Road Dawgs, Crime And The FBI, Pygmy Terrorists [Books]

I’m not sure I’ll ever get over seeing how easy Elmore Leonard makes writing crime novels look. His newest book, Road Dogs, is no exception. In it, he brings back characters from his previous works to serve as his two main characters. They open as inmates who have helped each other while inside, i.e., road dogs. One of them gets out and goes to check on his road dog’s girl. While dealing with her, he’s hounded by a federal agent who is convinced that he’ll return to his nature and rob another bank. Crimes ensue to a great conclusion.

I’ll say right out that I really enjoyed Bryan Burrough’s Public Enemies: America’s Greatest Crime Wive and the Birth of the FBI, 1933-34. But I’m not sure that it lives up to the Burrough’s stated goal–to highlight the transformation of the FBI from near obscurity to a real federal police force. While there is plenty of discussion of J. Edgar Hoover (confirming that he was probably always a petulant and dictatorial menace) and his efforts to greatly elevate the FBI, the story moves mostly by telling the (much sexier) stories of Bonnie and Clyde, Pretty Boy Floyd, the Barker-Karpis Gang, John Dillinger, and Baby Face Nelson and the circumstances that brought them all into a huge crime wave in 1933. Admittedly, it is great reading, but I’m not sure Burrough’s theme is proven where the FBI made so many huge mistakes in trying to apprehend these bandits. Maybe the FBI did a lot of growing up, but it seems just as likely that the criminals were always due for short rides and it was just a question of which police agency would end their sprees. Two lasting items for me: 1) all of these criminals were mortally wounded during their apprehension and 2) the criminals would travel by car from Dallas to Chicago to Atlantic City to Reno to Miami at the drop of a hat.

Either Chuck Palahniuk’s works have become successively more odd, or I’ve moved on. I think it may be a little of both. His latest, Pygmy, is seriously ODD. Pygmy, the narrator, poses as a foreign exchange student but is, in reality, a trained terrorist. He, along with a number of similarly trained cohorts, have descended upon middle America to launch Operation Havoc to bring America down. Written as a series of field reports, Pygmy’s grammar is poor, which makes the reader work hard to understand, but Palahniuk attempts to expose our cultural stupidity in a variety of settings–high school classrooms, science fairs, church, Walmart, etc. I get Palahniuk’s point, but I’m not sure I care anymore to see him make it.