City Primeval: High Noon in Detroit by Elmore Leonard

"I knew it," Clement said.  "You got no higher motive'n I do, you talk about laying things on the table, see where we stand.  You don't set out to uphold the law any more'n I set out to break it.  What happens, we get in a situation like this and then me and you start playing a game.  You try and catch me and I try and keep from getting caught and still make a living.  You follow me?  We're over here in this life playing and we don't give a shit if anybody's watching us or not or if anybody gets hurt.  We got our own rules and words we used and everything else.  You got numbers, all these chicken-fat dicks that'd rather play the game than work; but I got the law to protect me and all I got to do is keep my mouth shut, don't associate with stupid people and there's no way in hell you're gonna lay this one on me... or any of the others."

A judge is killed in his car near the northern border of the city of Detroit.  He's hated by almost everyone, this judge: criminals, lawyers, cops.  He's capricious and cruel, and prone to make suggestive sexual remarks to women.  But the judge's death is a McGuffin, and the mystery of his death is easily solvable; he got into a rage road tiff with a man who just happened to be notorious killer and "Oklahoma wildman" Clement Mansell.  Dedicated cop Raymond Cruz quickly ties Clement to the murder, but Clement's walked on similar charges.  Soon the two men find themselves hurtling toward a violent confrontation, one that threatens not just them but also Clement's beleaguered girlfriend Sandy, the sexy defense attorney Carolyn Wilder, a bunch of Albanian gangsters, and a pot dealer named Sweety.

Driving around Detroit, you can get a sense of how Wild West narratives might operate there with ease.  So much of the city is simply abandoned, rotting in, like civilization has disappeared within local radii, taking with it law and all social convention.  Having once been a much larger city, it gives the distinct impression of a place that's been emptied; you can imagine two men facing each other down a deserted street with a tumbleweed blowing past.  That's essentially what Clement goads Raymond into doing: abandoning the pretense of a law that guides their actions and embracing the "high noon" logic of the Wild West.  Both he and Raymond are caught up, he says, in a "kind of game," but if their conflict will be resolved, both will have to break out of the game's rules.  It's not so different from your standard "We're not so different" speech, but Leonard is cynical enough to suspect that Clement is essentially right.  Raymond fantasizes, over and over, about reaching out and killing Clement in a fit of rage, and the visions seem like a self-fulfilling prophecy.  Now that I think about it, the murdered judge isn't just a victim of narrative expediency; he's actually embraced Clement's belief in operating outside of law.

This is my first Leonard book.  I know he's revered by a lot of people.  His style of anti-writing is often thought of as a kind of antidote to pretentiousness of all kinds, and it does have a kind of muscular propulsion to it.  He's very good at banter and dialogue; Clement's speech, in particular, sparkles with grit.  But in many ways it seemed to take its cues from cheap television.  There are lots of wisecracking secondary cop characters, and a hot defense attorney that just can't help her attraction to Raymond.  The wisecracks are good, and the hot defense attorney is compelling, but I couldn't shake the sense that I was reading a novelization of an especially good episode of NYPD Blue.  But I guess there are worse things a book could aspire to than that.