Rating: 
Summary: "So These Two Guards at the Death Camp are eating Lunch."
Review: Mr. Leonard has a rare gift for dialogue. Everyone knows this. This is his strength. Here we are introduced to Fr. Terry Dunn, a missionary Catholic priest in Rwanda. Dunn drinks Johnny Walker and sleeps with his housemaid. I had visions of Humphrey Bogart and an obscure old movie with Spencer Tracy called "The Devil at 4 O'Clock." 'I have lost my faith but I'll help them keep theirs'.We are told that after 5 years, missionary priests are permitted to go home to "refresh" and to raise money for the missions. Terry goes home to Michigan and does a lot of refreshing with the funny, felonious Debbie Dewey. We also learn that Father Terry left Detroit shortly before he was about to be arrested following a Federal indictment. And then we realize that raising money for the Rwandan missions might be no more than a ploy and a scam. Halfway through the book we come to the conclusion that not only have we no "connection" with Terry or Debbie, they kind of disgust us. The conversations with the Mutt, Johnny Pajonny and Randy are vintage Leonard and worth the price of admission. Or at least the price of the paperback. And the cross examination of Father Dunn by his sister-in-law, Mary Pat, is worthy of the belief that most hard working mothers raising teenage daughters are tough enough to go 5 or 6 rounds with a solid middleweight. My problem is with Rwanda as the back drop for sex, drugs and rock 'n roll. And a lot of humor. We don't know much about the Rwandan genocide and if we are to believe Bernard Goldberg in "Bias," the reason we don't is because the big three networks don't see it as a money making story. Come on. You know about the Irish Protestants and Catholics, right? And certainly, could we learn anymore about Palestine and Israel? Kosevo? Yeah. That was pretty well covered. We're making movies about it now. Must be important. But did you know that in Rwanda, one million natives were slaughtered, in many instances by machetes, in 90 days! I don't know why we don't know more about it. I mean to say why we know so much about certain stories but virtually none about this one. Some pundits suggest the very unpleasant possibility that there is a racial undertone here. Certainly this is not the place to discuss that. But for "Pagan Babies," I found it very disturbing.
Rating: 
Summary: Good plot with social commentary
Review: I've read a good handful of Elmore Leonard books, and liked just about all of them. While it doesn't necessarily make it a better novel, in how many sources have you read about the situation in Rwanda, where half a million people have been massacred, and thousands are now sitting in jail awaiting trial for these crimes? If this had happened in a Caucasian country, it would have absorbed our lives for generations. This is the background for this novel. A priest (or is he a priest), in Rwanda is completing a five-year stint in a mssion here. He doesn't have much to do in his church because it's filled with massacred bodies that he is forbidden to remove. When he hears another massacre is looming, he takes action into his own hands before returning to the U.S. It's here where the story brings in all of your standard Leonard characters, and a very good plot that ties back into Rwanda. Terri works on a plan to get some money for these poor people. But is it by legal means? Is he going to get the money? And most important, is he going to use the money for what he says he's going to? These questions linger throughout the novel, and we really don't know which direction it's going to take until the end. The characters we meet in Detroit range from the priest's relatives, who are pretty sure something crooked is going on to flat-out cold-blooded killers, which includes some of the "good guys". The fact that nobody in this story seems to be completely clean is one of the reasons it's such good reading.
Rating:
Summary: Mediocre book
Review: This was my first attmept at Elmore Leonard. I have read Carl Hiaasen, and John Sanford and was told that if I liked Hiaasen then I HAD to read Leonard. So I picked up his latest in paperback, Pagan Babies, for a long flight to Europe and back. Please tell me that this isn't the quintessential Elmore Leonard book! If so, then I am highly dissappointed. The book wasn't bad, but it wasn't that good either. There was no zing, no suspense, no real humor. The characters of Terry Dunn and Debbie were not ones that I felt connections with, or even really cared to read more about. Some of the smaller characters were more enjoyable: Randy, The Mutt, and Johnny Pajonny, but it ends there. The book coasted along at a relaxed, but easy pace. I will try another Leonard book (someday) before giving up on him. Hopefully, I will have better luck.
Rating:
Summary: Lots of twists
Review: "He pulled Chantelle's pistol out of his cassock and shot Bernard, shattering the bottle he held against his chest. He shot the one next to Bernard trying to get up, caught between the wall and the plywood table. He shot the one in the chair tilted against the wall. And shot the one by the back hall as this one brought a machete out of his belt and shot him again as the blade showed a glint of light from the open door."
The preceding is a surprising early twist in Leonard's rather unconventional novel PAGAN BABIES. Murder scenes aren't too unusual in Leonard's novels, but they are when the shooter is a Catholic priest (Or is he?) Leonard's novel begins in Rawanda, where Father Terry Dunn's church has become a tomb for "forty-seven bodies turned to leather and stains." None of his parishioners will enter the church, so Father Terry hears confessions in the yard of the rectory. This is where Bernard confesses his plans to kill more people.
Father Terry is living in sin with his one-armed housekeeper, Chantelle Nyamwase. He's given up saying mass for the most part. He drinks a lot of Johnny Walker Red. Now, is this a case of priestly angst or is something else going on here? Leonard keeps the reader guessing well into the book.
Terry escapes to Detroit, where he hooks up with Debbie Dewey, stand-up-comic in training, who's just done three years in prison for running over her ex-husband with a Buick Riviera. She wants the $67,000 he conned her out of, plus interest. By now, we know that Father Terry has a colorful background as well, smuggling tax-free cigarettes, but ostensibly, his half of the con will go to the Rwandan children.
I found the Rwanda scenes totally engrossing. Leonard has the African accent down pat: "Bless me, Fatha, for I have sin. Is a long time since I come here but is not my fault, you don't have Confession always when you say." Chantelle is a compelling character as are the other Africans. It's when we get back to Detroit that Leonard reverts to form, with his cons conning cons motif. Debbie Dewey's stand-up routine also adds a certain quirky charm. Look for another jolting twist at the end.
Rating: 
Summary: good first half
Review: Elmore Leonard's plain style always has a driving quality that pushes me right through one of his books. That's great when the book is entertaining. I was excited that this one started off with the African material. I was prepared for a book that was not only entertaining and compelling, but one that had taken an unexpectedly important subject in the genocide in Rwanda. The strength of the beginning conjured something of the mood and tone of Robert Stone's novels. It's fascinating to see how this book picks up other subjects and other characters. It's very clever, but that seems to be its undoing as well. Mr. Leonard lost sight of his subject and frittered it away after the first half. I kept reading only to see how badly he would blow the book. He completely destroyed it. I asked a couple of friends if they had read it; they said they put it down about halfway through. It's pretty awful to come to the end of a book like that and see the first chapter of his next book appended. I can't help but think this is part of the problem: marketing E.L. is so easy no one paid attention to the quality of this one. This from a novelist who writes enjoyable, lively, compelling and funny books!
Rating:
Summary: Not a Bust but Not Great
Review: Elmore Leonard has come to attract a certain audience and to create certain expectation. In Pagan Babies, Leonard has fallen from the lofty expectations that have established him as an icon of the action read. In this work, Leonard appears to have lost his way and seems to be operating on fumes rather than the racy and substantiative material in past works. I mean, I love novels with big breasts and sex scenes but do we need a piece of fiction that would cause a corpse to to do push-ups on a December day in Fargo? And what does that have to do with the storyline? Lamentably, Leonard has reverted to easy sleaze and the result is sex, sex, sex.For those still interested, it's a busty book with testosterone oozing from its pages, while every woman has an implant and the men seem to have no interest in moving the plot forward. In short, I think its shallow but worth a little steam. Leonard, however, seems to have little steam left.
Rating:
Summary: Plumbing the depths
Review: Elmore Leonard's pre-eminece in his chosen genre is not any longer an issue: The man is tops, surpassing both Hammett and Chandler in dialog, plot and characters. In so many ways he's the dark twin of Norman Rockwell--an artist who both mirrors and creates a world that the world in turn immitates and feeds off. But, like Rockwell, Leonard still seems too concerned to turn out a highly commercial product and chooses not to delve too deeply into character. After finishing PAGAN BABIES as other Leonard novels one comes away with a tremendous rush of respect, even an astonishment at how he brought it all off--but then you realize that, however engaging his characters are, you really don't know much about them below the surface. Thay yak and yak and yak on, but they restrain themselves from revealing too much about themselves. And Leonard, always posing as the guy just telling a good story, refuses to get involved. In PAGAN BABIES Leonard seems poised to go considerably deeper with the main character, Fr. Terry Dunn, a missionary who has witnessed genocide in his own Rwandan church. But once the plot takes off and the reader is brought into the petty criminal world of Leonard's beloved Detroit, Dunn just coasts through the rest of the book, wisecracking and conning the cons.
A tour de force. One wonders if Leonard will ever disappoint his fans in pursuit of something richer than commercial sales.
Rating: 
Summary: Do not recommend
Review: This book started out well, and the story became engrossing by the middle of the book, but all went down hill from there--I did not care for the ending on this book at all. I was very disappointed.
Rating:
Summary: How come I've missed all of his books before?
Review: My only contact with Elmore Leonard before buying this book was seeing Quentin Tarantion's excellent movie "Jackie Brown", based on Leonard's book "Rum Punch". I can see now why Quentin chose to do a movie on an Elmore Leonard book; they are clearly two peas in a pod even though the use different channels for their art. The characters are at the same time despicable--liars, killers, mobsters, pimps--and likeable: the fake Father Dunn, who escaped to Rwanda to get away from an indictment, really cares about the orphans. If you are looking for realism, go somewhere else. You are more likely to encounter Tolkien creatures on the streets of Detroit than you are people like The Mutt: self-styled contract killer without a clue. But these people are totally unpredictable, so the story can run almost--but not quite--out of control wihout that bothering the reader. Will I start collecting Elmore Leonard books now? You betcha! (Anyone has any suggestions where to start, send me an email.)
Rating: 
Summary: Darker and deeper
Review: Elmore Leonard is usually reliable airplane reading, but this one goes much deeper. Mr. Leonard plays with moral questions and develops characters that act in surprising and very human ways. Throughout the book, the tones are dark and comedy is bitter. Altogether I felt that this was a venture into Jim Thompson territory and a very welcome one. Now as a rule, Leonard novels have a very cinematic quality, but I found it impossible to imagine this one on film.
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