My brother John was a very diligent reader. Someone told him that if you read ten pages per day, you can read the complete works of Marcel Proust in one year. So he did. And then he kept reading. John got through a lot of books. In 2006, for example, he listed 52 books in his annual book report. I suspect that he cheated and read more than ten pages per day to get though that many books. All of them were rated from one to five plus stars (much to the chagrin of his friend and sparring partner P.G. Springer).

John was very ecumenical in his tastes so he was happy to follow up In Search of Lost Time with Elmore Leonard’s latest “trashy crime novel” (John’s words, not mine). When John died, he left behind a lot of books. His wife, Rosalee, is now downsizing and so  John’s library will also have to shrink. Knowing John’s love of Elmore Leonard and Larry McMurtry, I picked up a stack of their novels from Rosalee to supplement my vow to do more reading offline.

The first Elmore Leonard novel that I’ve finished is The Hot Kid. Leonard’s short story “Fire in the Hole,” set in Harlan County, Kentucky, and featuring U.S. Marshall Raylan Givens, became a hit TV series on FX called Justified. The son of a small town crook, Givens wore a white hat and could outdraw any bad guy who tested him.

The Hot Kid is novel-length and is set in Oklahoma, but has the same archetype. Carlos Webster is a U.S. Marshall wearing a white hat (a Panama hat instead of Stetson) whose laconic declarative sentences (“If I have to pull my weapon, I’ll shoot to kill.”) are instantly recognizable to anyone who has watched Timonthy Olyphant play Givens in Justified (“He drew. I shot him. There were witnesses.”).

Mr. Leonard knows his business and he does it well. His writing is unadorned and direct just like his dialogue. He gets you from A to B to C with a minimum of fuss and feathers.  As a former journalist, I think John enjoyed Leonard’s lack of pretension. Most of this book is snappy dialogue and Leonard is good at crafting it. Maybe too good. The craft is there, but the characters don’t really develop and nothing much is at stake. The bad guys are bad guys so Leonard finds reasons for Webster to shoot them. If you are hoping to find a classic anti-hero like Justified’s Boyd Crowder, you will be disappointed.

John gave The Hot Kid four stars. I don’t really believe in star ratings, but in honor of PG’s arguments with John, I’ll give it three stars. It’s not without its pleasures, but there’s not enough there to push this above average.