As Pirates Swash Their Buckles, review by Janet Maslin

DJIBOUTI

By Elmore Leonard

279 pages. William Morrow. $26.99

Monday is Elmore Leonard’s  85th birthday. It is also Columbus Day 2010, a national holiday. Coincidence? Perhaps. But this is as good a time as any to acknowledge America’s hippest, best-loved, most widely imitated crime writer as a national treasure. 

In honor of the occasion Mr. Leonard seems to have given himself a couple of birthday presents. First of all, he calls his 44th and latest novel “Djibouti” just because he loves the sound of that name. Second, he gives “Djibouti” Xavier LeBo, a studly 6-foot-6-inch black leading man who, at 72, has lost none of his appeal to pretty young women. And he puts Xavier on a small boat with a smart, tough and alluring younger woman, a pale-skinned blonde who also happens to be a prizewinning filmmaker.

Mr. Leonard was very taken with Kathryn Bigelow (“The Hurt Locker”) when he met her years ago and took care to send her an early copy of this novel. “Djibouti” follows a very Bigelow-like director named Dara Barr as she heads for East Africa to make a film about pirates. Dara specializes in documentaries about tough subjects, so she has made films about Bosnian women, neo-Nazis and Hurricane Katrina.

(“Dara, you nailed that hurricane,” somebody tells her.) Now she wants to find out about the very dangerous Republic of Djibouti, whose port is conveniently located near both the Gulf of Aden and the home turf of Somali pirates. Dara thinks real pirates might be great on camera.

Neither Dara, Xavier nor, apparently, Mr. Leonard is exactly sure what opportunities Djibouti will provide. In a book without a powerhouse plot but with plenty of the old familiar crackle, Mr. Leonard simply flies his principals to this exotic spot and then imagines which other opportunists might be drawn to the place. He hits pay dirt with a noisily ostentatious Texan named Billy Wynn, who can count a big boat, an elephant gun and a model named Helene among his favorite possessions. Helene, this book’s funniest character, is willing to sail around the world with Billy on the off chance that he will marry her and write her into his will.

The pirates’ paradise of this novel turns out to be a lot more civilized than it sounds. For one thing, the pirate kingpins are a gentlemanly lot, what with their European pretensions and large sums of discretionary income. Dara has the gift of charming these people while filming them covertly for possible use in her magnum opus. She gets to know the courtly Idris, whose day job as a pirate leader does nothing to diminish his skills as a debonair party host, and Ari Ahmed Sheikh Bakar, a Saudi diplomat who has done his best to anglicize his name into “Harry.” Then Dara goes back to the boat that she and Xavier have rented and tries to figure out what she has captured on camera and what, exactly, is going on.

“Xavier LeBo believed was he 10 years younger, they’d be letting good times roll all over this boat,” Mr. Leonard writes of the book’s never-say-die hero. But Xavier’s dealings with Dara are professional, at least until he goes and purchases something called horny goat weed from a local merchant. Mostly, the two engage in a nonstop debate as to what kind of film Dara ought to make. What soon becomes clear to both of them is that the idea of Somali pirates as misunderstood underdogs is not going to fly. The hijacking of a tanker filled with liquid natural gas is one good reason to think that this region is getting ready to explode.

Mr. Leonard is on familiar turf when it comes to the pirates’ punk aspirations to live large. (Xavier’s explanation of what the pirates do: “They on the sauce gettin millions for their ransom notes.”) And he’s great with eccentricities, particularly Billy’s, once Billy starts reminding Helene of the Sterling Hayden character in “Dr. Strangelove.” But “Djibouti” has links to serious business that the book can’t just take lightly. Real events, like the 2009 attack by Somali pirates on the Maersk Alabama and rescue of Captain Richard Phillips by United States Navy Seals, are used to lend gravitas to the novel’s exotic setting.

Mr. Leonard also allows the shadow of terrorism to loom. He creates a character who has an Arab’s name, Jama Raisuli, but an American’s rap sheet and criminal record. And he derives most of his suspense this time from the question of how dangerous Jama will be. In a novel not otherwise overly concerned with plot, there is drama attached to whether Jama’s real name can be found. If he turns out to be a real American-born jihadi, he may be worth serious reward money from the American government. But characters in “Djibouti” who get too inquisitive about Jama’s identity have a way of winding up dead.

How does Dara’s filmmaking figure in all this? Perhaps autobiographically, since it lets Mr. Leonard regularly step back to contemplate the storytelling process. We watch Dara and Xavier talk over the material they’ve collected and the different ways they might put it together. Are they making a documentary? Should they turn it into a drama? Are there scenes they need to boost artificially or does the truth speak for itself? The 85-year-old birthday boy already has the how-to manual “10 Rules of Writing” to his credit, but he delivers a little more literary advice here by demonstrating how these filmmakers work. It’s simple: Ask the right questions. Then come up with the right answers.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/11/books/11book.html?ref=review&pagewanted=print