Get Shorty by Elmore Leonard: a British First Edition (Viking/Penguin, 1990)

Just a wee (er, ish) addendum to Monday's post on Elmore Leonard's new novel Raylan and its relationship to Justified, the TV show which both inspired it and was itself inspired by earlier Leonard/Raylan Givens stories – I mentioned in that post that Martin Amis once described Leonard's 1990 novel Get Shorty – which was, of course, filmed (quite successfully, although not as successfully as Justified) by Barry Sonnenfeld in 1995, with John Travolta in the role of gangster-turned-movie mogul Chili Palmer, and followed by a sequel, the not-quite-as-good Be Cool, in 1999, which was also filmed (rather less successfully), this time by F. Gary Gray in 2005 – as "a masterpiece", and that I wholeheartedly agreed with his assessment. (That Amis quote, by the way, I spotted the other weekend in this excellent Guardian essay on Leonard by Philip Hensher.) But it struck me whilst writing that post that despite Get Shorty being not only my favourite Elmore Leonard work but also one of my favourite novels, period, I didn't actually own a copy (I believe I borrowed the one I read from Beckenham Library in the early-'90s).

Naturally I immediately set about rectifying this egregious state of affairs, and went in search of a first edition of the book. A straightforward task, you might reasonably assume, since first editions of Get Shorty litter the likes of AbeBooks and Amazon Marketplace like bodies litter Leonard's backlist. Ah, but you see, the vast majority of those are the American first edition, published by Delacorte Press; the British first edition is in much shorter supply – and even shorter now that I have this:

A near-fine copy of the British first edition/first impression, published by Viking/Penguin in the same year as the Delacorte first, 1990, my acquisition of which reduces the available number of British firsts on AbeBooks worldwide to, currently, eight – and two of those are ex-library. Of course, since the Viking edition and the Delacorte edition are virtually identical – same dustjacket design, same interiors (bar the copyright page) – you'd be forgiven for wondering why I'd want the British edition anyway, especially since it's probably printed, like most British editions of American books, on what's almost certainly an inferior paper stock. But I'm afraid the only explanations I can offer there are (i) because it's scarcer than the American one; (ii) because I'm British myself, and therefore guided by a misplaced pride in my homeland; and (iii) because I'm an idiot.

The jacket design is uncredited, but it's done in the same "big book look" style as the covers of all of Leonard's novels around this early-1990s period – see also Maximum Bob (1991), Rum Punch (1992) and the Raylan Givens novels Pronto (1993) and Riding the Rap (1995) – and will be very familiar to readers of a certain age (i.e., my age). I know that the illustrations on the covers of those last two are by Mark Taylor, so it's a fairly safe bet that the illo of the Hollywood sign on Get Shorty is by Mr. Taylor, too.

Anyway. Next up: it's Donald E. Westlake Day!

Justified: Raylan Givens in Raylan by Elmore Leonard (Book / TV Show Review)

Way back in the dim and distant past – in fact around this time last year, oddly enough – I posted a series of reviews of Elmore Leonard's crime fiction stories featuring US Marshal Raylan Givens, comparing them to the TV show they inspired, Justified – my belaboured point being that Justified is the most faithful adaptation – in spirit, tone, characterization and even dialogue – of Leonard's work yet seen. Those three posts – on the novels Pronto (1993) and Riding the Rap (1995) and the short story "Fire in the Hole" (2002), plus an introductory piece – proved pretty popular, together receiving thousands of hits from fans of Justified investigating the source material. The final one in particular, on "Fire in the Hole", ended 2011 as the most viewed post of the year on Existential Ennui, and continues to attract a fair bit of traffic even now (perhaps understandably, given each episode of Justified boasts the legend "Based on the short story 'Fire in the Hole' by Elmore Leonard" in its titles).

Justified is now into its third season in the States and seemingly going from strength to strength, but an unexpected bonus of the show's creative success has been that it inspired Elmore Leonard – an executive producer on Justified – to pen further Raylan Givens stories, something I doubt he'd have done if the show hadn't existed. Indeed, according to Justified's creator and show runner, Graham Yost (quoted in this recent Reuters piece), it was the actor who plays Raylan, Timothy Olyphant, who suggested to Leonard that he write some more Raylan tales – and those tales in turn inspired aspects of Justified's second season and reportedly even its third (Leonard was showing his new stories to Yost and co. as he wrote them).

The end result of Olyphant's intervention, the prosaically titled Raylan, is published in hardback by Weidenfeld & Nicolson in the UK on Thursday (it's been out in the US for about a month already), and the first thing to note is that it isn't so much a novel as three short stories – or, more accurately, novellas – stitched together – a consequence of the way the book was written; according to Yost, Leonard wrote one story, then just kept going until he had three. But the three separate tales aren't presented as such, and so even though there are plot strands which tie them together, there's an episodic feel to the work, with noticeable changes of direction. Moreover, the relationship between Leonard's book and Justified isn't quite so clear cut this time; whereas previously the show's makers lifted Leonard's Raylan stories almost verbatim, this time they've been more selective, taking elements and scenes and altering them as they've seen fit. (Leonard's instructions to Yost regarding the novel were, "Hang it up and strip it for parts.")

The main plot in the first third of Raylan hasn't yet shown up in Justified, and centres on the illegal removing of internal organs from unwitting victims around Harlan County, Kentucky, where Raylan grew up and now lives and works (having been exiled there in "Fire in the Hole"). But it does involve Pervis Crowe and his feckless offspring Dickie and Coover – and it's these three characters, in an altered form, that Yost and his team made the focus of the second season of Justified. While in the book the Crowes are distantly related to the hapless Dewey Crowe, in the show they become the Bennetts, and Pervis changes from patriarch to matriarch, in the form of Mags Bennett. Hopefully that organ-stealing story will turn up in Justified at some point though, because it's a classic example of the way Leonard confounds expectations – the kicker is that the organ thieves are selling them back to their original "owners" – and climaxes with Raylan naked bar his boots in a bathtub filled with ice (steady, ladies).

Story #2 forms the basis of Justified season two's main arc, and sees Raylan assigned to protect hard-assed operator Carol Conlan of M-T Mining, a company seeking to buy the presumed coal-rich Big Black Mountain, which, it transpires, is owned by Pervis Crowe. Here we see the return of Boyd Crowder, Raylan's former friend and now nemesis. Boyd is working for M-T, and gets mixed up in a shooting when a disgruntled local vents his frustration at the way the mining company has been polluting the area. This part of the book hinges on a town meeting to discuss M-T's plans, during the course of which Raylan fatally undermines Carol's argument, and amidst all the – admittedly enjoyable – gunplay of Raylan, to my mind it's this scene which is the highlight of the entire enterprise; it's notable that it's duly transported wholesale – along with Carol – to season two of Justified.

Now, those familiar with Leonard's original "Fire in the Hole" story might, at this point, be wondering how on earth Boyd Crowder can feature in Raylan, since, counter to the events of Justified, Boyd died at the end of Leonard's tale. Leonard offers no explanation for Boyd's miraculous resurrection, although he does slyly address it in a couple of lines from Raylan during a tense standoff: "You thinking about the time I shot you and you rose from the dead? It only happens once in your life." But it's clear throughout Raylan that Justified didn't merely reignite Leonard's interest in the character of Givens; seems the writer fell back in love with much of the cast of Harlan County, not just Boyd but also Ava (it was Leonard's idea to have those two getting together, something that again plays out in Justified season two) and especially Raylan's long-suffering boss, Art Mullen, who features repeatedly in the book.

The final section of Raylan again changes tack, setting Givens on the trail of twenty-three year old Rachel Nevada, alias Jackie Nevada. Jackie is something of a card sharp, but she may also be mixed up in a string of bank robberies, so Raylan heads over to Lexington to get to the bottom of things, in the process partnering up with Marshal Bill Nichols. Nichols has already made an earlier appearance in Raylan, in a scene which is one of the most wryly amusing in the book: 

Nichols said, "You've shot and killed a man?"

"Yes, I have," Raylan said.

"An armed fugitive?"

"More than one," Raylan said.

"It doesn't matter how many, does it?"

"Not a bit," Raylan said. "Once or twice I might've been lucky."

"You get to where you have to pull—"

"Knowing you better shoot to kill," Raylan said.

Nichols gave Raylan a nod.

They knew each other.

Essentially, Nichols is an older version of Raylan, and though Leonard doesn't do much with him in Raylan, one senses the author is setting him up for further appearances down the line. The same goes for Jackie Nevada, with whom Raylan really hits it off – and Graham Yost having stated that he and his fellow writers and producers will be using further bits of Raylan in season three of Justified (and season four, if there is one), I wouldn't be at all surprised if both Jackie and Nichols make it onto our TV screens at some point.

Martin Amis once said of Elmore Leonard that Leonard is "incapable of writing an uninteresting sentence" (Amis also favourably reviewed Riding the Rap, and called Get Shorty – quite correctly in my opinion – "a masterpiece"), and that's as true of Raylan as of any others of Leonard's novels and stories. Due to its origins it's not the most tightly plotted of his books, but in its charmingly meandering way it's as sublime – not to mention purely pleasurable – a reading experience as you could wish for. That's down to Leonard's by-this-juncture utterly effortless storytelling, not to mention his beautifully idiosyncratic and allusive dialogue, the way he can lightly sketch characters who nevertheless fair leap from the page, and the occasional emotional gut-punches he seeds throughout the book.

But Raylan also exerts a strange fascination for the way it came into being. It's been called an "alternate universe" version of Justified in some quarters, but that strikes me as an inadequate explanation for what it actually is: a piece of Elmore Leonard fiction inspired by a television show that was in turn inspired by another piece of Elmore Leonard fiction; art, imitating art, imitating art, the one feeding off the other, feeding off the other, and so on. And if Leonard, suitably inspired by what the makers of Justified have done with the stories he wrote having been inspired by what they'd done with the original stories he wrote, chooses to write yet more Raylan Givens stories, which the makers of Justified then base further stories on...

...well then I think my head might just explode.

Justified: Raylan Givens in Fire in the Hole by Elmore Leonard (Novella / Short Story in When the Women Come Out to Dance)

It's the final post in this short series on FX television show Justified – which starts its second season in the US today – and how it stacks up against the two novels and one novella by Elmore Leonard that inspired it. Praise the Lord and pass the biscuits.

To recap: on Friday I posted an introductory ramble about the show and the stories, and on Monday I posted some thoughts on the first of Leonard's Raylan Givens novels, 1993's Pronto, and how it compares to the season one episode it forms the basis of, Long in the Tooth, as well as some more general comments on how Justified adopts Leonard's distinctive tone. Then yesterday I looked at the second Givens novel, 1995's Riding the Rap, which inspired the episode Fixer, and wittered on about the characters in Leonard's stories – in particular Deputy US Marshal Raylan Givens – and how they translate to the small screen. The point of all this frantic blogging being to demonstrate how Justified is the most faithful screen adaptation of Elmore Leonard's work yet seen – a point that's probably somewhat belaboured by this, er, point, but what the hell. We've come this far, you and I. Might as well see it through to the finish.

Today we turn to the last of Leonard's Givens stories, the novella Fire in the Hole, which was published as part of the 2002 collection When the Women Come Out to Dance. And in terms of plot – which, as I mentioned previously it would be, is the focus of this post – it's the clearest example yet of how faithful Justified is to Leonard's stories. If you've seen the first season pilot, then you'll experience an overwhelming sense of deju vu in reading Fire in the Hole, because Justified's creators basically took the novella and levered it practically unchanged into their debut episode. There's the addition of the opening shootout with Tommy Bucks in Miami, of course – which, you'll recall, originally took place at the end of Pronto – but other than that, the beats are the same.

Fire in the Hole (the novella) begins with unhinged religious Nazi (literally) Boyd Crowder on his mission to blow shit up, in the company of the unfortunate Jared (who meets precisely the same fate he does in the TV show). Cue the explosive dispatch of one questionable church at the hands of Boyd and his grenade launcher – with his accompanying eponymous Nam-inspired holler – and enter Marshal Givens, on secondment at the request of the man in charge of the East Kentucky Special Ops Group, Art Mullen. From there, events progress much as they do in the pilot episode, as Raylan gets reacquainted with Ava, wife of Boyd's brother, Bowman, who she's coincidentally just shot and killed, and confronts Boyd, with whom he mined coal as a young man.

In terms of plot (and a fair bit of the dialogue, too), the transliteration from page to screen is near total. But the thing is, if all Justified's writers had to go on was the novella Fire in the Hole, I doubt we'd be seeing the remarkably faithful TV series we have. Fire in the Hole is a good (short) story, but it's not the whole story. Both Pronto and Riding the Rap have a lot more meat on their bones, particularly in the way they flesh out the character of Raylan. I wrote at length (and how) yesterday about Raylan's character, so I won't go over all of that again now (read the post, if you dare), except to say that the work Leonard put in on Raylan and other characters is what made the pilot of Justified and everything that follows possible. (The mantra for the show's producers was, "What would Elmore do?") So if you're a fan of Justified, and you're considering reading some of Elmore Leonard's source material – something I'd obviously heartily recommend – I wouldn't start with Fire in the Hole. The novella is so slight, you won't get a true sense of Raylan just from that. Best to make your way through Pronto and Riding the Rap first.

That said, Fire in the Hole is definitely worth reading once you've got the two novels under your belt, if only to marvel – as I did – at the way so much of what Leonard wrote ended up on the screen. Take Ava (played by Joelle Carter in Justified). She's slightly older in the novella, but other than that it's the same character in the short story as in the show; the sparks between her and Raylan are as tangible as they are on screen ("I had a crush on you," Ava tells him, "from the time I was twelve years old"). As for Boyd and Raylan, the weird mixture of animosity and kinship is present and correct in the novella. Raylan delivers his warning to Boyd – "You make me pull, I'll put you down" – and Boyd for his part offers Raylan the same deal Raylan offered Tommy Bucks: "Get out of Harlan County by tomorrow noon or I'll come looking for you. That sound fair?" And we all know where that leads. (The novella ends with Raylan's line, "Boyd and I dug coal together.")

Leonard is apparently writing further Raylan stories*, but even if they never see light of day, at least we've got the new season of Justified to enjoy – and all being well, many more to come. As I've (hopefully) made plain over the course of these posts, it's as close to the true Elmore Leonard experience as you're ever likely to get – without reading the books, that is. And if you're thinking of doing that, here are the stories in the order you'd need to read them, along with the Justified episodes they inspired. How's that for service?

Pronto (Delacourte/Viking/Penguin, 1993)
Justified season one, episode four, Long in the Tooth/season one, episode one, Fire in the Hole (Tommy Bucks shootout)

Riding the Rap (Delacourte/Viking/Penguin, 1995)
Justified season one, episode two, Riverbrook (Dale Crowe Junior/Dewey Crowe prison transport)/season one, episode three, Fixer

Fire in the Hole in When the Women Come Out to Dance (William Morrow/Viking/Penguin, 2002)
Justified season one, episode one, Fire in the Hole

* Elmore Leonard did indeed pen further Raylan Givens stories – a whole book's worth, titled, rather prosaically, Raylan – and you can read my review of that book and how it relates to Justified seasons two and three right here.

Justified: Raylan Givens in Riding the Rap by Elmore Leonard

If you've just joined us, this week I'm making my way through the two novels and one short story – actually more of a novella – that together provide the inspiration for the TV show Justified, which begins its second season in the US on Wednesday. Yesterday I was looking at the first of those, 1993's Pronto, as well as at how the tone and feel of Elmore Leonard's writing generally informs Justified. Today, it's the turn of 1995's Riding the Rap, and the focus in this post will be on the characters, in particular the star of the show, Deputy US Marshal Raylan Givens, as portrayed by Timothy Olyphant. And if that strikes you as being potentially a bit worthy and dull, well, I'll do me best to pep things up. 

Riding the Rap picks up the story of Raylan, Miami bookmaker Harry Arno, and Harry's former girlfriend – and now Raylan's girlfriend – Joyce, following the events of Pronto, which climaxed with a shootout between Raylan and gangster Tommy Bucks (the same shootout that kicks off the first series of Justified, in fact). All three are now back in Miami, and Harry is back to his bookmaking ways, although still making noises about jacking it all in. To do that, however, he has to tie up a few loose ends, one of which is Chip Ganz, a middle-aged stoner who owes Harry $16,500. So Harry dispatches skiptracer (and occasional hitman) Bobby Deo to retrieve the money. Bobby, however, soon gets other ideas, and falls in with Chip and Chip's ex-con associate Louis Lewis in hatching a plan to kidnap Harry and hold him hostage (Beirut-style) in order to extract Harry's considerable fortune. But when Joyce, who still cares for Harry, realises he's missing, she asks Raylan to find out what's happened to him.

Now, if all that sounds a little familiar to fans of Justified, that's because Riding the Rap forms the basis of the first season episode Fixer. In that episode, Harry becomes Arnold Pinter, Chip becomes Travis Travers (and earns Raylan's exclamation of disbelief upon hearing his name, instead of in the novel, where Raylan responds to learning Lewis's name with, "You putting me on?"), and Louis and Bobby get blended into a single character, Curtis Mims, but otherwise, the broad strokes remain the same. (There's another, early sequence in Riding the Rap that ends up almost verbatim in a different season one episode, namely the second one, Riverbrook. In the novel, Raylan transports Dale Crowe Junior to prison and nearly gets carjacked; in Riverbrook, he transports his brother, Dewey, and afterwards gets locked in a gas station storeroom by an escaped convict. Much of the choice dialogue transfers from one to the other though, along with Raylan's brutal but effective straightening out of Crowe.)

All this chopping and changing of characters shouldn't detract from the central thrust of my hypothesis, however, which is that Justified is the most faithful interpretation of Leonard's stories yet. Yesterday I noted that that's partly down to the way Justified effectively parlays the tone of Leonard's writing, but a lot of it is also down to those characters, altered though some are. Elmore Leonard's characters are unfailingly appealing, whether they're charming policemen or lowlife criminals, because Leonard takes you inside their heads and shows you events from their perspective. He switches viewpoints constantly, not just from chapter to chapter but multiple times within each chapter. In Riding the Rap, one minute you're seeing things from Raylan's perspective, the next from Chip's, then from Bobby's and so forth. It's how Leonard gets you to relate to each character, no matter how objectionable they may be.

Justified does some of this too, although the spotlight does fall on Raylan more (probably necessarily, the demands of television being what they are). Even so, it's commonplace for episodes to cut away to action that Raylan plays no part in. In Fixer, we spend ample time with Travis and Curtis – and indeed they play out a key scene in the episode, the quick-draw dry run, which in the novel is enacted by Louis and Bobby. Similarly, much of Long in the Tooth (inspired, remember, by Pronto) plays out from Rollie's perspective. And throughout season one of Justified we see events variously from Raylan's ex-wife Winona's point of view, from her current husband Gary's, from Raylan's father's, and most prominently from that of Boyd Crowder, who mined coal alongside Raylan when they were young men (as related in both the final Givens story, 2002's Fire in the Hole, and the show), and who becomes his foil, his nemesis, and eventually his friend.

But Justified doesn't just lift characters straight from Leonard's original stories. It introduces new ones too, and expands on existing ones significantly. With the new characters that showrunner Graham Yost and his writers have created, what's interesting is that they could've easily come from the pages of a Leonard book. Neither Rachel Dupree (Erica Tazel) nor Tim Gutterson (Jacob Pitts) – both fellow marshals – appear in Leonard's stories, but the way they act on screen, they might just as well have. Theirs and Raylan's boss, Art Mullen (Nick Searcy), does appear in the novella Fire in the Hole, but not a hell of a lot. Yost, Searcy and co. stay true to Leonard's conception of the character but build on those bare bones to create a fully rounded, funny, often despairing (at Raylan's actions, that is) man who shines in every scene he's in.

The supporting character who's developed most is, of course, Boyd, played by Walton Goggins. He only appears in the short story Fire in the Hole, but he drives the narrative there, a neo-nazi religious nut who's nevertheless utterly compelling. His story ends in Fire in the Hole, but the way he grows in Justified, becoming an increasingly conflicted and complicated character, would, I think, meet with Elmore Leonard's approval.

As for Raylan, it's almost uncanny how Justified brings him to life. As a massive fan of Deadwood, I already knew that Timothy Olyphant could do pent-up fury, but in Justified the way he channels Raylan is extraordinary. It's a cliche, but it really is as if the character has stepped off the page; the way he speaks, his deceptively laidback attitude, his Southern good manners: it's all there. And it's not even a case of him spouting Leonard's lines, although he does that too. Olyphant perfectly captures Raylan's strange mixture of gentle inquiry and simmering but largely invisible anger, as well as his innate intuitiveness. (The character Reverend Dawn in Riding the Rap, herself a psychic – an occupation Leonard offers no judgement on – senses that Raylan possesses a form of second sight. Joyce probes Raylan on this too, wondering how he could have known Tommy Bucks had a gun – and dooms their relationship as a result.)

The affectation of the Stetson is there in both the novels and the show as well, as much a part of Raylan's character as how he thinks or moves. What Raylan is, is a man out of time. The cowboy hat is an obvious pointer, but there are also the constant references to stand-offs, shootouts, gun thugs, and most of all that seated gunfight with Tommy Bucks, which comes to define Raylan in a lot of people's eyes. More than one character notes that Raylan really belongs in the Old West. This is all made explicit in Riding the Rap (the title of which Raylan repeats in the novel itself; "It's all anybody has to do") and Fixer, with Bobby/Curtis wondering if he can outdraw Raylan, although both Leonard and the makers of Justified subsequently puncture that fantasy through Raylan's confrontation with Bobby and then Bobby/Curtis and Louis/Travis's fast-draw practice session.

There are differences between Raylan in the books and Raylan on the screen. Raylan is divorced in both, but has two sons in the stories and is childless in the show. His father is dead in the novels. But these are minor changes. The essence of Raylan is virtually identical in either medium. It's an entirely faithful translation. And as we'll see in my final post tomorrow, that faithfulness, from character to dialogue to plot, becomes glaringly apparent in the last of Leonard's Givens stories, Fire in the Hole.

Justified: Raylan Givens in Pronto by Elmore Leonard (1993)

As trailed on Friday, this week I'll be posting a series of essays (which might make these missives sound a bit more high-falutin' than they'll actually turn out be, but allow me a little artistic license here) on the two novels and one short story by Elmore Leonard that together provided the inspiration for US TV show Justified, which begins its second season in America on Wednesday. Both the show and the books star Stetson-wearing Deputy US Marshal Raylan Givens (well, as much as Leonard's stories ever star one character...), a Miami-based lawman who's exiled back to the place he grew up, Harlan County, Kentucky following a shooting. That's how the first season of Justified begins, anyway. But as we'll see, the novels take a slightly more circuitous route...

Raylan debuted in the 1993 novel Pronto, so that's where I'll start, even though Justified explicitly states that Raylan's third and final appearance – in the 2002 short story Fire in the Hole – is the basis for the telly show. Pronto, however, sets up the character of Raylan, as well as some of the other characters who appear in the TV show – in an altered form – and provides a fair few of the plotlines too, including the event that kicks off the entire television series and to a large extent defines it. I'll come back to that, but more importantly than any of that, Pronto sets the tone for the TV show, despite it taking place not only not in the American south of Justified but in large part in another country entirely. (I made grandiose claims about the faithfulness of Justified on Friday, but one thing it's not is slavishly faithful.)

It's a feel and a way of storytelling that'll be familiar to fans of Elmore Leonard's work, but it's one that's rarely been successfully translated to the small or large screen. The remarkable thing about Justified is, the creators have managed to tap into that feel. So as well as comparing the events of Pronto to those in Justified, I want to focus in this post on the tone of Leonard's Givens stories, and how the TV show manages to replicate that tone. In the next post, which'll be on the second novel, 1995's Riding the Rap, my plan is to concentrate on the characters – particularly Raylan – and then in the final post, on Fire in the Hole, I'll ponder plot. And in both cases there'll be further reflections on the stories versus the show. We'll see how that all pans out.

The description "consummate storyteller" is often bandied about as regards novelists, but it's usually applied as shorthand without ever considering what it actually means. There are plenty of writers who are skillful at imparting a convincing tale, but there are few who really tell you a story. As in, it's almost as if the author is sitting there with you (maybe beside a campfire...), just spinning you a story, right there and then. Elmore Leonard is one of the few. And it's not an intrusive thing either; Leonard is a constant presence when you read his work, but he never gets in the way of the story he's telling. It's the lapping cadence of his prose, the long stretches of dialogue, the low-key verbal jousting, that incredible ear for how people speak, from criminals to normals to lawmen, that make his books so unlike anyone else's. Leonard captivates you and leads you sashaying through his stories like no other writer I can think of.

The overall effect is to make his stories seem laidback, easygoing, effortless – even though they're evidently anything but – until, of course, you reach those sequences where violence erupts. Then the underlying tension, that buzzing background menace you always knew was there but had been lulled into ignoring by Leonard's lilting prose and engaging characters, explodes. And the thing is, Justified does exactly the same thing. The TV series has the same easygoing attitude, the same authentic yet witty approach to dialogue – sometimes lifted verbatim from the page – and the same sporadic bursts of violence.

Both Pronto and Riding the Rap provide the basic plots for individual episodes in season one of the TV series – as well as a number of other incidents – while Fire in the Hole forms the basis of the debut episode. I'll be looking at that in the final post, but as this post is on Pronto, it's worth outlining the broad strokes of the story and how it fits into the wider Justified arc. Pronto tells the tale of Miami bookmaker Harry Arno, who falls foul of the mob – from whom he's been skimming for years – and absconds to Rapallo in Italy. He's joined by his girlfriend, Joyce, and hunted by a group of thugs headed up by Tommy Bucks, a.k.a. the Zip. He's also pursued by Deputy Marshal Givens, who wants to bring Harry back to the States.

Much of this plot ends up in the season one fourth episode Long in the Tooth. There, Harry becomes dentist and former mob accountant Roland Pike, who years ago embezzled money from his employers. He goes on the run to Mexico, again pursued by the mob and by Raylan. Both Harry and his counterpart Rollie have encountered Raylan before, in both cases when they gave a too-trusting Givens the slip, so there's a history between the characters – almost a friendship – that plays out nicely in the book and the episode. But there are a couple of other notable incidents in the book, one of which occurs in the episode itself, and the other of which opens the entire series of Justified.

The first of those is a shootout on a stretch of dirt road between Raylan and two mobsters. In Pronto it takes place in Italy, while in Long in the Tooth it takes place on the way to Mexico, but a lot of the action and dialogue is identical, right down to the way one of the mobsters tries to get closer to Raylan, telling him "It's okay", while Raylan tells him, "You take one more step, I'll shoot you." The outcome is slightly different, but it's a good example of how scenes are transposed almost wholesale from books to screen.

The second incident comes near the end of Pronto, where Raylan confront Tommy Bucks at a Miami restaurant, having given him twenty-four hours to get out of the county. This scene will reverberate through the next couple of books, but it's also how the first episode of Justified, Fire in the Hole, begins. It unfolds pretty much the same way in both cases, and in Justified, as it does in the novels, it haunts Raylan from here on out; not so much in that he dwells on it – Raylan's not much of a dweller, as we'll see in the next post – more that it comes to define him in the eyes of many of the other characters – and in ours, too – and affects his relationships with them and how they respond to him.

Incidentally, unlike Harry Arno, Tommy Bucks gets to keep his name in the episode in which he (briefly) appears. But Harry does get a second guest-starring role in Justified, this time as a New York bookie called Arnold Pinter, now reluctantly living in Harlan County and acting as an informant (and still taking bets). His main appearance is in the third episode, Fixer – and that in turn was inspired by the second Givens novel, Riding the Rap, which again co-stars Harry. And I'll be examining that episode and that novel – and also Raylan and one or two other characters – in the next post.

Justified: Elmore Leonard's Raylan Givens Novels and Stories; Pronto, Riding the Rap and Fire in the Hole (Featuring a Signed First Edition)

The relationship between novels and their TV or movie adaptations is a subject I've returned to more than once, notably in this missive on Jeff Lindsay's Dexter books and how they compare to the Dexter television show. I was mostly assessing the relative merits of the novels and the show in that post, but I did briefly touch on the matter of the faithfulness of adaptations, if only by way of illustrating how certain adaptations – the movie of Watchmen, say – can be so slavishly faithful to the surface of a text that they overlook the underlying complexities and even the heart of a work. Truly faithful adaptations – those which effectively translate the feel and even the soul (for want of a better word) of a book as well as its plot and characters – are, I think, few and far between, in large part because distilling a 300-page novel down to a one-and-a-half hour film (or even a 400-page graphic novel down to a three-hour film in the case of Watchmen) is nigh on impossible.

But in the last ten years American television has undergone a renaissance, so much so that it is now possible to do justice to a book over multiple episodes of a show. The Sopranos is endlessly cited as being pioneering in the shift to more complex storytelling on television, but alongside it stand Six Feet Under, Mad Men and particularly The Wire, which really did adopt a novelistic approach, each season acting as one long story. (You could make a case for Babylon 5 and the latter seasons of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine being the 1990s forebears of the extended story-arc approach, but good though those shows were, I think you'd struggle to claim they had the depth of The Wire.) TV has become the natural medium for adventurous producers and writers wishing to properly explore storytelling possibilities – and indeed properly adapt a source text (witness the first season of Dexter, for example). Which brings me, in a rather long-winded way, to Justified.

Justified, if you're not familiar with it, is an FX show about a cowboy hat-wearing Deputy US Marshal named Raylan Givens, who, following a shootout at a swanky Miami hotel pool, is excommunicated back to small-town Kentucky, where he grew up. Created by Graham Yost, it stars Timothy Olyphant as Raylan – a character not a million miles from another lawman Olyphant has played, Sheriff Seth Bullock, as essayed in the brilliant Deadwood. Justified is based on an Elmore Leonard short story called Fire in the Hole... at least, that's what the opening credits would have you believe. In fact the 2010 debut season draws from all of the stories Leonard wrote about Givens, which comprise two novels – Pronto and Riding the Rap – and the aforementioned short. Yost and the rest of the production team's mantra in making the show was, "What would Elmore do?" but in reality I doubt they had to repeat that too much: countless sequences and stretches of dialogue are lifted straight from Leonard's stories; his name runs through Justified as if through a stick of rock. It is, without a doubt, one of the most faithful adaptations – in story, character, and tone – of Leonard's or any other writer's work we've yet seen.

I'll be exploring how and why it's so faithful in a series of posts next week on each book (bet you can't wait after that meandering preamble), ahead of the start of Justified's second season on Wednesday in the States. But for now, let's have a look at the UK first editions:

Left to right we have the UK hardback first editions and first printings of Pronto (1993), Riding the Rap (1995) and When the Women Come Out to Dance (2002), all published by Viking/Penguin; that last one is where Fire in the Hole resides. The cover illustrations on the first two are by Mark Taylor and the photograph on When the Women is by Russell Duncan. Now, if you've been paying attention (a big ask, I know, but anyway), you might recall my having blogged about a first edition of Pronto before, which I bought up in London. The copy you can see here isn't that copy, however. This one has something special about it, something that made it irresistible to me:

It's signed by Elmore Leonard. Of course, signed editions of Leonard's books aren't exactly thin on the ground – there are over fifty signed copies of Pronto on AbeBooks alone. But almost all of those are for sale from US dealers, and almost all of the books are US first editions. There's only one other signed UK first edition I've seen online, and that's going for fifty quid, which is way more than I paid for my copy. So in this instance, I reckon buying a second copy of the same (albeit signed) book was... well... justified.

See you next week.

Cecil Court Score: Pronto by Elmore Leonard

Moving on from Charing Cross Road on my seemingly never-ending round-up of the books I bought on my recent jaunt round the bookshops of London, we come to Cecil Court, which runs between Charing Cross Road and St. Martin's Lane. As any British bibliophile will tell you, Cecil Court is second hand book nirvana: a whole street of bookshops catering to all tastes. Being central London it can also be an expensive place to shop, but if you go in armed with a foreknowledge of what a reasonable amount to pay for a particular book is, you can still emerge with, if not a bargain, then at least a fairly priced prize.

Having said all that, this was probably a little overpriced:













A UK hardback first edition of Elmore Leonard's Pronto, published by Viking in 1993, jacket illustration by Mark Taylor. I bought this in what is usually one of the more hideously overpriced shops in Cecil Court – naming no names, regular visitors will probably know the one – but although I know I paid slightly over the odds for this copy, at least, unlike a lot of online sales, I could see the condition it was in (excellent). As for why I wanted it: I've read a few of Leonard's books before and enjoyed them, but this particular one forms the basis for the new(ish) US TV show Justified, which is ace. I don't know if much more than the character of US Marshal Raylan Givens makes it over from the book to the show – in fact I think the first episode owes more to the later Givens-starring short story Fire in the Hole, from Leonard's 2002 collection When the Women Come Out to Dance – but Givens, as played by Timothy Olyphant (brilliant in Deadwood, nearly as brilliant here), is the main reason to watch it, so I'm interested to see how he comes across in the novel.

(UPDATE: I've since reviewed Pronto – and the other Raylan Givens stories – in relation to Justified.)