already threading through so many characters and places that will basically weave through his whole career (Stick, Ordell and Louis, Jack Ryan, no the OTHER Jack Ryan etc etc) just the best best best, I couldn’t have asked for a better start to Jumble June

I don’t know if I’ll ever go to Detroit. But I’ll tell you this, I would be more than happy to go back to Elmore Leonard’s Detroit.

[Mike Mikulski · Rating 4 out of 5]

Four gritty crime novels of the 1970's. Leonard captures Detroit in the early stages of urban decay with grifters, car thieves, art theater proprietors, alcoholics, process servers and ex-cons trying to take their share from what a dying auto industry has left behind. Fast paced, crisp dialog laced with sex, guns, alcohol, double dealing and a few twists to keep things interesting.

[David Guy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Elmore Leonard wrote great—I would almost say groundbreaking—dialogue, but the rest of his writing was ordinary, even pedestrian. Let’s the opening of Fifty-Two Pickup.

“He could not get used to going to the girl’s apartment. He would be tense, driving past the gate and following the road that wound through the complex of townhouse condominiums. Even when it was dark he was a little tense. But once he reached the garage and pressed the remote control switch and the double door opened he was there and it was done.”

This is Library of America material? “Call me Ishmael,” it’s not.

So what is it about Elmore Leonard that made him the envy of many of his contemporaries?[1] What we sometimes forget is that the art of fiction is first and foremost about telling a story, and Leonard had an absolute genius for that. Fifty-Two Pickup, peopled by the most ordinary characters imaginable, is absolutely terrifying, and moves like an express train, thundering through a story that other writers would have taken fifty more pages to tell. Scene after scene is so brilliantly put together, starting and stopping on a dime, that we never have a chance to catch our breath, and the ending is so abrupt that you finish the book and think, wait a minute. Did I just read that? So you read it again.

Then, if you’re reading a Library of America volume, you start another novel.

Years ago, when I kept up with the Washington Post Book World, Bruce Cook wrote an article called “Elmore Leonard’s Detroit Sound.” I was so taken with it that I began to read Leonard, and to follow his career. I liked the gritty urban Detroit characters, and the city streets he described, became a little less interested when he moved on to glitzy places like Miami and L.A. I wondered if success was taking him away from his roots. (Actually, as this book’s Chronology makes clear, Leonard was always commercially successful and dealt with Hollywood right from the start. He wrote Westerns before he wrote crime novels, and wrote the original stories for both Hombre and 3:10 to Yuma.) So when my son moved to Detroit, and the Library of America brought out a volume of the early novels, I was all over it. The novels were every bit as good as I remembered. And the Chronology gave me a whole new understanding of his career.

Leonard wrote crime but not detective novels, a distinction I didn’t understand when I began reading him. He often wrote from the viewpoint of the criminal, or the victim. His books aren’t about some crime that has happened, and unraveling the mystery of who did it. We’re right in on the crime, and often see what happened, and how it went. And we have no idea what might happen. The good guys don’t necessarily win, or stay alive. There aren’t really any good guys. It’s just us folks. But some of us are committing crimes.

Fifty-Two Pickup is a case in point. Harry Mitchell is a Detroit businessman who’s been having an affair. He’s in his early forties and it’s the first time he’s ever done that; he needed a little excitement in his life, met a young woman in what’s now known as a Gentleman’s Club and started to see her. While another writer might have treated us to the pleasures of the flesh (Updike would have gone on for pages), Leonard opens with his character being blackmailed; the person waiting for him in the apartment is not his girlfriend but a black man with a stocking over his face. The man has movies of Mitchell meeting his girlfriend. He wants money—and claims to know how much Mitchell can afford—or he’s going to expose everything.

Another person—me, for instance—might have gone to the police right away. But Mitchell started off as a blue collar guy and has risen to the top of the business world on his own. When workers threaten a slowdown in his plant he confronts them directly, and takes on the guy from the union physically, even though the man is bigger. He also actually loves his wife, and she’s a strong person in her own way; she’s pissed when he tells her the story but is ready to fight back. It’s the two of them against three petty criminals who have thought up the blackmail scheme, each one sleazier than the last. Things happen that are hard to stomach. People die. But the book is riveting all the way through, and ends as abruptly as it began. No Charles Dickens stuff here.

I was a little startled, after the real terror of Fifty-Two Pickup, to discover that Swag is, among other things, a comedy. It’s about two guys who take up a life of crime almost as if they’re entrepreneurs. Stick has an absolute genius for stealing cars, was actually stealing one out of a used car lot when his partner discovered him. Frank—the partner in question—was selling the cars at the time, though he just worked for the place, didn’t care if the car was recovered or not. He likes his job okay, but thinks there might be easier ways to make a living. The two of them go into it like two guys doing a science experiment, first stealing some guns, then knocking over a liquor store, then going on from there.

They have a set of rules for how they’re going to run their business (much like Leonard’s Ten Rules for Writing). Frank had actually created the rules before he began his life of crime, but the two men go over them all the time. They move into a nice apartment complex with a swimming pool and a number of unattached women. They set up a bar in their house and learn how to make specialty drinks. They’re low class guys living the high life. And then, predictably, they reach for too much.

This is one of those crime stories where you can’t help rooting for the criminal. I continued to feel that way even after Stick had shot a couple of guys (but they had tried to rob him after he’d robbed somebody else). This is a novel about guys who like to lie around—or as they would say, lay around—a swimming pool, have a few too many drinks, get to know some friendly young women (paying one now and then) and work as little as possible, maybe a couple stick-ups a week, just to keep the booze flowing. It’s when they try to make the big score—and also when they cross Detroit’s racial divide (there’s a lot of very funny stuff about race in this book, very politically incorrect, very Detroit)—that they get in trouble. And that’s when the book gets as suspenseful as Fifty-Two Pickup.

[1] The list of writers who corresponded with Leonard is rather impressive. Charles Willeford, Lawrence Block, Evan Hunter, Tony Hillerman, Pete Hamill, Russell Banks, Ross Thomas, Jim Harrison, James W. Hall, Andre Dubus, Dean Koontz, Walker Percy.

www.davidguy.org

[Vince Tuss · Rating 4 out of 5]

Maybe more a 3.75, but all started my favorite character: Detroit.

[Jeff Tankersley · Rating 3 out of 5]

Part of the three-book "Elmore Leonard: The Classic Crime Novels" set, this first entry has four early crime capers written in the 1970's.

Fifty-Two Pickup:
Fifty-Two Pickup was written in 1974 and is an ugly story. I'm hoping the rest of them aren't this bad lol.

The crime is a blackmail attempt on a cheating husband by three Detroit street thugs who are working in drugs, peep shows, murder, bars, strippers, similar vice stuff. To its credit, the dialogue and characters are somewhat interesting; not relatable but interesting. Unfortunately, where Leonard's film adaptations (Get Shorty, Jackie Brown, Out of Sight) are famous for showing ugly criminal characters who are actually relatable and kinda fun, this novel's characters all play the bad side very straightly-bad. There's no redeeming quality in any of these people.

Verdict: Fifty-Two Pickup has some of that great Leonard-style dialogue, but the plot and setting are tiresome and soulless. A dark comedy without humor.

Jeff's Rating: 1 / 5 (Bad)
movie rating if made into a movie: R

Swag:
"Speaking of rules, Stick said maybe there was one more they should add. Number Eleven. Never try and hold up an Armenian."

Swag was written in 1976. Two friendly criminals in Detroit decide to team up hoping for a nice long career in armed robbery.

This one is a treat, quite funny, with a comical cast of bad characters, and the dialogue is just great. His two main characters are naive, self-conscious and slow on the uptake, but capable and smart when they follow their plans. The middle third of the story, with some booze and drug parties, is a slog at times, but the final third reads like a Tarantino heist movie.

Verdict: A fun, 70's era, downtown Detroit crime story.

Jeff's Rating: 3 / 5 (Good)
movie rating if made into a movie: R

Unknown Man No. 89:
Written in 1977, Unknown Man starts off as a typical Leonard-style urban petty crime novel. The protagonist is a patient and competent but at-times clueless recovering alcoholic who as a process server is usually serving divorce papers and summons for the Detroit court and lawyer system.

It gets a little intense at times and Leonard pulls no punches when showing how bad life can get for his characters. But instead of just leaving this ugliness owning the book (as in "52 Pickup" in my review #42), "Unknown Man No. 89" has hope and humanity inside its web of hustling and extortion that make it a great read. I was honestly rooting for these two messed up people.

Verdict: An unexpected and surprisingly rich love story set in a shakedown attempt, with good plot, pacing, characters, and dialogue. I'll admit, I liked it.

Jeff's Rating: 5 / 5 (Excellent)
movie rating if made into a movie: R

The Switch:
The Switch is about a kidnapping attempt. The kidnappers, the victim, the victim's husband, and the husband's girlfriend are all caught in a game of musical chairs as they scheme and switch sides against one another a few times. Another fun Elmore Leonard crime heist, The Switch has some things I like and some I don't.

Good: The kidnappers and the husband's girlfriend are Ordell, Louis, and Melanie, the characters played by Samuel L. Jackson, Robert De Niro, and Bridget Fonda, respectively, in the Tarantino movie "Jackie Brown." They are all quite funny.

Bad: The tennis moms, country club, preppy attitudes, bleak, rich, always-drinking wives, white-collar-scamming husbands, suburban environment doesn't play as well as Leonard's usual gritty, urban street level crime hijinks. Especially when characters get high and lament how boring their lives are.

Verdict: A short kidnapping heist, can read on a Saturday morning like I did. There were plenty of twists and turns and funny characters.

Jeff's Rating: 3 / 5 (Good)
movie rating if made into a movie: R

Averaging those four ratings puts this collection at a 3.

[Samuel · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.75/5 Four novels with seedy, 1970's Detroit as their backdrop. All have decent to pretty good plots that usually keep up right until the very end. The dialogue felt realistic and was usually very good. Characters were also done pretty well with a couple interesting antagonists. Some aspects of the stories run together since they're all set in the generally same area and some of the characters tend towards general crime archetypes. But overall, four enjoyable crime novels done by a pro.

Fifty-Two Pick up 4.5/5 Driving plot that has momentum till the very end. My favorite of the bunch.

Swag 3.5/5 Slower/laid back pace with bursts of action. Felt more dated/of its time. Decent humor and payoff. Characters were okay.

Unknown Man No. 89 3.5/5 Intriguing set up that hooked me initially. Kinda veered into a subplot that I wasn't expecting, but it was decently handled. Interesting characters. Good ending.

The Switch 3/5 Honestly, I was starting to run out of steam by this point after reading seven other Elmore Leonard books all in a row and my interest just wasn't held as much. Felt like I was starting to see where things were going or end up. Still a decent story, but the ending was meh.

[John Bleasdale · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Switch: Just very entertaining darkly comic crime novels that are constantly grounded in credible human behavior and beautifully observed detail no matter how awry everything else goes. A kidnap plot goes wrong but also in some ways right.

[Robby Nichols · Rating 5 out of 5]

Unknown Man #89 is incredible. It needs to be a movie, like now.

[Anthony · Rating 5 out of 5]

It’s great that you can read an Elmore Leonard book whenever you want and it’ll be better than anything else you were just reading.

[K. Fox (Cahill) · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hilarious collection, surprisingly hard to put down

[Craig · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great characters and a beautiful plot. I really love Leonard's touch with dialogue. Note: This is for "The Switch" only.

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

The first novel in this volume, Fifty-Two Pickup, is a gritty, big-city crime story of how quickly life can get out of control with one little dalliance. Brilliantly constructed scenes and characters make for a wild ride, a superb thriller. Onward to Swag!

Finished Swag and found it as much of a page-turner as the first novel, but with much more humor. Street life in the Motor City -- painted authentically by Elmore and quite readable.

All done now. Elmore Leonard was a master of his art. Stories well told, and I heartily agree with whoever wrote the description of this volume. Leonard had "an uncanny ear for the rhythms of ordinary speech," and that skill alone makes his stories come alive.

[Charles Finch · Rating 4 out of 5]

My New York Times review:

FOUR NOVELS OF THE 1970S

By Elmore Leonard

Library of America, $35.

Is Elmore Leonard a great American novelist? His advocates certainly think so, and now, in a volume edited by his longtime researcher Gregg Sutter, he has the imprimatur of the Library of America, with the full accompanying paraphernalia: the bookmark ribbon, the predictably superb chronology of life and work, the elegant cover. For all that, I think the answer is, not quite. Genuinely transcendent genre novelists, like Melville and Greene, seem to work partly from some restlessness with their forms, whereas Leonard’s novels are merely (merely!) the perfection of his — the darkly comic suspense novel, whose lineage stretches back to Hammett, forward to Paretsky.

This volume shrewdly drops us into his assured midcareer run, starting with the absorbing “Fifty-Two Pickup,” about a Detroit businessman and his blackmailers, and concluding with “The Switch,” about a housewife who manipulates her kidnappers. All four novels flawlessly capture the sad, twilight feel of the 1970s, when idealism failed into sleaze, when poverty made drug use and open sexuality an ally of violence, suddenly, instead of love. But the books rely on that violence, rather than appraise it. When there’s not a gun or a getaway car nearby, they can grow ponderous, as in the brooding outlier of the bunch, “Unknown Man No. 89,” whose treatment of alcoholism, which bedeviled the author, paradoxically flattens its characters. Leonard is best when he’s plotting something, like the serial armed robberies of “Swag” — mid-crime, nobody’s pace or voice has ever been so dazzling.

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fifty-Two Pickup *** 1/2 (out of 5) Read October 2014
Swag *** 1/2 (out of 5) Read May 2015
Unknown Man #89 **** (out of 5) Read November 2015
The Switch *** (out of 5) Read February 2016

Averaged together, my rating for this volume, collecting four of Elmore Leonard's best crime novels of the '70s, is 3.5 stars, so I'm rounding up because it's the Library of America. As these novels progress, you can see Leonard perfecting his blend of humor and expertly-rendered dialogue as he becomes the dean of American crime fiction. On to the '80s!

[Karen · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've only read one of the four novels included in the volume, Swag, which was published in 1976. It's a crime caper with a comic undertow, focusing on car thief Stick and car salesman Frank, who embark on a string of armed robberies of gas stations, liquor stores, and supermarkets in suburban Detroit. They are living very comfortably and enjoying mingling with the "career ladies" at their apartment complex, but Frank wants to move up to the big time and convinces Stick to participate in a more complex robbery at a downtown Detroit department store, where the payoff will be immense. However, it means involving three other men, which Stick is hesitant about. Leonard's dialogue rings true and he paints a sympathetic portrait of characters who should be unlikable, but somehow aren't. This is not my usual type of book but I was engrossed in the story.

[Clay · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was new to Elmore Leonard, but I'm a sucker for these beautiful Library of America books. What a delight. These aren't terribly serious literature but the movement in the pages and the dialogue make the pages turn like days spent on a sunny beach.

I've since read a couple more old Leonard yarns and I'll be coming back for more.

And if you haven't read one of these Library of America editions, you should. The heft, the quality... They are about the only books I keep.

[Robert Foreman]

These are good books that I read recently. All four of them are different but also similar because the same fella wrote them. My favorite is probably Swag because it is just so darn wild but Unknown Man No. 89 is also good because it gives some nice lessons on alcohol and how to overcome it with your friends. I give it the five stars. Elmore Leonard is kind of like David Goodis but like I said about the novels in the book he is also different from David Goodis.

[Joan · Rating 4 out of 5]

4/16/26. Read the first two books in this volume. Well, read the first one “52 pick up“ and half of “Swag“. Really enjoyed “52 pick up”. Lost interest in “Swag”.

6/24/26. Read 3rd book in this volume, “Unknown Man No. 89“. Enjoyed this one very much. Interesting characters, snappy dialogue, good plot.

[Tom · Rating 5 out of 5]

Swag on Sept. 27, 2014
Unknown Man No. 89 on Nov. 30, 2014
Fifty-Two Pickup on May 12, 2015

[Michael Brown · Rating 3 out of 5]

Four mixed books was a bit too much. Like them one at a time. But this is how I found these 4 tales and slugged my way through them. Some better that others but all Elmore likable.

[Mills College Library]

Fiction L5812f 2014

[Brandon Kempner · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fifty-Two Pickup, 4 stars, 12/14/15-12/16/15
Swag, 4 stars, 12/24/15-12/25/15
Unknown Man No. 89, 3 stars, 12/26/15-12/29/15
The Switch, 3.5 stars, 12/30/15-1/1/16

[Julie · Rating 5 out of 5]

My review for this book will be linked back here in the near future.

[Tortuga]

Fifty-Two Pickup ***