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Get Your Kicks on Route 66

Leonard’s “The Big Bounce,�� first published in 1969 after nearly a decade since his last novel, announced the entry of Leonard into the grand arena of crime fiction and his departure from the world of westerns, an era that had seemed to have passed. In The Big Bounce, Leonard offers a crime caper novel that is more about the two lead characters than about anything else. The setting is a beach resort in Michigan surrounded by cucumber fields, picked for pickling plants. Bonnie and Clyde they were not.

For Jack Ryan, it’s always been difficult to stay on the straight and narrow. He’s a washed up minor league ball player whose career was derailed by a bad back. His past is littered with petty larceny, breaking and entering, dishing out beatings to guys who get out of line with a bat. Trouble just follows him around and before you know it he’s no longer crew chief of the migrants working the cucumber fields and his old boss wants him the he’ll out of town. That advice doesn’t stick and he finds himself as a handyman for a resort down the road and involved in some more breaking and entering.

Nancy appears to find trouble just like Jack. From seducing older men and outing them to their wives to breaking windows to plowing cars off the road, she’s just trouble with a capital T. For Nance, it’s all about kicks and getting the Big Bounce and she’s like the addict who just needs a bigger and bigger fix to get her high. And, she knows she’s got Jack hooked and he can’t stay away.

Twice the geniuses in Hollywood made this one into a movie and twice it bombed with some well known names on the celluloid. It’s not action packed and lacks a lot of the booming action and car chases of other crime capers. It’s a quieter, more thoughtful story and that’s perhaps where it loses some readers.