Greetings, fellow meritocrats and egalitarians. I bring some bad news. Nepotism might not be so terrible after all. Early days, I know, but unless his father Elmore publishes a late masterpiece in the next 11 months or so, Peter Leonard's All He Saw Was the Girl is likely the thriller of the year. Even though he thought little of what he saw as his son's overly tricksy books, Kingsley Amis was fond of telling Martin Amis how proud he felt when he saw their novels ranked together on library shelves. Given the zip and tug of his son's work, Elmore Leonard can be prouder still. Whatever it does - and it does an awful lot - All He Saw Was the Girl follows Elmore Leonard's 10 Rules of Writing to the letter.
We are in Rome, the eternal city, and a place eternally etched once more in your mind by Leonard junior's effortlessly focused, eggs-over-easy style: "They were coming out of a bar in Santa Maria di Trastevere, fountain in the middle, church at one end". The descriptive brevity and elision (as well as the dustjacket information about All He Saw Was the Girl's being "A Book by Peter Leonard") might prompt the thought that we are reading a man who has read nothing but screenplays. Certainly Leonard's perpetually present-tense gaze glides like a camera, and at times of high drama there is no missing that he would love to be able to cross-cut back and forth between different scenes of action. Yet the fact that he can't make such second-by-second leaps in time and space on ramps up the tension: yo've told me who the guy with the rifle has in his sights - now tell me what the guy in the sights is going to do about the guy with the rifle…
The plot is a double helix of delight. A bunch of Mafia hangers-on kidnap and American exchange student in the hope of bulging a random from his diplomat father. Trouble is, they've grabbed the wrong student, and not only does McCabe - a handy-with-his-fists former hockey player straight out of Hemingway - make good his escape: he kidnaps the kidnappers' honey-trap bellissima into the bargain. Now he wants the ransom money for himself. Meanwhile, cashiered CIA agent Ray Vanelli is on the trail of brain-dead hood Joey Palermo, who is thought to be hiding in the foothills of Rome. How long can it be before the two stories crash into one another?
The answer is, not long, though the collision is the only predictable thing about Leonard's story. It's not just the slaloms and switchbacks of his plotting that invigorate; it's the constant riffing inventiveness of his almost throwaway characterization, the snap and snarl of his dialogue, the sheer clarity of action - "A fat blonde tourist eating an ice-cream cone walked right into him and got chocolate ice cream on the front of his teal Tommy Bahama Eazy Breezer. 'Why don't you open your fucking eyes,' he said." Why not let Peter Leonard open yours?
- Christopher Bray
Peter Leonard wants to escape from Detroit. Not literally. The 59-year-old American crime novelist actually resides 30 miles northwest in Birmingham, where he lives happily with his wife and four kids. Instead, Leonard wants to flee Michigan State's 'Motor City' fictionally. That's because his father is Elmore Leonard, just about the most famous living crime writer and the author who's been dubbed the 'Dickens of Detroit'. So with his third novel, All He Saw Saw the Girl, Leonard Jr has set one of its twin narratives in Detroit and the second and more substantial storyline on the other side of the Atlantic, in Rome.
'I am trying to distance myself from my father,' says Peter Leonard. 'I've been accused of telling his kind of story. The Italian story made perfect sense, because I spent a year living in Rome as a student. The beginning of the book is based on an actual event. I got drunk one night and a buddy and I stole a taxi and took it for a ride across town to another bar. I was arrested and spent a week in jail, and while I was there I looked out of the cell, through the barred window into the exercise yard and thought: "This is too good. I've gotta use this someday". And 30 years later I thought of a story.'
Leonard actually wanted to write from a young age. After he graduated from college he penned a story, gave the six pages of it to his father and received three pages of notes back, which included the less-than-inspiring comment: 'Your characters are like strips of leather drying in the sun'. After that he took up writing of a different kind at an advertising agency, which was still following in his father's footsteps given that Leonard Sr was an ad man for Chevrolet.
Eventually, he set up his own advertising company, but despite it being successful enough to raise a family on the proceeds, Leonard eventually wanted out. He turned once again to writing fiction, this time with more luck, and in 2008 published his first novel, Quiver. That book, and a follow-up, Trust Me, were critical and commercial successes, and the three decades on from that early critical drubbing, Leonard's father gave his son his professional blessing.
Nevertheless, having the Dickens of Detroit for a dad has been a mixed blessing. 'Elmore has influenced me, and continues to influence me,' he says. 'A lot of it has to do with style, letting the characters tell the story, don't over-write, etc. I saw him just last night and said, "I like your characters, they have attitude". But it has been difficult being related to Elmore, because of the inevitable comparisons. But that's life: I got into my father's profession and I take the consequences.'
Meanwhile, Leonard is continuing to buck his father's trend and move beyond Michigan borders with his next book. 'It's about a Holocaust survivor whose daughter is killed in Washington DC by a German diplomat. So that's something new. Now my writing is beginning to feel familiar to me as though I've now found my voice.'
- list.co.uk
"Peter Leonard gets better and better. Three books in, and he's already ahead of the chasing pack of contenders for the crown worn for so long by his father, Elmore, the undisputed champ of hip thriller writers. With Don Winslow coming a cropper recently with the disappointing Savages, and nothing from Laurence Shames in nearly a decade, Sean Doolittle - still relatively unknown here, but highly regarded by George Pelacanos and Dennis Lehane - is right now probably Leonard's only competition in an increasingly outstripped field.
All He Saw Was The Girl is set in Rome. A gang of yahoos with vague ties with the 'Ndrangheta, the Calabrian mafia, specialists, as we're informed, in "kidnapping, extortion, guns and drugs," abduct a US exchange student, rubbing their hands in anticipation of the big pay day from the kid's moneybags father. The twist is, they've got the wrong guy, a friend of the rich kids, and the wrong guy is someone you wouldn't want to mess with.
His name is McCabe, blue-collar Detroit by upbringing, a former ice hockey dude, more than handy in a scrap and various other tight corners, and it's bad news, nothing but, for his kidnappers when he decides that, hey, maybe he'll relieve them of the random money the want in exchange for his life. In a parallel plot, burned-out Secret Service agent Ray Pope's on his way to Italy, looking for his wife who's run off with a Detroit hood, the hugely comical and homicidally unhinged "Swingin''' Joey Palermo. It's not long before the two narrative strands collide, at which point things become really complicated, to the readers increasing entertainment.
The book has all the hallmarks of vintage Elmore. There's the hot-plate sizzle of brilliantly written dialogue, succinct description, all you need to know about where you are in a few telling sentences, no fat at all on these words, crisp characterization that tells you everything about the book's colorful cast and brings then to vivid actuality in a few neat strokes and an impeccable eye for detail. Tremendous stuff, really."
Allan Jones - Uncut Magazine
Peter Leonard¹s third novel is just as fast faced and action packed as the first two and what we¹ve come to expect by this new author. All He Saw Was The Girl starts out in Rome in a stolen taxi, then cuts over to the story of a mobster in Detroit. From here on in the story flows back and forward between the two cities.
Leonard flicks between the two intertwined story arc with a masterful ease, making the competing story lines equally as interesting. The way Leonard writes is so fluent that I¹d finished the book in such a short amount of time and now can¹t wait for his next book.
- The Fringe
Peter Leonard's third novel confirms the enormous promise of its predecessors and shows that he is not simply an echo chamber to his illustrious father. While he has Elmore's wit and skill at writing razor sharp dialogue, he has highly individual qualities that set him apart.
The novel is rooted in personal experience. When a student in Rome, Leonard ended a drinking spree by getting into a taxi. As the vehicle was empty, his friend jumped behind the driving wheel and took the taxi on a wild dash through the streets before crashing it. Both students landed in gaol.
From this incident, Leonard weaves a captivating yarn in which the pair become involved with a violent gang hatching a kidnap plot. Abducting the wrong student is only one of their mistakes. The beautiful Italian girl who helps them has a change of heart that introduces more chaos. Back in Detroit, meanwhile, Ray Vanelli, a secret service agent, discovers that his wife has been having an affair with Joey Palermo, a Mafia enforcer. When Palermo flees to Rome to escape the enraged husband, Vanelli goes after him.
The two stories coalesce beautifully and the suspense is intensified. A terrific read shot through with humour, genuinely scary moments and jaw-dropping surprises.
- Keith Miles (aka Edward Miles)
