Coolness. Some have it, some want it, some chase it, but all of us admire it. It is an unquantifiable blending of calmness and competence that has the power to transform us, to make movie stars of actors, to make musical legends of dive-bar strummers, to make presidents of ordinary politicians. It is not too much to say that it orders society, helping to distinguish the leaders from the followers, the charmed from the luckless. Coolness... It's what Mr. Leonard does better than almost anyone else.
Florida may be his jurisdiction, but U.S. Marshal Raylan Givens is all Kentucky. A one-time coal miner who came up hard in a world of unionized strikes and the company gun thugs who broke them, he's traded in his shovel for a badge,Appalachian hatreds for Miami glitz, but his cowboy hat remains, along with a sense of old world justice. Raylan Givens is the product of a long-dead time, a lawman from the untamed West dumped into a settled world of legalities and niceties. But while this clash gets our marshal into hot water, it also earns him respect, fear and enough room to do his job.
All of which come in handy when he is called upon to find and protect Harry Arno, a Miami-area bookie who, after being set up for a fall by elements within the Italian crime family for which he toils, flees to Italy where, 50 years earlier, he'd been stationed as a young American soldier during the Second World War. The aging Arno might've gotten away clean if it weren't for his need to have his girlfriend join him in exile, a decision he may well come to regret. For more than the law has followed Joyce across the Atlantic. Italian gun thugs track her to Italy where they are convinced she will lead them to Arno and the vengeance they require.
Though Pronto does many things well, it lacks the intensity that powered Leonardian classics like Glitz and Get Shorty. The reader is treated to some quaint, Italian scenery, some truly eccentric gangsters, and one ascendent badass in the form of Givens, but the plot is not of a quality to match Mr. Leonard's characters who are unsurprisingly first-rate. Harry Arno's sunsetting into a kind of pathetic elderhood was as interesting as the shortsighted gangster politics which entangled him in a mess not of his own making. But Givens steals the show, upstaging Harry to such an extent that it undermines the drama around which Pronto pivots. There are laughs here, and the trademark Leonardian coolness, but this is not much more than a quick, summer read. (3/5 Stars)
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