Tishomingo Blues: A Novel | 
| Author: Elmore Leonard
Category: Book
List Price: $25.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  70 reviews
Sales Rank: 2121867
Format: Bargain Price
Media: Hardcover
Edition: Cloth-bound
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 320
ASIN: B00006JP0S
Publication Date: January 2002
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Amazon.com
Take a high diver who witnesses a murder from his perch 80 feet above a Mississippi casino. Add a cooler-than-thou con artist from Detroit who's out to take over the Dixie mafia's lucrative Gulf Coast drug business. Throw in a crooked deputy sheriff and an honest state cop. Put them all in costume along with a bunch of other "reenactors" bent on refighting an important Civil War battle, season with plenty of historic detail, and you've got all the classic ingredients of an Elmore Leonard novel--except for drama, suspense, or mystery, that is. This is a rib-tickler in the Carl Hiaasen/Dave Barry tradition rather than the kind of thriller Leonard wrote before Hollywood discovered him. As the author himself explains, his intent was to entertain himself by gathering an odd assortment of characters, building a story as they bump heads, and seeing what happens. And as usual, he carries it off with style, wit, and brio. Readers will be casting the inevitable movie in their heads (Samuel L. Jackson is a lock for Robert, who glides into town in a flashy Jag and gets the action going) as they chuckle their way to the last hilarious page. --Jane Adams
Book Description
Things are going along okay with Dennis' gig at the Tishomingo Lodge & Casino Tunica, Mississippi, "the Casino Capital of the South," until the day he looks down from the high-dive platform and witnesses a mob hit -- Dixie style.Turns out there was a second witness, Robert Taylor from Detroit, who carries a picture of his great-granddaddy's lynching along with a gun in a briefcase and listens to Delta blues while cruising the back roads of Mississippi in his black Jaguar. Robert works for a man from up north who has come to play General Grant in a Civil War battle reenactment, and like Dennis, Robert has a death-defying act of his own: he's sleeping with his boss's wife.Adding further intrigue are the women. Vernice lures Dennis with the whitest thighs he's ever seen. Diane comes to do a story on Dennis and wants to take him to Memphis. still another comes along to give Dennis the surprise of his life. But it's the scams Taylor plays that move the action through all kinds of unexpected twists and turns.Tishomingo Blues rings true with the bestselling author's dead-on dialogue, capturing the flavor and rhythms of the South , and finds him plotting at his unpredictable best.
Download Description
Dennis Lenahan the high diver would tell people that if you put a fifty-cent piece on the floor and looked down at it, that's what the tank looked like from the top of that eighty-foot steel ladder. Dennis is a daredevil and the girls love him. Things are going along okay with his gig at the Tishomingo Lodge & Casino in Tunica, Mississippi, "the Casino Capital of the South," until the day he looks down from the high-dive platform and witnesses a mob hit -- Dixie style. The killer looks up and says, "Let's see you dive." Suddenly, being a daredevil has lost its kick. Turns out there was a second witness, Robert Taylor from Detroit, who carries a picture of his great-granddaddy's lynching along with a gun in a briefcase and listens to Marvin Pontiac while cruising the back roads of Mississippi in his black Jaguar. Robert works for a man from up north who has come to play General Grant in a Civil War battle reenactment, but like Dennis, Robert has a death-defying act of his own: he's sleeping with his boss's wife. Thirty-seven miles from Tunica is the famous "crossroads" where Robert Johnson sold his soul to the devil for a style of funky blues that had never been heard before. Robert Taylor is about to introduce Dennis to a "crossroads" of his own. He has a secret agenda for taking on the Cornbread Cosa Nostra and wants Dennis in on it. To complicate matters are the women. Some are dressed in hoop skirts, and all of them have plans of their own. Vernice lures Dennis with the whitest thighs he's ever seen. Diane comes to do a story on him and wants to take him to Memphis. And still another comes along to give Dennis the surprise of his life. But it's the scams Robert Taylor plays, drawing Dennis into his game, that move the action through all kinds of unexpected twists and turns. Before he knows it, Dennis has agreed to join Robert in the battle reenactment, which leads to a showdown between the bad guys and the really bad guys.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 65 more reviews...
 a study in cool restraint June 24, 2008
A less over-the-top story than many Leonard books, this book is a study in cool, both on the part of the author and the main character. Leonard's rhythm is perfect, creating an effortless, casual tone that any writer knows is truly hard work to pull off. Likewise, his protagonist is cool as ice - he has to be to make those death-defying dives - without being an implausible super-hero. No, Leonard shows just the right level of restraint in his storytelling. Readers looking for another Get Shorty may be disappointed, but those interested in the literary equivalent of a long cool drink will find this a refreshing read.
 The Man Delivers May 12, 2008
That Elmore Leonard has kept writing the same kind of novels for over 40 years is impressive. What's amazing is that, far from losing a step or getting stale, he's finding new ways to deliver the goods.
At one level, 2002's "Tishomingo Blues" is another story about a guy who more or less wanders blindly into the midst of a deadly game. But the setting, the characters, and a surprisingly dense thicket of a plot all conspire to surprise even the most jaded of Dutch's readers, while entertaining most everyone else.
Dennis Lenahan is a professional high diver who routinely plunges from 80 feet in the air into a tub of water that looks more like a half-dollar coin from Lenahan's perspective. When Lenahan executes one such dive after witnessing the murder of his vagrant assistant at a Mississippi casino and resort, it impresses an onlooker named Robert Taylor, a Detroit drug-runner who wants to break into the Dixie Mafia.
Taylor's hardly what you'd call a level customer, but his admiration for Lenahan is genuine. "How many people you know can do what he does?" he asks his lady, Anne.
"He ever saw what you get into he'd die of fright," Anne replies.
Dennis gets a good look when Robert decides to make him his partner, whether Dennis wants to or no. Robert is the kind of guy who talks up his great-grandfather being lynched for talking to a white woman, then makes a point of being a Civil War re-enactor - for the South, riding for Nathan Bedford Forrest, no less. Or at least the guy who is acting the part of Forrest, and who also is connected to the Dixie Mafia in a big way. Watching Robert push buttons like he does is to feel Dennis's dilemma about staying on the right side of the law.
It's the same with Leonard. He sets up a great story with an assortment of odd characters, an offbeat premise, and tangy dialogue. There's even a nice use around the theme of crossroads, as Robert tells Dennis the story of how bluesman Robert Johnson sold his soul to the devil for the gift of music (and never looked back, as Taylor tells it), while the big payoff takes place around the reenactment of Brice's Crossroads, Forrest's greatest victory. The "blues" of the title thus refer both to music and the color uniform Dennis unhappily finds himself in as the bad stuff goes down.
"Tishamingo" fades toward the end a bit as things pan out a bit pat, including a shoehorned romance for Dennis. But the moral ambiguity at the story's center remains firm, providing both the most entertainment and lingering food for thought in this dense but never dull book.
Leonard readers may notice the Indian pitcher Chickasaw Charlie Hoke also appears in Leonard's other 2002 book, "When The Women Come Out To Dance", in the short story bearing his name. Another short from that collection, "Fire In The Hole", details the story of what happened to the Temple of the Cool and Beautiful J.C., a storefront church and marijuana clearinghouse Robert tells Dennis about here.
It's nice catching those connections, especially if you're like me and want to read more Leonard first chance you get.
Brass-Knuckle Cool May 26, 2007
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
[...]
Cool. That's Elmore Leonard. Not kid cereal cool, or Saturday morning cartoon cool, or Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure cool; but Cool. The kind of pure, simple Cool that runs like a knowing thread from blues to bebop to beat, Hank to Johnny to Waylon, quintessentially American Cool.
And if Cool is the man, then Cool must be the man's world: spotting Cool, playing Cool, being Cool enough to get someone to blow their cool. The man's men and women either have it or don't. And woe be those who don't.
Cool backs the action in Tishomingo Blues, Sir Elmore's 37th (count 'em) romp through the mythology of American Crime. It is a mythology he has played a large part in creating.
Foresaking his hometown of Detroit ("Cleveland without the glitter") and his much made of mean Miami streets, Leonard descends into a Delta almost as foreign - and as brutal - as the Rwanda of his brilliant Pagan Babies. The place: Tunica County, Mississippi, a big muddy swim from Arkansas, where poverty is next to Godliness. Or used to be anyway, before the casinos came a callin'. Now that there's gambling in them thar hills things have taken on a whole new meanin' - money. And with the grab bag comes the crooks, kooks and otherwise exploitative characters.
And oh what a terrific blend of high-living low life. In no particular order Tishomingo Blues boasts a weathered - but Cool - carny high diver; a slick, smooth and crafty D-Town hustler (Cool, natch); a poor honest soul made whole by unlucky love and Jenny Crank diet plans; a half-bit ex-con former Sheriff's Deputy and his inbred Dixie Mafia sidekicks; an Outfit chieftain and his two-timing trophy girl; and last but never least, Chickasaw Charlie, a once dim light of big league backlots, who makes a sore point of providing innocuous running commentary from his low rent hustler's perch - a pitching cage.
Then of course there's action, brass-white-knuckled action. Leonard pits the cornbread Cosa Nostra against the breakaway Motor City mobsters on a field reenactment of some obscure Civil War battle and creates another a showdown worthy of Peckinpah.
Come to think of it, it's a wonder Peckinpah never made motion picture magic of Leonard's work - nearly everyone else has. Frankenheimer, Ferrara, Tarentino, and Soderbergh are but a few who struck celluloid gold filming Leonard's more modern shoot 'em ups. While any of the early wild westerns - 3:10 To Yuma (Glenn Ford, 1957), Hombre (Paul Newman, '67) and Joe Kidd (Clint Eastwood, '72) - are the stuff of gunslinger legend.
In Tishomingo Blues, the legend continues, a legend of lives lived hard and fast. In fact, bluesman Robert Taylor (after the "Homes" in Chicago?) talkin' about Roy Scheider doing Bob Fosse in All That Jazz, best sums-up the Leonard legend as thus: "the man living every minute of his life till his very way of living kills him. Beautiful."
In an America where bootstraps conceal pistols and Horatio Alger robs banks, Leonard is the perfect chronicler, the master mindful of the various shades of grey, but determined to keep the fight between black and white. What's cool is that Leonard's patented brand of black and white fight is not a brawl between good and evil but between smart and dumb, an angle that provides hope to bad guys everywhere.
Perhaps this is why Leonard is without question the con's favorite author. Not only does he know cons - how they move, how they think, and especially how they speak - he knows too that not all cons are bad. In other words, he's not afraid to let a bad guy win every once in awhile; providing of course they keep their Cool.
 poorly written, irritatingly lame literature October 16, 2006
0 out of 5 found this review helpful
This book was so bad, I sped thru reading it just to be done with it. It's poorly written, poorly thought out...just garbage basically...in content & form. Hated it! And he gets even worse marks for trying to write about/in a southern dialect because not only was it incorrect, but terribly inconsistent!
Elmore Leonard at his best August 24, 2006
3 out of 4 found this review helpful
Let me start by saying that I am an Elmore Leonard fan. I have read most of his novels. This is one of his best. This novel is filled with the strange characters common to Leonard's repertoire. The writing is crisp and lively as always. I think the plot of this book is one of the most intriguing of all the Elmore Leonard novels. This is a must read.
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