Rum Punch

Title: Rum Punch
Author: Elmore Leonard
Published: 1992, then 2011 in ebook format
Genre: Crime and punishment
Pages: 4132 little Kindle pages


It's my unwritten yearly new years' resolution (well it was until now) that I'll read more books than I did last year. Because reading is fun and all that. It's 13th of January now, and I'm down two books! Not bad, considering how much work I've also done in the last two weeks...

Rum Punch is probably better known as its movie version Jackie Brown, directed by Quentin Tarantino. One of my favourite movies. As it turns out, it makes for excellent reading as well. I didn't find out until I was about 75% through with it that Rum Punch is actually kind of a sequel to another book where we first meet the characters of Ordell Robbie and Louis Gara. I'm gonna have to check that out sometime.

There are of course some differences between the book and the movie, but I think that they both work pretty well. Or then I just don't want to say anything bad about a movie I've liked so much for so many years. But, even though I've seen it plenty of times, I was still hooked to the book, knowing what would -most likely- happen next. Leonard's writing is pretty straight-forward, not much with the pondering of deeper motivations and such, but the characters still come through clear. Plus, there's plenty of humour.

My one and only disappointment is that the line "What the fuck happened to you, man? Shit, your ass used to be beautiful!" is only in the movie. (It's "What's wrong with you, Louis?" He said, "Shit, you use to be a beautiful guy, you know it?" in the book so I don't really mind all that much.)