ABSTRACT
Elmore Leonard's protagonists challenge the stereotype, in part because they draw upon a less troubled history of veteran readjustment and rehabilitation going back to World War II, in which Leonard fought, but also because their Odyssean typology unfits them for inclusion among their pop-cultural counterparts, though forced to resort to violence. The near decade between 1960, when Leonard quit his day job in advertising to devote himself full time to writing, and 1969, when his first crime novel The Big Bounce was published, saw the exponential growth of America's investment of blood and money in Vietnam, and the incipient decline of public support for the war. Leonard, too, had a hard lesson to learn in holding down his new job as a writer of crime fiction. In a farmhouse standoff that is reminiscent of Leonard's recurrent fifth-grade daydream, the betrayed and outnumbered Martin uses the dynamiting know-how he acquired in the Army to blow his opponents to kingdom come.
