Alaska Employment Law

I wish I could warm up to Elmore Leonard. I’ve tried. I read Get Shorty a few years ago (after the film version), and I thought it was confusing and oddly uninvolving. But everyone likes Elmore Leonard, so I thought I would try yet again with The Hot Kid, which Stephen King effusively reviewed in the Boston Globe when it came out in 2005. Well, no luck. This is the tale of Carlos Webster, U.S. Marshall in the 1920s and 1930s, mostly in oil-rich Oklahoma and Kansas. Carl (as he becomes known) meets his share of hookers, gun molls, bank robbers, pimps, and pulp fiction writers, and properly dispatches all things. Virgil, his father, a pecan farmer with some oil leases on the side, is an excellent fellow. The principal bad guys, Emmett Long and the evil Jack Belmont, are despicable enough. But (and there must be a “but”), to me the tale of The Hot Kid operates at the comic book level only. I suppose it would be a good movie, and I imagine it has been optioned.

I don’t think Elmore Leonard is my cuppa tea, but I am distinctly, and consistently, in the minority. The San Francisco Chronicle’s writer is about the only other reviewer left stone cold by The Hot Kid.