“PAGAN BABIES” BY ELMORE LEONARD
DELACORTE PRESS 224 PAGES, $24.95
Father Terry Dunn, the cool and watchful hero of Elmore Leonard’s latest crime caper, is not like other priests, and not just because he celebrates mass only twice a year in the Rwandan village where he lives.
The local military officer, puzzling over the mystery of this halfhearted missionary, observes, “He doesn’t hold himself above you, with the answer to everything, all of life’s problems.”
The riddle of Dunn’s priesthood is soon solved, but a more important question will take the rest of “Pagan Babies” to answer: Is he or isn’t he on the side of the angels?
And how about Debbie, the ex-con turned standup comic, with whom Dunn teams up to collect money for the Little Orphans of Rwanda Fund, once he comes home to Detroit.
Leonard doesn’t hold himself above us either, writing happily (this is his 36th novel) in a genre he sometimes seems too good for.
But he diverts the reader with something beyond the usual crime novel plot: His characters don’t know if they’re good or bad. They only find out as the story moves along.
And it’s a pretty good story. Leonard takes a risk, starting out in post-genocide Rwanda, but his eye for detail and gift for boiling things down to essentials keep him from seeming exploitive.
Back in Detroit, the subplots multiply, as Debbie hopes to con her con-artist ex out of the money he stole from her, and the double-crosses start doubling up. This is Leonard at his near best.
There are quibbles. Debbie, like a lot of the author’s female leads, can be too cute. Minor characters could stand some filling in, and the constant need to sound “street” wears the taut prose thin in places.
But if Leonard offers no answers to life’s problems, he knows how to take our minds off them.