Critical Essay | Critical Review by Charles Champlin

SOURCE: "Leonard Cocks a Snook at Hollywood," in Los Angeles Times Book Review, July 29, 1990, p. 9.

In the following review, Champlin offers a favorable assessment of Get Shorty.

Long before he earned his present eminence for his swift and sharp-tongued contemporary mysteries, Elmore Leonard knew Hollywood and Hollywood knew him, initially as a writer of Westerns. Among the movies based on his novels were The Moonshine War and Mr. Majestyk (both of which he also scripted), the Martin Ritt/Paul Newman Hombre, Valdez Is Coming and 3:10 to Yuma.

Leonard's impressions of Hollywood from the early '60s forward were evidently indelible and amused, and he has drawn upon them for his new novel, Get Shorty, a book that Raymond Chandler and Nathanael West might have written if they had decided to join forces (an engrossing idea if there ever was one).

Goodness does not abound in Get Shorty; it...
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