Freaky Deaky
By Elmore Leonard
Arbor House, 352 pages, $17.95
The good news emanating from Detroit this month isn`t coming from General Motors or Tiger Stadium.
No, the Japanese aren`t abandoning automobiles to concentrate on lawn mowers and VCRs. And, sorry, slugger Kirk Gibson isn`t coming back from Los Angeles to play left field for the Hometown Nine.
The cheers are for Elmore Leonard, who`s bringing it all back home to Motown. After an extended prose tour of the South, New Jersey and the Caribbean, the nation`s pre-eminent writer of crime fiction is back in Detroit with ”Freaky Deaky,” a wonderfully wicked tale about a handful of overripe
`60s radicals and a pit bull disguised as a cop.
It has been argued that Leonard`s scenarios should never have left Michigan in the first place, that such sun-tanned works as ”Cat Chaser,”
”La Brava,” ”Glitz” and ”Bandits” are mere travelogues compared to
”City Primeval,” ”Swag” and ”Unknown Man No. 89.” I wouldn`t go nearly that far, but I`m happy that the center of his current universe is closer to police headquarters at 1300 Beaubien than, say, a condo in Ft. Lauderdale.
Setting the action in Detroit and its suburbs allows Leonard to concentrate on the two things he`s always done best: creating fascinating characters and giving them interesting things to say. He doesn`t spend a lot of time describing the city-we can well imagine what it looks like-so the reader is pulled into the mix a lot faster than in his most recent novels.
(Last year`s ”Touch,” a terrific yarn about religion, miracles and exploitation, was written in 1977, and it, too, was set in and around Detroit.) ”Freaky Deaky” is a no-frills sprint in a vintage Motor City muscle car. Once you climb behind the wheel of this baby, get ready for a nonstop, pedal-to-the-metal romp.
”All these ones here,” says a detective, when describing suspects in the execution, by bomb, of a drug dealer, ”they got their game going, living on the edge. . . . We get a feel for that kind of action, huh? Know when to step outside, so to speak, let them do their own kind of freaky deaky. You remember that sexy dance? Was about 10 years ago. Man, we had people shooting each other over it-two homicides I know of come to mind. You freaky deak with somebody else`s woman you could get seriously hurt.”
”Or you could get lucky,” responds Chris Mankowski, the cop who sorts out the pieces of two seemingly unrelated crimes and powers the novel to its explosive ending.
Skip and Robin are former SDSers at the University of Michigan who spent time in prison after they were jerked up from the underground. Skip now does special-effects work for movie companies, while Robin is a writer of romance fiction. He maintains a hearty appetite for LSD and TNT, and she`ll do almost anything for a quick buck.
After a romantic reunion, they end up freaky deaking with Woody, the meal ticket of a former Black Panther. Woody`s a corpulent millionaire who once drove Ann Arbor hippies to rock festivals in his limousine but now spends much of his time floating around his pool in a alcohol-induced haze listening to show tunes.
Donnell, the retired militant, arranged long ago for Woody to be mugged, just so he could rescue him and secure a comfortable spot on the fat man`s payroll. He doesn`t like it one bit that Skip and Robin are nosing around with their bombs and extortion demands.
Mankowski, who`s between assignments on the force-the bomb squad and sex crimes unit-gets involved when his investigation into the drug dealer`s death overlaps with the probe of a rape committed by Woody. The fat man`s lawyer, of course, has beaucoup political connections and has Mankowski suspended before he can solve either crime. Need I mention that, in the meantime, the cop falls for the rape victim?
Like many of Leonard`s quietly tough male protagonists, Mankowski doesn`t need much time to catch the general drift of the scam. The fun comes watching him tie the creeps into knots, while he also figures out a way to return to the force and straighten out his love life.
”Freaky Deaky” reminded me of ”52 Pickup”-the novel and the movie, co-scripted by Leonard-and ”Switch,” in the way the conmen eventually get set up and conned themselves. These violent, but hapless villains are drawn with humor and a sense of the absurd, and they help make this book, like Leonard`s other works, a joy and a breeze to read.
Welcome home, Dutch.
