Total risk
Full Risk (Original Title: Riding the Rap ) is a thriller novel by the US- American writer Elmore Leonard , which was first published in 1995 by Delacorte Press, New York, and in a German translation by Jörg Ingwersen in 1996 by Wilhelm Goldmann Verlag , Munich .
action
The story takes place in Florida in the mid-1990s. The US Marshal Raylan Givens from Miami is from his girlfriend Joyce, a former topless - go-go dancer , asked to recover their disappeared without a trace ex-boyfriend Harry Arno.
Because the much older Harry Arno, a former Jewish bookmaker of the Mafia , who had since been banned by the public prosecutor's office, probably wanted to ask his last defaulting debtor to repay the money he owned. For this he had used the not exactly squeamish Puerto Rican Bobby Deogracias, who is no longer allowed to work as a bounty hunter due to a committed manslaughter and subsequent imprisonment .
One of these debtors is Warren "Chip" Ganz III. in Manalapan , Palm Beach County . This idler worked as a “son” for a number of years and, thanks to his drug and gambling addiction, slowly brought through the fortunes of his mother, who is now demented in a retirement home .
When Bobby Chip visits Ganz on his shabby, yet multi-million dollar property, he experiences a surprise: Cold as ice, he proposes a strange deal. Covered by Louis Lewis from the Bahamas , whom Deogracias happened to know from their time together in prison in Starke , he reported on his plan. In contrast to a normal kidnapping , in which there is always the risk of handing over the ransom and the police, who are usually involved, make the whole thing even more difficult, one would kidnap completely unpopular rich personalities who would prefer to shy away from the public anyway. Hardly anyone would miss them. After a certain period of complete isolation, during which they would be left in the dark about the motives of the kidnappers, they could be offered a solution: the payment of a not inconsiderable sum in order to be allowed to stay alive and to get free. Harry Arno was seen as the first victim. Bobby Deogracias goes into the plan.
With the help of the medium “ Reverend ” Dawn Navarro, who, in addition to her good powers of observation, actually seems to have clairvoyant abilities, the conspirators lure the curious bookmaker into a trap in order to be able to kidnap him more easily. They also hope - thanks to the young woman's hypnosis skills - to get his Swiss bank details more easily. Fate seems to play into their hands when it turns out that although it is a Swiss bank, it is located in the Bahamas. Thus, Lewis Louis believes his relationships on the islands have an advantage and is already forging a plan how he can deceive both Deogracias and Ganz.
However, this is only one reason for the emerging rift between the kidnappers, especially since they proceed more and more reckless and bumbling after the initial sense of achievement. In the absence of a secluded hiding place, they actually put Harry Arno in the relatively remote and overgrown Villa Chips, but completely lose sight of the fact that one of the last two decisive traces - i.e. the defaulting debtor - clearly points here. They also neglect their safety precautions by recklessly allowing Harry to see his kidnappers and Bobby Deogracias preferring to raid a shop instead of going shopping.
In addition, they fail to reward Dawn Navarro for their decoy service , which makes them all the more receptive to making hints between the lines when questioned by Raylan Givens, who easily got on their trail. In addition, Dawn and Raylan are noticeably attracted to each other. While she notices at the first touch that he is a man who has already shot another gunman with full awareness of the dangers involved, this stands in striking contrast to the reluctance Joyce has towards acts of violence.
Gradually Louis and Deogracias get impatient and take the second step before the first is completed. You kidnap the fraudulent investment banker Ben King on a golf course . When he resists in the house, Bobby shoots him to demonstrate his power. On the one hand, this frightens Arno, who at least became an ear-witness of the event and has to remove the traces of the crime, and on the other hand, it reveals to Chip and Louis that Bobby has now become a risk to both lives.
After Raylan sees his suspicions confirmed during his research, Deogracias tries to provoke him, but Raylan stoically rejects him . The Puerto Rican, who for his part is looking for revenge due to the loss of face, wants to rehearse the western-like showdown with Louis like at 12 noon , as Raylan reminds him of a figure from the Wild West because of his stoic calm, the Stetson and the cowboy boots . After the clarifying conversation with Chip, Louis follows an impulse and surprisingly shoots him because both weapons are loaded. But here, too, the two surviving criminals behave stupidly. Instead of Deogracias relieving his money supply, so that they could finally pay Dawn, they sink the body prematurely in the completely muddy swimming pool of the villa and weigh it down with a heavy garden table.
Meanwhile, Raylan has only one problem: He knows where Arno is being kept, but due to the chaotic approach of the criminals, he cannot make any sense of it to make an official presentation to the authorities. In order for him, for his part, to stay abreast of the law, he needs clear evidence that would lead to a house search and thus to his liberation. So for his part he sets a trap for Chip Ganz, who regularly goes to cuddle parties to pick up young runaways and sell their parents “information”. His goal is to put Chip under so much pressure that he will, as it were, voluntarily let him into the house.
Just as Louis Arno wants to take a boat to the Bahamas, he is surprised by Raylan. When both are ready to shoot, Louis is shot by Arno with Raylan's shotgun from the first floor of the villa, which Arno had forgotten when Arno was liberated.
While Joyce is now fleeing back into the arms of rich Arno, despite her resentment towards violence, Raylan and Dawn seem to finally get closer, although he has concerns. But she counters: “What is so bad about doing something stupid every now and then? A good question". With this open, but ambiguous, unambiguous ending, the story comes to an end.
background
scene of action
In contrast to his world success Snap Shorty , which is set in California, the action of Full Risk takes place in Florida, in which several of Leonard's novels, above all the also quite famous Cat Chaser (1982) ( Florida Fever ), filmed in 1989 by Abel Ferrara with Paul Weller and Kelly McGillis as Cauldron Miami , also play. The common western analogies are obvious with Leonard, since he contributed several script templates for westerns in the 1950s and 1960s. The best known are probably Hombre , who was named Hombre with the German film title Man called him , and Valdez .
Narrative perspective
As with most of his novels, the narrative perspective is poly-perspective and not linear in time. Instead, the storyline is taken up in a logical manner by the various people, whose perspective is always represented in the third person, in order to increase the tension. It is noticeable that Joyce is only dealt with passively and very briefly twice.
characters
None of the characters is downright sympathetic, as Raylan, as a classic antihero, has a latent tendency to violence, although he always seems to be holding a laconic rehabilitation experiment with his criminal environment ("That you are stupid does not mean that you have to die.") Dawn tries to stay impartially exactly between "good and bad", while Joyce ultimately only strives for security. The criminals and their victims are driven solely by their greed. The characters of Raylan Givens and Harry Arno are among the few who Leonard took up as protagonists a second time, namely previously in Every Wager ( Pronto , 1993). Raylan Given also appeared in his blue suit, cowboy hat and boots in the short story Fire in the Hole and also served as a model for the TV series Justified and Leonard's later character Carl Webster in The Hot Kid (2005). Even Dawn Navarro can be found again later in his novel Road Dogs , because he found the riddle of her abilities not adequately dealt with: “ I was never sure if Dawn was actually psychic - but she was psychic enough to say, when she was talking on the phone to somebody, 'Why don't you put the light on? I can't see you. ' So I wonder, is she faking? And I'm not sure. ”
Others
Wilhelm Goldmann Verlag used a colored black and white photograph of Hollywood's blond siren , Veronica Lake , for the cover design , although Dawn is more likely to be described as a dark-haired hippie with the face of the young Marianne Faithfull and the other female figures do not match either. The company commissioned to design the cover, Design Team Munich, used a picture from the Archive for Art and History , Berlin, and apparently found it unnecessary to name the person depicted for all readers.
expenditure
- Elmore Leonard: All risk . Wilhelm Goldmann Verlag, Munich 1996, ISBN 3-442-43480-7 , 287 pp.
review
Publishers Weekly complained that the merging of plot threads of destructive, simple characters with Leonard in this book seems almost like written on autopilot , but even a mediocre Leonard novel would stand out positively from the crowd.
reception
filming
- Justified TV series , 2009
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ Elmore Leonard: Full Risk . Wilhelm Goldmann Verlag, Munich 1996, p. 287.
- ↑ Elmore Leonard: Full Risk . Wilhelm Goldmann Verlag, Munich 1996, p. 16.
- ↑ Justified in the Internet Movie Database (English)
- ↑ goodreads.com
- ↑ januarymagazine.com/
- ↑ Archived copy ( memento of the original dated August 30, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ↑ elmoreleonard.com
- ↑ quoted from amazon.com ; seattle.bibliocommons.com
