Up In Honey's Room by Elmore Leonard

Honey's Room is another recommendation by the chief Knuckmeister, Charlie Stella. His last suggestions have been winners so I had no doubt this would be fun, too.

Our tale takes place in the waning days of WWII in Detroit. Honey has married the most boring man on earth, Walter Schoen-a German ex-pat, but she walks out after a year. Dull, dull, dull. The most fun they have is when he needs to pass gas, he tells Honey "Pull my finger" and then she falls down like she's been shot. Hell, he doesn't even know she's not a natural blond cuz he only bumps uglis in the dark.

Honey goes to work in a downtown department store selling better dresses and Walter continues on as a butcher. Problem is he is a dead ringer from Himmler and thinks he is a long lost twin, so he harbors some sentiment to the German cause. So does Vera and her cross-dressing Ukrainian lover Bo. We also meet Jurgen (SS tank commander from the Afrika Korps) and Otto who are POWs recently escaped from a camp in Oklahoma who have found their way to Detroit, closely followed by Carl, a US Marshall of some notoriety.

Vera is a low rent German spy and Bo has a violent past, slicing his way through a POW camp earlier in the war and with Walter has a little spy ring set up. An ObGyn and a Klansman also figure in this little circle of spies who really seem to learn very little of substance to send back to the Fatherland. This motley group circles each other as Honey weighs taking off her clothes (something she does rather frequently) for Jurgen or Carl. Meanwhile, Carl is going through Honey to find Jurgen who wants to be a professional bull rider.

But Walter has bigger ideas. He wants to assassinate FDR as a gift for der Furher's birthday. Problem is, FDR has his stroke the day before the intended strike, so Walter tries to let everybody assume he somehow did it by shrugging "you believe what you want to believe."

Anyway, Vera and Bo are worried that the FBI are closing in and hatch a plan to kill them all. First Bo takes out the bigot and the doc (the doc's wife is collateral damage). Then the rest are all "Up in Honey's Room" when Bo enters in his finest dress carrying a submachine gun in an umbrella. He taunts them a bit, makes them all strip and sit on the couch. In an earlier scene, Honey and Jurgen fiddled with a Luger that she stuffed in between the couch cushions. She moves Carl's hand to the pistol and . . .

What happened next actually surprised me a bit. It may surprise you too, or you may see it coming. It doesn't matter cuz it's all fun getting to this potential massacre scene. Needless to say, Vera is a survivor, Jurgen is suspected to be in Cleveland or with Otto (who married a nice Jewish girl-go figure), Carl goes back to Oklahoma and his Marine machine gun instructor wife . . . and Honey? When Carl tells this tale to his wife, will he leave in the part about Honey traipsing around naked in high heels?

This was too cool. Stella says that Higgins and Leonard are masters of dialogue and the 1940s rat-a-tat-tat dialogue shows us just who these characters are. The Germans are trying to learn and use American slang, sometimes not too successfully, Honey is working out who to spend her future with, Carl is trying like hell to stay faithful and Jugen just wants to be a cowboy. I was unaware of Leonard's body of work and was surprised to see he had written the books that became the movies Get Shorty (IMHO, Travolta's Chili Palmer is one of the coolest dudes on film), Hombre (Newman), Mr. Majestyk (Bronson), Valdez is Coming (Bert Lancaster), 52 Pickup (Roy Scheider), 3:10 to Yuma, etc. etc. etc. So, for a good time, I've got the feeling you can't go wrong with most any Leonard story.

East Coast Don