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This first hard covered slip cased edition is numbered 89 of 100 produced, and is signed by Elmore Leonard.

These books were published by Otto Penzler Books. An imprint at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (2005��2010). The trade edition has blue boards.
The Armchair Detective Library. Reprinted classic crime fiction for collectors and libraries. The book was original published by Fawcett in 1869. This edition has a new introduction by Leonard.

“The Big Bounce�� was Elmore Leonard's first crime novel, or, more accurately, his first contemporaneously set novel. Up to this point in his career, Leonard had published only western novels and short stories, pretty successfully in the 1950s, with two of them,
��3:10 to Yuma�� and “The Tall T�� ( aka “The Captives��) being made into films in 1957.

As soon as he decided to leave his ad agency job in 1960, however, the western market died on its ass; as Leonard explains in the introduction to the 1989 Armchair Detective Library edition of “The Big Bounce��, for most of the rest of the decade he "wrote ads, promotional material, industrial and educational films, not a word of fiction". Eventually, the movie rights for his 1961 novel “Hombre�� sold, and Leonard used the money to fund the writing of his "first novel with a contemporary setting, This is Jack Ryan".

The book was rejected Eighty-four times. One rewrite and a title change later (although the line the original title was inspired by is still in the book), “The Big Bounce�� found a home as a novel at ‘Gold Medal�� with a Mcginnis cover, and was made into a movie at Warner Bros.

The film, directed by Alex March and starring Ryan O'Neil and Leigh Taylor-Young, is by all accounts a bit of a stinker �� and the 2004 version isn't much better regarded �� but the novel is terrific; not Leonard at his absolute best �� that would come later with the likes of “Stick��, “Get Shorty�� and “Pronto�� but not far off. Even at this early stage in his career, Leonard had a prose style all his own: lilting, deceptively easygoing, yet focused and intense; clever, lightly handed but thorough character work; and that gloriously naturalistic and yet still idiosyncratically Elmore dialogue.

A young drifter, Jack Ryan (no relation to Tom Clancy's later CIA analyst-turned-president), takes a job working as a handyman at a Michigan lakeside cabana complex owned by local justice of the peace Walter Majestyk (no relation to Vincent Majestyk from Leonard's own “Mr. Majestyk��). Majestyk has seen film footage of Ryan using a baseball bat in a fight and so knows he has a self-destructive streak; but he also sees something worthwhile in the younger man, and does what he can to help him out, with a certain amount of resistance on Ryan's part.

But then Ryan, who has a string of minor robberies in his past and has already turned over one local property, gets mixed up with Nancy, the manipulative mistress of Ray Ritchie, the rich farm owner for whom Ryan briefly worked as a picker �� and Nancy has a plan for stealing fifty grand from Ritchie.