June 7, 14.20pm
In the middle of last year I picked up a book called Land Of The Blind, by a Washington state-based writer called Jess Walter. The book was on a shelf in my home, so I can only believe that I must have bought it at some point, although I recall neither when nor why (it might have been the Spokane location that attracted me).
And I enjoyed the book. Some of the passages about the teen anxieties of puberty were very interesting, and a little nostalgic - the introduction of "Dana Brett's rack" was particularly memorable - and as a mystery novel it was cleverly-plotted.
It was pretty good, if nothing special, I thought. Certainly nothing in it hinted that Jess Walter might be the second coming of Elmore Leonard.
But now that I've read Citizen Vince - the 2005 novel that was a panic buy in a railway station a week ago - I wonder if he just might be.
Citizen Vince is the tale of small-time, edge-of-the-mob criminal Vince Camden, who has been relocated from New Jersey to Spokane as part of the Witness Protection Programme after testifying against a mobster he has run up debts with. Vince has settled into a similar lifestyle as he enjoyed in Jersey - a little credit card fraud, a little drug dealing - but given his existence a gloss of respectability with a day job frying donuts.
The narrative is set against the backdrop of the 1980 Carter/Reagan presidential race in which Vince - his felonies set aside by the Feds - has the first vote of his law-flouting life. But just as he tries to adapt to the responsibilities of citizenship his supposedly secret existence is disturbed by the arrival of a mob hitman, and Vince is forced to face up to his past.
Citizen Vince has a cast of colourful characters that will apeal directly to Leonard fans: small time made men, hookers with hearts, put upon case workers, dysfunctional teenagers deluded politicos. It is smart, clever, laugh-out-loud funny in some parts and pseudo-philosophical in others.
In Vince himself it has a cleverly-constructed complicated hero. It's impossible not to like him, to forgive him his trespasses and enjoy his jounrney towards honesty and clean living.
It is a fabulous, fabulous book, and I cannot recommend it highly enough.