Out of Sight by Elmore Leonard

I promise the next post will NOT be a book by Elmore Leonard.

I was reading Road Dogs when I was traveling to Philadelphia. At the RDU airport, I stopped in (as I always do) at the used book store for titles or authors I can't find in the library or stores. The main character in Road Dogs is Jack Foley who the jacket blurb said was last seen in Out of Sight, which I found at the used book store and started reading it in Philly once I finished Road Dogs.

Smart guy that I am, it took me maybe 10 pages to realize that this is the basis of the George Clooney-Jennifer Lopez movie of the same name. Having seen the movie, I still plugged away.

A group of hispanic inmates are breaking out of the Florida prison where Jack now finds himself. He is invited to go, but declines, then hatches his own plan with the help of a friend, through his ex-wife, to meet him outside the prison fence. Problem is US Marshall Karen Sisco is serving some legal papers to the prison at just the wrong (or right, depending on your viewpoint) time and ends up being stuffed in the car trunk with Foley during the escape. When they get to some rendezvous point they are separated, but not before having 'a moment' in the trunk.

So Jack and Karen go their ways, but both continue to think about that 'moment' in the trunk. The tale wanders around a bit as Karen and Jack sort of circle each other like a couple jr. high kids at a dance until both end up in Detroit. Jack and cohorts get connected with another ex-con now a low life fight promotor and robber. When Jack finds out Karen is also in Detroit, he conspires to meet up with her in her swank hotel bar and one thing leads to another...you get the picture.

Now, this group of low lifes plan to rob a stock broker ex-con of his running around money stored in his mansion. The plan goes bad and Jack takes out a couple of the idiots only to have Karen shoot him in the leg. He ends up back in prison and she back on the job in Florida, bujt both wonder about what might have been.

Now I saw the movie and pictured Clooney and Lopez delivering all the lines in the book. But I really can't say I remember the 1998 movie all that well. I remember the scene in the trunk, at the hotel bar, and faintly remember the ending where she shoots him, but I will need to watch it again for a fuller appreciation of the film version of this terrific, and a bit lighthearted, tale. It's supposed to be the movie that set the course for a number of Clooney's characters since.

While not wanting to sound redundant, this book has all the trapping of Leonard's work...terrific dialogue, a sparse, bare-bones narrative mostly devoid of long 'scene setting' descriptions. We know the characters, not necessarily the scene. Honestly thought I'd be sort of bored reading the book after having seen the movie, but had I believed that, I'd have missed out on one of my favorite Leonard stories so far.

East Coast Don