When the Women Come Out to Dance: Stories » (~)

After 30 years writing westerns and crime novels, Elmore Leonard finally started to get somewhere. "Author Discovered After 23 Books," The New York Times said in 1983, referring to his Edgar Award-winning novel LaBrava. Since then, Leonard's tack-sharp dialogue and comic underworld characters have been drawing accolades and an ever growing base of fans.

Elmore Leonard, a literary icon praised by The New York Times Book Review as "the greatest crime writer of our time, perhaps ever," has captured the imagination of millions of readers with his more than three dozen books.

In this short fiction collection, Leonard demonstrates the superb characterizations, dead-on dialogue, vivid atmosphere, and driving plots that have made him a household name — and once again illustrates that the line between the law and the lawbreakers is not as firm as we might think.

Federal marshal Karen Sisco, from the bestselling novel Out of Sight, returns in "Karen Makes Out," once again inadvertently mixing pleasure with business. In "Fire in the Hole," Raylan Givens, last seen in Riding the Rap and Pronto, meets up with an old friend, but they're now on different sides of the law. In the title story, "When the Women Come Out to Dance," Mrs. Mahmood gets more than she bargains for when she conspires with her maid to end her unhappy marriage.

All nine stories are Elmore Leonard at his vivid, hilarious, and unfailingly human best.

The New York Times

Given the compactness of his writing, it's curious that this is only his second collection of short fiction (the first, The Tonto Woman, comprising some of his early western fiction, came out a few years ago). As if to offer proof of the concision that is Leonard's forte, When the Women Come Out to Dance is his most satisfying book since Out of Sight. Where some writers try to squeeze an entire worldview into the narrow gap between the shot glass and the tough-guy grin that are the traditional parameters of hard-boiled fiction, Leonard understands the hard-boiled genre as a sort of no-hoper's vaudeville. As in low comedy, the prime motivators of hard-boiled fiction are greed and lust, and the leading actors are often the butt of the joke. — Charles Taylor