Be Cool (Paperback)

The film Get Shorty was a success on many fronts. It introduced a new style of hip gangster that revised the stereotype of the Godfather series. It also helped re-launch the career of John Travolta. And it brought Elmore Leonard's impressive body of fiction to larger public attention. In Hollywood, such a triumph usually spawns a sequel--a film that rehashes the great jokes and cool scenes of the first film, but with none of the panache that initially inspired audiences.

In the beginning of Be Cool, the sequel to the novel Get Shorty, readers are reminded that Chili Palmer-- like his creator--scored a huge success with a gangster film (his was entitled Get Leo). But the sequel, Get Lost, was a predictable dud. Rather than follow that sordid story, however, Leonard takes Chili into a totally new direction. He places Chili on a murder investigation (in which he is a prime suspect) and then traces his entry into the music business. Meanwhile, Leonard reveals a whole new cast of fresh, funny, and flaky characters to populate Chili's world; characters like Elliot the gigantic, gay, Samoan bodyguard who lives to be on the stage. Throughout, the voice of John Travolta rings in Chili's every speech (word has it that Travolta has already been cast to reprise the role) as Leonard pokes fun at the Hollywood apparatus and the task of a sequel writer.

Be Cool surpasses its original because it is so self-consciously a novel about sequels, about the sometimes cowardice that limits the creativity of the American film industry. It is hard to imagine how Leonard could top the multi-layered satire/crime novel/expose. One only hopes for a sequel. --Patrick O'Kelley, Amazon.com --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

In Get Shorty, Chili Palmer drifted into film production by accident, feeding the gangsterish events he became caught up in into a storyline he could sell. In Be Cool he's back, a producer with a three-picture contract to complete, looking for a new story. An ex-mob acquaintance, now an indie record producer, gets 'popped' as they have lunch together, and Chili decides to find out why. No longer the innocent, he's playing God now, setting up situations and manipulating people to see how it'll all turn out. Could there be a subtext here? The artist and his puppets? There's a host of startling characters, a plot that's a lot simpler than it looks, real tension and dialogue like broken glass - shiny and sharp. And there's enough background to set you up in indie music, if that's the way you want to earn a crust. Leonard and Chili ('Look at me!') Palmer are back in town. Who needs more? (Kirkus UK)

Nine years after his farcical conquest of Hollywood in Get Shorty, former loan shark Chili Palmer aims to scale equally unlikely new heights as a music producer. As you'd expect, it all happens more or less by accident. Stung by the failure of Get Lost, the sequel to his triumphant debut, Get Leo, Chili's not sure what story will put him back on top of Hollywood's greasy pole. Should his comeback film be about a rocker like Linda Moon, a singer who works for a dating service, or about a record producer like Chili's acquaintance Tommy Athens? The decision gets complicated when Tommy is executed in the middle of a power lunch with Chili, and when Chili tells Raji, the pimplike manager of Linda's girl group, that Linda is suddenly free to reconvene her old band Odessa ("AC/DC meets Patsy Cline") because Chili himself will be managing her from now on. In short order, then, Chili's getting serious homicidal attention from the outraged Raji, his gay Samoan bodyguard, and the shooter who took out Tommy Athens - all helping to explain the dead man in Chili's living room. (Raji's hit man, chagrined at having zapped another hit man by mistake, aptly observes that people are lining up to kill this guy.) A lesser executive would be toast. But not Chili, with his unshakeable confidence and his would-be killers' boundless capacity for self-delusion: he tells one assassin he'll get him a screen test, manufactures for a second the tale of a scare only Chili can straighten out, and puts himself in the middle of a deal a third needs to clinch before he can murder Chili. As the corpses who aren't Chili pile up, Leonard (Cuba Libre, 1998, etc.) tosses off a dozen new spins on Get Shorty's gorgeous premise - that nobody can run the entertainment industry as well as a low-level mobster armed with Leonard's endless stream of wisecracks - to produce a good-natured thriller as relaxing as it is exhilarating. (Kirkus Reviews)