Pageburners #1: Get Shorty, by Elmore Leonard

 Hello, Streakers! Boog here, with another double post this week. There will be page breaks so you can still get to all the geeky goodness my compatriots have served up before me. First, a thank you to kspaz for pointing out the coming Rapture. In anticipation, I have put together all of my carefully thought out feelings and opinions for my first Pageburners review. And, as seems to be my pattern, it's something I love, it has heavy influence on the decade I was born in, and the one I grew up in, and, it has to do with movies. The novel is Get Shorty. The writer is Elmore Leonard, and if I only ever review one book in my entire review career, I've gotta go with this one. You see, before this book, I read, but didn't really care for, contemporary crime fiction. There were a few books, but they had mostly a comedy focus, like the Dortmunder series from Donald E. Westlake, another favorite of mine. They were funny first, over the top, and no matter what happened, it was never meant to be shocking, or make you that the characters were in any true danger. They were just plain fun to read. and then I find this book. It's funny, to be sure, but it's hard, a little dark, and there really isn't a single character that you want to immediately root for, not even the book's protagonist, mob loan shark Chili Palmer. But it was still fun to read. And that was mind changing. A novel that focuses first on the crime, but get plenty of laughs along the way.

Elmore Leonard, as of maybe 2005, 2006.

 I'm not going to go into the story itself, because you should go read it. But honestly, my love for this book isn't too surprising. Get Shorty is maybe the 32nd novel in a soon to be 46 novel career staring in 1953, with a plethora of Westerns, because that's where the money was. He started writing crime novel in the 70s, but also wrote here and there specifically for Hollywood as well. To date he has written 3 original screenplays, adapted 1 from a different author, had had 1 novel adapted into a TV series, and another TV series currently airing (Justified) based off of his characters. One of his books was adapted into an ABC mini-series, and no less than 18 of his books have been adapted into film. So, he's no stranger to my first passion, the film. Leonard knows Hollywood so well, that he sets most of Get Shorty there, and puts together a hilariously cynical view of the movie business. The basic plot and premise involves the main character, Chili Palmer (actually based on one of Leonard's friends, who was a mobster) going from Miami to LA chasing a rather stupid individual who owes him, and therefore his organization, money. From there he decides he wants to get into the movie business, because hey, it can't be that hard, right? Well, thanks to some of the other characters, Chili figures out that working in Hollywood isn't that different from working in Miami, and his mobster background just might make him perfectly suited to be a producer, if he can get his first project off the ground. And if he survives the people out to kill him.

Honestly one of the finest main casts I have ever watched

 This book is fantastic. The settings are important, and are obviously researched heavily, plenty of location name dropping, and strong visual writing of the current locale's unique geographic and sociographic features, like the areas in and around the foothills and mountains outside of LA, near the Hollywood and further north, where 90% of the houses are built on stilts due to the lack of a large enough flat space to place a foundation. The characters are very fleshed out, and very well written, each one bringing a new set of wrinkles and problems to a quickly multi-layered storyline. I even love the film adaptation, which is pretty dang close to the novel, and is usually in my personal list of favorite movies of all time. I thoroughly enjoy this book, and I heavily encourage you to Get Shorty.