THE HOT KID by Elmore Leonard

Finished Su 5/17/2020- While dealing with the biggest 'water incident' downstairs.

A hardback novel that I bought at West Branch for two bucks on Sa 8/23/07 and finished the first time on Labor Day Mo 9/3/07.

The 'Hot Kid' is Federal Agent Carl (Carlos) Webster. He's trying to make a rather lurid name for himself as a famous officer of the law.

Orvis Belmont is a rich banker, oil man, and land owner. His son, Jack is an up and coming criminal. Jack's mother vows to shoot him on sight and his father tries to cover up his mistakes.

The novel is set in and around Tulsa, Oklahoma.

Louly Brown likes to think that she was a lover of Pretty Boy Floyd (Charles Floyd), and she becomes Carl's partner.

Tong Antonelli is a reporter for True Detective and he is covering Carl's career in the most sensational manner. 

This is the era of John Dillinger, Bonnie and Clyde, Baby Face Nelson, and Pretty Boy Floyd.

I thought that the characters were beautifully presented and each scene was finely etched. The conversations and dialog were absolutely life-like and true to the era.

From the book's page at Amazon:

"Carlos Webster was fifteen in the fall of 1921, the first time he came face-to-face with a nationally known criminal. A few weeks later, he killed his first man—a cattle thief who was rustling his dad's stock. Now Carlos, called Carl, is the hot kid of the U.S. Marshals Service, one of the elite manhunters currently chasing the likes of Dillinger, Baby Face Nelson, and Pretty Boy Floyd across America's Depression-ravaged heartland.

Carl wants to be the country's most famous lawman. Jack Belmont, the bent son of an oil millionaire, wants to be public enemy number one. Tony Antonelli of True Detective magazine wants to write about this world of cops and robbers, molls and speakeasies from perilously close up. Then there are the hot dames—Louly and Elodie—hooking their schemes and dreams onto dangerous men. And before the gunsmoke clears, everybody just might end up getting exactly what he or she wished for."

A quote from the author, Elmore Leonard:

"The literary set also admires Leonard's style -- or antistyle, rather. "If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it".

From the review in the New York Times:

"Bonnie and Clyde, Pretty Boy Floyd, Machine Gun Kelly, John Dillinger and Baby Face Nelson -- all the outlaws who captured both the headlines and the American imagination in the early 30's make brief appearances in the novel, which is also at pains, in Leonard's minimalist fashion, to evoke the look and feel and even the music of the period. We get glimpses of the Light Crust Doughboys (A Western Swing Band), the great hillbilly swing band, for example, and hear about the wild music played by colored fellows named Count Basie and Louis Armstrong. There are scenes in tourist courts and roadhouses and in Kansas City speakeasies where the waitresses work in their underwear or in nothing at all. Where so much of Leonard's recent fiction has a sharp, almost hyperrealistic quality, "The Hot Kid" is noirish and even a little pulpy at times, in the fashion of 30's movies and detective magazines."