When Xavier says “We got Pirates at home playing baseball for Pittsburgh,” Leonard isn’t dialing it in. Still, Leonard is Leonard, and much of the dialogue and internalized patterns of speech are simply to die for. Nobody, for instance, ever “ran” with the Sloane Rangers, Sloanes not being some London version of the Crips but braying upper-class hoorays who wear Barbour jackets and claim kinship with Princess Di. “Djibouti” feels too researched, and even then, some of the research is off. Leonard thus poses a big thematic question - how the heck do we mediate confused contemporary reality? - while fragmenting and confusing his narrative. Less successfully he frames the bulk of the action within the device of Dora and Xavier reviewing the footage they’ve shot and quizzing each other about what they’ve seen and heard while trying to sort out what their final film might be. A floating bomb, in other words, and the compellingly villainous Jama is looking to do something spectacular for Al Qaeda.Īs usual, Leonard uses dialogue and shifting point of view to forward intricacies and surprises. “He didn’t see being a jihadist made him a traitor any more than selling blow or holding up a liquor store did.” Now Jama has his eye on a hijacked tanker filled with liquefied natural gas. Jama al Amriki or Jama Raisuli, a small-time Miami drug dealer who looked at Islam as the “way to go” (in its several meanings) and has reinvented himself as a terrorist. There’s Texas billionaire Billy Wynn, who seems to be hooked up with the CIA and whose big yacht is crewed by a witty and gorgeous redhead hoping to bag him as a husband. Jackson, a rather riskier and more unusual will they/won’t they.ĭara and Xavier do indeed meet pirates and diplomats and dubious hangers-on, and those trusty stand-bys of unpredictable motives and unknowability of character motor the plot. As casting, the reader tends to think, not J-Lo and Clooney (who famously starred in Steven Soderbergh’s version of “Out of Sight,” the classic Leonard book from the early 1990s) but Angelina Jolie and Morgan Freeman or Samuel L.

They got together on Dara’s film about Hurricane Katrina, and now they’re a team. Xavier is 6 feet 6, age 72, African American, über-cool. “Djibouti,” as the title suggests, is set in the Horn of Africa and tells how Dara Barr, an accomplished documentarian, sets out with her right-hand man, Xavier LeBo, to make a film about Somali pirates hijacking ships in the Gulf of Aden.ĭara is determined, smart, a typically snappy and sexy Leonard heroine who has snagged an Oscar but still looks hot in shorts and a bra.

Elmore Leonard’s latest novel, his 44th, takes him beyond America’s shores, way outside the criminal turfs - Detroit, Miami, Hollywood - he more or less owns, deep into unfamiliar territory that looks both tempting and grabbed-from-the-headlines.

Djibouti by Elmore Leonard