CHARLIE MARTZ AND OTHER STORIES The Unpublished Stories

This collection is packed with entertaining nuggets, and the narrators are all on target, but the Elmore Leonard stories themselves--most of them early, unpublished works--use styles and techniques that Leonard would later abandon or refine. For example, Will Patton starts the collection with the right mix of cynicism and fatalism in "One, Horizontal," a noir-ish first-person tale with an O. Henry ending, all elements that Leonard later shunned. This formula--great narration and unexpected stylings from Leonard--makes CHARLIE MARTZ an oddity among Elmore Leonard's 40+ audiobooks. The thematic seeds are there--the underestimated man, women and men as partners, the battle against social injustice--but the stories are missing the twinkling dialogue and light pacing of the mature Leonard. Kudos to all the narrators, especially Tish Hicks. R.W.S. © AudioFile 2015, Portland, Maine [Published: JULY 2015]