Prolific author Elmore Leonard wrote nearly fifty novels, multiple short stories and a large handful of screenplays over more than fifty years of working as a published writer. With characters that often spoke with a street-level vernacular and stories that centered around crime and deceit, Leonard’s signature style is the way in which he wrote his stories: the dialogue was usually written in a spoken style, with little emphasis put on ‘proper’ grammar, and his stories were populated with characters who we met that time we accidentally stumbled into the wrong bar. Some of his most notable books include Get Shorty, its follow-up Be Cool, Out of Sight, Killshot, Maximum Bob, and Freaky Deaky. Another work for which Leonard is quite well-known is the 1992 novel, Rum Punch.

The story follows Jackie Burke, a 44-year-old flight attendant who decides to start smuggling cash from Jamaica into the United States via her crappy airline job for a wanna-be gun-dealing gangster, Ordell Robbie. After federal agents catch her in the act, they threaten extensive jail time unless Burke agrees to act as bait to catch Robbie and send him to jail. When Robbie catches wind of the agents’ plan, he attempts to try to pull off one final score once again using Burke as his mule. Facing middle age with the possibility of no employment or worse, Burke tries to turn the tables on both Robbie and the federal agents with the help of an aging bail bondsman named Max Cherry in order to ensure herself of a prosperous–and free–future.

““Come on up to Riv’era Beach and say those things, you be dead.”

Elmore Leonard, Rum Punch

As with most of his books, Leonard draws out these characters very nicely, and it doesn’t take much imagination for us to understand who they are. Take Ordell, the novel’s principle antagonist, as one example. A master manipulator, Ordell is as convincing as he is ruthless. He intimidates everyone he comes in contact with, even the relatively headstrong Jackie, who herself is fearless and will do whatever necessary to get what she wants, which, in this case, is to avoid jail time and hopefully get her hands on all the money she’s been smuggling. Through Leonard’s crafty, slick dialogue, we know which character is speaking without even having to be told, which, in my experience of reading, is not easy to do.

Another thing that makes this book so much fun to read is the quick pacing. Leonard himself has said that, in regards to his writing style, his goal is to always cut out the parts that people tend to skip when they’re reading and to help the story move forward by minimizing unnecessary dialogue and grammar. This shows a lot here, as it does with much of his work. This is the type of book that makes it easy to pick up for thirty minutes here and fifteen minutes there, with short, fast-flowing chapters and a plot that never dwells too long in one place. Also, the fact that Leonard doesn’t bog down the story by throwing in too many side characters is a real plus. This is something I’ve noticed that often plagues stories of this kind: a convoluted mess that too ambitiously tries to put in as many characters as possible. As it is, the story focuses on about six principle characters with a few others on the peripheral, a nice blend of central and supporting players.

Image of Quentin Tarantino coutesy of Gage Skidmore.

In 1997, only a few years after the release of Rum Punch, Quentin Tarantino, fresh off the massive success of his seminal film, Pulp Fiction, decided to adapt Leonard’s novel into a feature-length film, renaming it Jackie Brown. Although the character of Jackie was a blonde, white woman in the book, Tarantino changed her into a black woman, ostensibly so that he could cast one of his favourite blaxploitation actresses from the ’70s, Pam Grier, in the starring role. The film also featured a stellar supporting cast with Samuel L. Jackson (Pulp Fiction, Snakes on a Plane) as the menacing Ordell Robbie, Robert Forster (Me, Myself & Irene, The Descendants) as Max Cherry, as well as Robert De Niro, Bridget Fonda, Chris Tucker and Michael Keaton rounding out the main cast. The film remains the only one of Tarantino’s career that he adapted from a source material, with all the others being his own original screenplays (some co-written by Roger Avary).

One of the things that makes this film so much fun is the stellar cast mentioned above. Jackson in particular has such a commanding screen presence, especially when playing menacing characters like this, similar to his role of Jules Winnfield in Pulp Fiction. There’s something about the way Jackson is able to look at people that is mesmerizing, and of course, hearing him say lines written by Tarantino that were themselves based on dialogue by Leonard is about as winning a combination as I can think of.

Robert De Niro provided another nice surprise in this film. Typically, De Niro is a leading man who plays characters that are powerful or psychotic or menacing in their own right. Here, we get to see him in a much more subdued role, albeit not one that is without its homicidal tendencies. Indeed, De Niro’s character, Louis Gara, is a hard-ass who plays second banana to Jackson’s wanna-be mob boss, and in one scene he even shoots a woman he knows in a parking lot because she was annoying the hell out of him. But what sets this character apart from others De Niro has played is the vulnerabilities. He often defers to Jackson’s Robbie possibly because he’s scared of him despite having done time for a bank robbery.

“When you robbed banks, did you forget where your car was then, too?”

Bridget Fonda’s character Melanie, Jackie Brown

As with Leonard’s source material, the best part about this and nearly all of Tarantino’s films is the dialogue. Tarantino has a way of making dialogue seem so natural and engaging. Where most directors employ a long scene of dialogue as simple exposition–a cheap way to get an important fact or piece of information germane to the plot across to the audience –Tarantino manages to make a scene out of two talking heads seem like the best part of the movie. In one scene, Jackson’s and De Niro’s characters are perched on stools in some sports bar shooting the breeze about women they’ve known. This is the type of scene that in other films would slow down the pacing, but here, it actually serves to add depth and excitement to the film. That is a rare trait in a writer/director to be able to make the ‘boring’ scenes just as fun and relevant as the action ones.

When comparing the two mediums and deciding which one is best, it’s tough to make a fair choice. Rum Punch is without a doubt among Leonard’s best work, as he creates incredibly interesting characters and slips them into a seedy world full of crime, greed and deceit. On the other hand, Tarantino’s film is filled with actors who perfectly embody the characters they are portraying and, in true Tarantino fashion, he somehow manages to make the violent scenes the funniest ones as he’s done many times before and after Jackie Brown. In a way, the film gives you the best of both in that it retains much of Leonard’s brilliant dialogue and characterization while injecting it with Tarantino’s signature style of film-making which includes a plethora of creative shots and extreme close-ups, and a smoking good soundtrack. For this reason, I’m going with the movie. As much as I love the book, the movie manages to up the game and elevate the story to new heights, making it the most underrated film of Tarantino’s career.

Final verdict: the movie.

Try picking up a copy of Leonard’s 1992 novel by clicking here. And be sure to take a look at the trailer for Tarantino’s film below.