Review
From the book jacket:
Carl Webster, the hot kid of the marshals
service, is polite, respects his elders, and
can shoot a man driving away in an Essex at
four hundred yards. Carl works out of the
Tulsa, Oklahoma, federal courthouse during
the 1930s, the period of America's most
notorious bank robbers: Dillinger, Baby Face
Nelson -- those guys.....With tommy guns,
hot cars, speakeasies, cops and robbers, and
a former lawman who believes in vigilante
justice, all played out against the flapper
period of gun molls and Prohibition,
The
Hot Kid is Elmore Leonard -- a true
master -- at his best.
Comment: In his 80th year,
with at least 40 novels and a slew of short stories behind...
Beyond the Book
Elmore
Leonard became interested in
writing in 1935, after reading a
serialization of
All Quiet on
the Western Front in the
Detroit Times. Touched by
the story, he wrote a play based
on the novel for his fifth-grade
classroom, using the desks as
"No-Man's-Land." In 1951
Argosy magazine published
his short story "Trail of the
Apache." Other stories—all
westerns—followed. In 1953 he
published his first novel,
The Bounty Hunters, followed
by four more over the next eight
years. Between 1951 and 1961 he...
