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Saturday, January 11, 2014

Pronto: A Novel by Elmore Leonard | LibraryThing

Pronto: A Novel by Elmore Leonard | LibraryThing:

An incongruous story at best.  A modern cowboy wanna-be, U.S. Marshal Raylan Givens, has taken off for Italy in pursuit of Harry who is being sought by a number of felons who want to do him harm. 

I started reading the Raylan Givens series after reading an interview with Elmore Leonard who remarked that the writing and character of Givens in the TV series was spot-on.  I watched a couple of the "Justified", liked them, and then have been reading the Givens books. Generally, they are pretty good, except for the idea of shoot-em-up happy U.S. Marshals wandering around.  

But Raylan in Italy, the quasi-hick from Kentucky, just didn't make it. Italy was irrelevant (and Italy should *never* be irrelevant.  Had it been set in Montana, it would have worked better. 

It was certainly interesting to see how they pulled isolated incidents from the books and melded them into a coherent set of episodes on the TV show.  The early scene in the pilot for example where Givens gives the bad guy 24 hours to leave town, is from Pronto, and Boyd's use of the rocket to wipe out the drug-dealing church, just after yelling "fire in the hole," is from the eponymous short story. 

Givens is an interesting invention, although I kept looking around for the horses.

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