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11 1 Nostalgia and Authenticity in Elmore Leonard’s Conflicted Heroes Michael Scrivener Some of Elmore Leonard’s fictional heroes like Raymond Cruz (City Primeval 1980 in Leonard 2015) and Terry Dunn (Pagan Babies 2000) have identities fractured by nostalgia and inauthenticity, or what Jean‐Paul Sartre called bad faith (mauvaise foi). That Leonard was familiar with French existentialism, that he minored in philosophy at the University of Detroit and came to intellectual maturity when Sartre, Camus, and existentialism were influ- ential in postwar educated circles, are well established (Rzepka 2013, pp. 39–40). I am not suggesting Leonard was a careful student of Sartre’s work or that there are direct influences on the fiction from philosophical sources. Rather, Leonard’s writing is often shaped by existentialist concerns, such as identity and freedom, the concept of the absurd, and the issue of autonomy and responsibility. People do grow intellectually as they get older, and some experience radical changes, but it is also true that the way people look at the world in their early twenties is both formative and in many respects enduring. I am not the only reader of Leonard’s work who sees strong continuity between his 1950s westerns and his later crime fiction (Noçon 2013, pp. 117–119; Hynes 1991, p. 184). Nostalgia, as I am using the concept, is a form of Sartrean bad faith in that one is lying not only to other people but also to oneself (Sartre 1965, pp. 137–140).COPYRIGHTED The myth of the American WestMATERIAL is an obvious example of cultural nostalgia, a way of avoiding historical reality in order to substitute a set of comforting lies about white supremacy and innocence for a painful and guilt‐laden understanding. Leonard’s westerns, while remaining within the generic boundaries of the western, dismantle this myth with effective- ness and moral insight. A part of the western myth that has carried over into Critical Essays on Elmore Leonard: If it Sounds Like Writing, First Edition. Edited by Charles J. Rzepka. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd. 0004504510.INDD 11 12/23/2019 6:03:46 PM 12 Nostalgia and Authenticity in Elmore Leonard’s Conflicted Heroes the twentieth century and our own era is the idealized figure of the rugged individualist who upholds a chivalric code of honor and masculine strength, protection of women and the weak, physical courage, and sexual power. While Leonard’s fiction, early and late, exposes the delusions and immoral- ity of white supremacy by representing with respect and honesty Hispanic, black, and Native American characters, it also shows how his conflicted white heroes struggle against ideological delusions. Leonard’s protagonists are not just flawed but occupy the role of hero only with considerable awkwardness. Raymond Cruz, who ordinarily follows the professional norms of police work, also models himself after the heroes of Hollywood westerns, and stages a confrontation with the mass murderer Clement Mansell that resembles an old western gunfight. Cruz is playing a mass‐mediated role attached to the nostalgic mythology of frontier justice, and that very artificial structure brings him close to what postwar existen- tialists like Sartre call inauthenticity, the inability to encounter reality with- out myths or lies or false assumptions. By contrast, in Pagan Babies, where Terry Dunn – thief, con man, alcoholic, and anything but sexually absti- nent – also plays the role of Catholic priest in Rwanda during the genocide of 1994, the path to authenticity is, ironically, by way of a highly conven- tional nostalgia. The plot of the novel seems to be moving in a direction that would allow “Father” Dunn to exploit his role and his photographs of orphaned Tutsis to embezzle money for his own use, but the novel con- cludes with Dunn returning to Rwanda and his Tutsi girlfriend Chantelle, eager to help the people as if he were a real priest. If nostalgia made Terry want to please his uncle and mother by playing priest – which helped him avoid an indictment for cigarette smuggling – it also led to his confrontation with reality, the Hutu slaughter of his Tutsi congregation. Dunn’s trauma- tized witnessing of the massacre and daily interaction with the survivors leads in a circuitous way to his authentic identity, someone who is priest‐ like, if not a real priest. The Oklahoma Wildman and the Gunfighter: City Primeval One of Leonard’s most memorable villains is Clement Mansell, the Oklahoma Wildman, a psychopathic killer who is insightful, charismatic, and clever. As Leonard explained in a 2000 interview, the bad guys are more fun to create (Taylor 2000, p. 134), and as one can also see there is a degree of self‐identification with his scoundrels, even the most murderous. Leonard, who as a boy lived briefly in Oklahoma before his family moved to 0004504510.INDD 12 12/23/2019 6:03:47 PM The Oklahoma Wildman and the Gunfighter: City Primeval 13 Detroit when he was eight, reports that as a child he pretended he was one of the famous gangsters of the 1930s like Pretty Boy Floyd and Machine Gun Kelly (Taylor 2000, p. 138). By making Mansell hail from Oklahoma and by making his antagonist Raymond Cruz a Detroiter from the age of 10, Leonard seems to be infusing both characters with his own life experiences. As an author Leonard has an ability to get inside even the most despicable of characters, and as readers experience the world through the feelings and sensations of loathsome characters like Mansell, they understand more and judge less. With City Primeval Leonard presents the reader with spectacu- larly violent crime focalized through the character of a police detective in a city that by the late 1970s was internationally famous as a site of urban blight and decay, black crime, white flight, and postindustrial ruin (Herron 1993). The novel pushes against white fantasies of black criminality by depicting blacks as victims of violence rather than symbols of violent wildness. Detroit is depicted as a kind of wilderness, if by that we mean an absence of civilized order. The novel opens with a report on Judge Alvin B. Gay, who is about to be removed from the bench for gross misconduct and corruption. He threatens to expose powerful people if the state supreme court acts against him (Leonard 2015, pp. 3–7). Judge Gay is modeled after the real Judge James Del Rio who was in fact removed from the bench (Dudar and Laitner 2018) and who played a prominent role in the racial politics of the 1970s in the era of Mayor Coleman A. Young. When in the very first chapter Mansell murders Judge Gay, the novel puts race and violence in the front of the reader’s attention, but not in the way it was usually represented at the time, with whites fearing black violence – unreasonably, because most vic- tims were African American. In the racially polarized atmosphere of the late 1970s, Leonard here decides to approach race a little off center, bracket- ing out the stereotypical divisions by pitting a racist white murderer against an Irish‐Hispanic policeman. Other than Judge Gay, who like most victims of violent crime in Detroit is African American, the black characters play a minor role in the novel. Race rather exists as a powerful imaginary con- struct, especially in the racist rhetoric and racist killings of Mansell. If Leonard’s white readers thought that their preconceptions about urban black violence were going to be reinforced in City Primeval (CP), they must have been disappointed. In the essay Leonard wrote in 1978 for the Detroit News Sunday Magazine, “Impressions of Murder,” the sympathetic treat- ment of the Detroit police is joined with a compassionate if brutally honest depiction of blacks killing other black people (Leonard 2015, pp. 937–948). The novel focuses rather on the phenomenon of wildness, something that in Leonard’s treatment is either racialized as white racism or located in a mythical West. His novel thereby encourages a thoughtful angle on 0004504510.INDD 13 12/23/2019 6:03:47 PM 14 Nostalgia and Authenticity in Elmore Leonard’s Conflicted Heroes urban violence. Raymond Cruz’s love interest is named, not accidentally, Carolyn Wilder, who is Mansell’s defense attorney. Wildness in some form is something shared by the main characters; it is also something at the heart of what Leonard is imagining to be the essence of American rugged individualism. By opening the novel with Judge Gay’s flamboyant lack of professionalism and murder at Mansell’s hands, Leonard dramatizes the relevance of Yeats’s (1956) famous lines in “Second Coming” that “the centre cannot hold” (l. 3), that the rule of law that enables a civilized society to function nonviolently and legitimately has been severely compromised. Cruz himself is both a proud professional who upholds the rule of law and someone who ignores the law for a form of frontier or western or wilderness justice. Mansell, who even before killing Judge Gay has already killed eight people, most of them black (Leonard 2015, p. 80), kills Gay mostly because he’s a black man with a pretty white woman. He has spent only a short time in prison for all his crimes, and he was able to escape punishment for murder on a technicality engineered by his lawyer, Carolyn Wilder. Early in the novel the police know with certainty that Mansell has killed Judge Gay, but they can’t prosecute him for the crime unless they find the murder weapon; even then he might evade conviction if the evidence is equivocal.