Appreciation …

… ELMORE LEONARD BLUES :: Oxford American - The Southern Magazine of Good Writing. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Instantly, here was race, implied violence, and the abject debunking of the two, all unspooled in a startlingly familiar dialect that was somehow hardly written in dialect. How absurd that this was the first scene of the novel. It was one of the most hilariously accurate depictions of the contemporary South I’d ever encountered, and from the pages of an airport crime novel written by an old white man from Detroit.