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Djibouti: A Novel Hardcover – October 12, 2010
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“Elmore Leonard is in a class of one….The greatest crime writer who ever lived.”
—Dennis Lehane
“Elmore Leonard is our greatest crime novelist…the best in the business.”
—Washington Post
44 novels and still going strong! The incomparable Elmore Leonard—“The reigning King Daddy of crime writers” (Seattle Times)—is back with Djibouti, a gripping, twisting, playful, and always surprising tale of modern-day piracy. Djibouti sparkles with the trademark Leonard style, wit, and crackling dialogue that have made novels like Get Shorty, Out of Sight, and The Hot Kid crime fiction classics. This time Elmore’s taking us to the Horn of Africa for an unforgettable confrontation with con men, crooked diplomats, documentary filmmakers, and pirates…and it’s going to be a wild ride!
- Print length288 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherMariner Books
- Publication dateOctober 12, 2010
- Dimensions6 x 0.97 x 9 inches
- ISBN-100061735175
- ISBN-13978-0061735172
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The author of the critically acclaimed novels Heart-Shaped Box and Horns, Joe Hill is a two-time winner of the Bram Stoker Award and a past recipient of the Ray Bradbury Fellowship. His stories have appeared in a variety of journals and Year's Best collections. Read his guest review of Djibouti:
In the spirit of Elmore Leonard’s 10 Rules for Writing, here are ten reasons why Elmore Leonard rules–a fact that has never been more obvious than in Djibouti, his 48th novel.
10. The babes. The heroine of Djibouti would be one Dara Barr, who has touched down in Africa to make a documentary about the booming piracy business and maybe win herself another Oscar. Dara is as laconic and unflappable as any of Leonard’s finest heroes (see: Hombre, Swag, The Hot Kid), with a creative and curious streak that marks her as special. Throw in an underwear model named Helene looking to make a married man out of a billionaire who likes to play C.I.A. agent, and you’ve got a book in which the gents are waaaaaay overmatched. 9. The bad boys. Creative writing teachers who want to show their students how to draft an unforgettable antagonist ought to tear out chapter 18 and pass it around. That’s where Leonard tells us the story of James Russell, a clever Miami lowlife, who reinvents himself as Jamal Raisuli, al-Queda bomb-thrower… all in 7 pages of breezy, economical characterization. 8. The talk. Plenty has been written about Elmore Leonard’s mastery of dialogue, and I don’t need to rehash it. Why bother, when I could just quote some of it? An elderly terrorist, jailed in The States, gets talking with James Russell:“What is it you hope to become in your life?”
“Famous,” James said. “I been looking at ways.”
“Become a prophet?
“I don’t tell what will happen. I do it.”
7. The walk. Everyone hustles in an Elmore Leonard novel; you can’t stand still and hope to score. From the slums, where life is the only thing cheaper than khat, to the clubs, where it’s easier to find a pirate than out on the open ocean, everyone is on their way up or on their way down… in a hurry.
6. The sound. Leonard famously said that if his sentences sound like writing, he rewrites them, but don’t be fooled. These sentences jump to their own dirty, hothouse jazz rhythm. There isn’t a better stylist anywhere in American letters. 5. The seduction. Dara isn’t just curious about piracy; she spends thirty days on a boat with 73-year-old Xavier LeBo, long enough to fall a little in love with her best friend, and wonder if the old dude can still get it up. Xavier bets her ten-thousand dollars he can. It’s the book’s biggest gamble; trust me, it earns out big. 4. More boom for your buck. A lot of the suspense in Djibouti revolves around a tanker filled with enough liquefied natural gas “to set off an explosion a hundred times bigger than the Hindenburg disaster.” It’s an atom bomb with a rudder and all it needs is a target. 3. The place. Leonard doesn’t beat anyone over the head with his research, but from Djibouti to Eyl to New Orleans (the three backdrops for this story), the details are crisp, unforgettable, and right. You don’t read Djibouti. You live there. 2. The pay-off. Everyone in an Elmore Leonard story wants one, but only the reader is guaranteed to get one, and boy do they, in a final chapter that seems inevitable, yet comes as completely unexpected. 1. The know-how. Let’s get to it. In the fifty-plus years he’s been turning out lean, loose, laid-back thrillers, Elmore Leonard has cast his indelible stamp on American crime fiction, inspired his peers, and spawned a thousand imitators. He’s the kind of guy critics describe as old school, but that’s missing it. Elmore Leonard isn’t old school. He built the school. (Photo of Joe Hill by Shane Leonard)
From Booklist
From the Back Cover
Elmore Leonard, New York Times bestselling author and "the hippest, funniest national treasure in sight" (Washington Post), brings his trademark wit and inimitable style to this twisting, gripping—and sometimes playful—tale of modern-day piracy
Dara Barr, documentary filmmaker, is at the top of her game. She's covered the rape of Bosnian women, neo-Nazi white supremacists, and post-Katrina New Orleans, and has won awards for all three. Now, looking for a bigger challenge, Dara and her right-hand-man, Xavier LeBo, a six-foot-six, seventy-two-year-old African American seafarer, head to Djibouti, on the Horn of Africa, to film modern-day pirates hijacking merchant ships.
They learn soon enough that almost no one in the Middle East is who he seems to be. The most successful pirate, driving his Mercedes around Djibouti, appears to be a good guy, but his pal, a cultured Saudi diplomat, has dubious connections. Billy Wynn, a Texas billionaire, plays mysterious roles as the mood strikes him. He's promised his girlfriend, Helene, a nifty fashion model, that he'll marry her if she doesn't become seasick or bored while circling the world on his yacht. And there's Jama Raisuli, a black al Qaeda terrorist from Miami, who's vowed to blow up something big.
What Dara and Xavier have to decide, besides the best way to stay alive: Should they shoot the action as a documentary or turn it into a Hollywood feature film?
About the Author
Elmore Leonard wrote more than forty books during his long career, including the bestsellers Raylan, Tishomingo Blues, Be Cool, Get Shorty, and Rum Punch, as well as the acclaimed collection When the Women Come Out to Dance, which was a New York Times Notable Book. Many of his books have been made into movies, including Get Shorty and Out of Sight. The short story "Fire in the Hole," and three books, including Raylan, were the basis for the FX hit show Justified. Leonard received the Lifetime Achievement Award from PEN USA and the Grand Master Award from the Mystery Writers of America. He died in 2013.
Product details
- Publisher : Mariner Books; First Edition (October 12, 2010)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 288 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0061735175
- ISBN-13 : 978-0061735172
- Item Weight : 1 pounds
- Dimensions : 6 x 0.97 x 9 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #1,618,249 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #16,111 in Cozy Animal Mysteries
- #59,550 in Suspense Thrillers
- #67,808 in Literary Fiction (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
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About the author
Elmore Leonard wrote forty-five novels and nearly as many western and crime short stories across his highly successful career that spanned more than six decades. Some of his bestsellers include Road Dogs, Up in Honey’s Room, The Hot Kid, Mr. Paradise, Tishomingo Blues, and the critically acclaimed collection of short stories Fire in the Hole. Many of his books have been made into movies, including Get Shorty, Out of Sight, and Rum Punch, which became Quentin Tarantino’s Jackie Brown. Justified, the hit series from FX, is based on Leonard’s character Raylan Givens, who appears in Riding the Rap, Pronto, Raylan and the short story “Fire in the Hole”. He was a recipient of the National Book Foundation’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, the Lifetime Achievement Award from PEN USA, and the Grand Master Award of the Mystery Writers of America. He was known to many as the ‘Dickens of Detroit’ and was a long-time resident of the Detroit area.
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People who approach this novel with certain expectations based on their past brushes with Elmore Leonard's fiction will be disappointed. As the reviews here demonstrate, they have been.
Nonetheless, I enjoyed it. If a graphic novel is storytelling with pictures instead of words, then think of Djibouti as a graphic novel told with words instead of pictures: then you get the ambiance.
Dara Barr the documentarian goes to exotic East Africa to shoot Somali pirates. She reviews her footage with her one-man crew Xavier LeBou, her Nawlins neighbor who's been around the world many times, the hard way. The stuff in the can lacks zip. The real story isn't the guys with guns in the skiffs boarding boats in the Gulf of Aden, but the money men on the other end and in between the ransom drops, and that's not exciting stuff for the screen. But things take on a different cast when Dara learns the subjects of her story have rousted a couple of al Qaeda operatives from a seized natural gas tanker and are turning them in for bounty. The tanker's ransom paid -- and bombs placed on board? -- the floating container of liquid propane is headed off to port in Lake Charles, LA, where, perhaps, bin Laden plans to detonate a firebomb more massive in destructive scope than Hiroshima. Now that would be a story worth filming -- if the ship ever makes its way past Djibouti.
There are colorful characters, including one of the temporarily captured al Qaedas, a black American who started as a gang banger before becoming a Muslim in prison and heading off to join a jihad that matched a vocation to his skills; a Texas billionaire sailing around the world with his fashion model girlfriend, drinking champagne and piecing together intelligence; pirate bosses who want only to get one more big score before retiring in comfort to Europe. They are all mixed together, and if the story doesn't move with the speed and direction of a locomotive (which admittedly it doesn't) it certainly does float along on a decidedly dangerous current.
You might just want to put aside any expectations and come along.
Characters that live and move and breathe.
A great read once again.
One of my favorite Leonard novels is LaBrava, where his protagonist's interior world is shown alternating between current experience and his memories of the female lead's performances in a movie. Leonard perfected a similar technique in Get Shorty.
It seems to me that Leonard's experiences in the film world got the better of him in DjIbouti. The cinematic editing of the novel went to far and became more distracting than expressive.
There are other narrative problems. In one segment Dara, our film-making protagonist, and her assistant Xavier watch video and comment on what they captured. There's a sense in which that's a clever narrative approach: reveal professional and personal relationships in the conversation between two lead characters while they set a necessary piece of narrative background before the reader. But there's a reason you don't see that kind of scene more often in the most involving novels. Characters doing something are inherently more interesting than characters talking about something they did.
Leonard is one of American's great narrative voices and prose stylists. This book simply doesn't show him to best advantage. Nice try, no joy. Odds are the next one will be better.
(Edited Nov. 2011 to fix a sentence fragment and typo. Yikes! Should have caught those in the first place.)
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The dialogue crackles along, it is very believable. It also defines the characters. But for me, as a style it is too sparse. There were times when I wasn't sure what was happening (maybe nothing?) and who was speaking. Certainly one could tell when Xavier, with his extreme street hip-hop (maybe those are the wrong words), was talking, but the others sometimes came close to it, with the same device used throughout (the omission of the word 'if'). And Leonard's sparsity of description and scene-setting sometimes left me baffled. Less is usually more, but in this case it was just too less!
As far as the story is concerned, it is quite clear that the plot comes a poor second to character. As others have observed, pretty much nothing happens for the first thirtd of the book, and what happens thereafter seems, at times, unconvincing. I wasn't compelled to turn the page to find out what happens next.
Leonard's research seemed good (the Sirius Star and Maersk Alabama hijackings), and where he did get down to describing (very much through showing) Djibouti, that seemed pretty convincing.
Maybe this isn't Leonard's best book. I'm giving it 3 stars on the basis 'it's OK'.
But while it is true that some stuff happens in the book, the author appears to have forgotten all about how to build tension, inject excitement, evoke expectation. Even write English, at times, unless the use of "lighted" instead of "lit", a usage you'd associate with infants or non-native speakers, is a deliberate wind-up.
Too much of the action is recounted second hand. Encounters with the pirates we generally see in the cutting room. The anticipated coupling of main characters Dara and Xavier happens off camera. At what I presumed was supposed to be the climax of the action (no spoilers here) I was reminded of Eliot: a whimper, not a bang. I assume it's supposed to be farcical, but it's not set up skilfully enough to be either funny or frightening.
The theme of the book is, of course, highly topical. Piracy off Somalia; the potential for AQ to muscle in on the operation. There are all sorts of reasons why Leonard's project should work, but ultimately it fails on almost all accounts. As the book ends two words came to mind. "So what?" Fittingly, the final three pages are blank.