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Joe's Reviews > Pagan Babies
Pagan Babies
by
by
If your idea of a literary feast is something in the way of a delicious crime thriller published in 2000 and prepared with characters that are just ripe, tasty dialogue, sharp wit, strong verve, evocative setting all cooked at just the right temperature and time, stop reading now and treat yourself to a steak well done titled Pagan Babies, the 36th and best Elmore Leonard novel of the nine that I've read so far. Part of the story's immense satisfaction was not knowing what corner it would turn next, terrain I'll reveal a bit without giving away the ending. I need to write my impressions down so I won't forget how or why I loved this novel as much as I did.
The church had become a tomb where forty-seven bodies turned to leather and stains had been lying on the concrete floor the past five years, though not lying where they had been shot with Kalashnikovs or hacked to death with machetes. The benches had been removed and the bodies reassembled: men, women and small children laid in rows of skulls and spines, femurs, fragments of cloth stuck to mummified remains, many of the adults missing feet, all missing bones that had been carried off by scavenging dogs.
Fr. Terry Dunn, a bearded young American who makes no effort to dress like a priest, hears confession when he feels like it in the yard of the rectory, recites Mass on Easter and Christmas, plays with the children, takes photographs and hands out clothes that his brother Francis sends. Terry's village, Arisimbi, like most of the villages in Rwanda, is five years gone from a genocide by the Hutus, who sealed the borders and set about massacring the Tutsis. Terry arrived in Rwanda the day the killing began. Attempting to protect his congregation in the church, he was reciting his first Mass when the Hutus came and slaughtered each Tutsi while Terry watched.
Though the Rwandese Patriotic Army drove the Hutus from power and now keep the peace, there are bad men still around, including one in a green checkered shirt named Bernard who brags about his atrocities to Terry in confession, as well as share his vision that the killing will begin again. The priest has a live-in housekeeper named Chantelle Nyamwase, a young Tutsi whose left arm was severed at the elbow during the genocide. Asking her if she thinks he does any good here, Chantelle tells Terry he could be doing a lot more. The morning after she brings news from his brother that their mother has died, she wakes to find the priest gone. And her Russian Tokarev pistol is missing.
Driving his Volvo wagon three hours to Kigali, Terry withdraws fifty thousand francs from the bank, purchases Sabena Air tickets and returns to the village to see his friend in the RPA sector office, Laurent Kamweya. Terry asks Laurent to use half the money to pay for forty-seven graves to be dug in the church courtyard and to give Chantelle the other half of the money and airline tickets to go on a holiday. He requests a ride to the airport and for information on where he can find Bernard. Directed to the home of a beer lady who makes her own banana brew, urwagwa, Terry confronts Bernard and his three friends and asks them to turn themselves in.
Bernard, smiling now, said, "You must be a crazy person." He spoke to his friends in Kinyarwanda and now they were smiling.
Terry said, "They were with you that day?"
"Oh yes, these and others. It was our duty," Bernard said. "We say, 'Tugire gukora akazi.' Let us go do the work, and we did, uh? Go now, we don't want you here."
"Soon as I give you your penance," Terry said.
There's something great about a well-told revenge story, to being introduced to rotten, no good sons of bitches who deserve what's coming to them. These are the kinds of men who usually get away with their crimes in our world, but in the world of a great novel, they get what's coming to them. And Pagan Babies is just getting started.
In Florida, we're introduced to Debbie Dewey, finishing up a three-year sentence at Sawgrass Correctional Institution for aggravated assault with a deadly weapon; she drove a car into her ex-boyfriend Randy after he cleaned her out of every cent she owned, wrecked her BMW and got rid of her dog. Debbie had been working as an investigator for Terry's brother Francis, a personal injury lawyer in Detroit who's in Florida with his homemaker wife Mary Pat and two daughters. Fran thinks he's being discreet by claiming he's golfing while he's visiting Debbie, whose plan after she's free is to return to Detroit and restart her standup comedy career, using her incarceration as material.
Back in Detroit, Terry is staying with Fran while his sister-in-law and nieces are still in Florida. In addition to sending his brother T-shirts and money for the last five years, Fran has smoothed over an indictment from the Wayne County prosecutor for a jam Terry got himself into, driving a truckload of smuggled cigarettes up from Kentucky. Terry's partners Johnny and Dickie Pajonny were arrested and gave Terry up, claiming he was the mastermind behind the tax fraud. Terry left for Rwanda to visit his uncle Tibor, who'd served as the priest in Arisimbi for forty years. While the D.A. is convinced of Fr. Dunn's innocence, Johnny Pajonny believes Terry owes him ten grand from the cigarette job and at his mother's funeral, showed up to question Debbie about it.
Fran takes Terry to a nightclub to introduce him to Debbie after her gig. Irritated by Fran and wanting to hear more from Terry, she offers to drive the priest home. In a stretch of some of the best writing I've read from Elmore Leonard, Debbie uses her candor and wit to break Terry down softly and get to the bottom of what he's really doing back in Detroit and what his story is. Whether she's that good an interrogator and suspicious of men, or Terry is that generous with the truth around her, he confides that (view spoiler). It doesn't deter Debbie from inviting Terry back to her place, where the interrogation continues post-coitus.
In the dark he offered a little more.
"You're the only person who knows."
"You haven't told Fran?"
"Not while he's talking to the prosecutor."
"No one during all that time in Africa?"
"No one."
"Not even your one-armed housekeeper?"
Look at that--she'd picked up on Chantelle.
"Not even her."
"She lived with you?"
"Almost the whole time I was down there."
"Is she pretty?"
"Miss Rwanda, if they ever have a pageant."
"Did you sleep with her?"
Debbie asked it looking straight ahead.
"If you're wondering about AIDS it was never a threat."
"Why would I worry about AIDS?"
"I said 'If you were wondering.'"
Confident that Terry is back in town working on a scam, Debbie tells him that her ex Randy Agley conned a local society matron into marriage and as part of the divorce settlement, received a few million dollars, which Randy used to open a high-class restaurant catering to auto executives, Randy's. The snake, as Debbie sees it, still owes her sixty-seven thousand dollars, even after she ran him over. Planning on a slip-and-fall at Randy's, she believes a priest slipping and falling might be even better. Johnny Pajonny gets in on the scam, the three of them unaware that Randy's silent partner is Vincent Moraco, the gangster Terry and Johnny sold their tax-exempt cigarettes to.
Pagan Babies is Elmore Leonard in peak form. The author is a master at crafting compelling characters whose healthy desires or criminal pathology reveal themselves not through purple prose, but through beautifully crafted dialogue. This more than any of his other Elmore Leonard novel I've read so far also introduces reversals and surprises that feel completely organic to the characters, rather than an author shoehorning his characters into doing pulp fiction plots. I had no idea where this story was headed and flew through the pages, staying up past my curfew the last night to do it. This is almost always a sign I've read a great book.
The attention to detail is impeccable. While genocide might not be a subject some want to encounter in their crime fiction, I appreciated the historical and cultural details on Rwanda in the front of the book and felt Leonard had supreme affection for the Tutsi people. Terry uses the genocide and his experiences in it to stop cold anyone in Detroit who tries to push him and those details similarly got my attention as a reader. The reveal on what pagan babies refers to was sublime. Leonard spares no expense when it comes to putting the reader inside cigarette smuggling, the restaurant business or standup comedy, which Debbie's routines and her comic philosophy feeling very plausible.
Leonard brings three formidable women to the table, two of which I've discussed at length, another I barely hinted at but who is not who she initially appears to be. Great female characters and reversals in expectation are two areas that seem so obvious and yet so many authors struggle with, especially if they're in a hurry. In contrast to a lot of novels I've read--a few of them by Elmore Leonard--that end when the author seems tired of writing, there was nothing extraneous about this one. No fat. Every character, every detail, is there because it pays off in some valuable way. This book is like an ATM for book lovers.
Here's my list of Elmore Leonard novels ranked from favorite to least favorite:
Pagan Babies
Stick
Killshot
Cuba Libre
Pronto
Be Cool
Get Shorty
La Brava
Djibouti
The church had become a tomb where forty-seven bodies turned to leather and stains had been lying on the concrete floor the past five years, though not lying where they had been shot with Kalashnikovs or hacked to death with machetes. The benches had been removed and the bodies reassembled: men, women and small children laid in rows of skulls and spines, femurs, fragments of cloth stuck to mummified remains, many of the adults missing feet, all missing bones that had been carried off by scavenging dogs.
Fr. Terry Dunn, a bearded young American who makes no effort to dress like a priest, hears confession when he feels like it in the yard of the rectory, recites Mass on Easter and Christmas, plays with the children, takes photographs and hands out clothes that his brother Francis sends. Terry's village, Arisimbi, like most of the villages in Rwanda, is five years gone from a genocide by the Hutus, who sealed the borders and set about massacring the Tutsis. Terry arrived in Rwanda the day the killing began. Attempting to protect his congregation in the church, he was reciting his first Mass when the Hutus came and slaughtered each Tutsi while Terry watched.
Though the Rwandese Patriotic Army drove the Hutus from power and now keep the peace, there are bad men still around, including one in a green checkered shirt named Bernard who brags about his atrocities to Terry in confession, as well as share his vision that the killing will begin again. The priest has a live-in housekeeper named Chantelle Nyamwase, a young Tutsi whose left arm was severed at the elbow during the genocide. Asking her if she thinks he does any good here, Chantelle tells Terry he could be doing a lot more. The morning after she brings news from his brother that their mother has died, she wakes to find the priest gone. And her Russian Tokarev pistol is missing.
Driving his Volvo wagon three hours to Kigali, Terry withdraws fifty thousand francs from the bank, purchases Sabena Air tickets and returns to the village to see his friend in the RPA sector office, Laurent Kamweya. Terry asks Laurent to use half the money to pay for forty-seven graves to be dug in the church courtyard and to give Chantelle the other half of the money and airline tickets to go on a holiday. He requests a ride to the airport and for information on where he can find Bernard. Directed to the home of a beer lady who makes her own banana brew, urwagwa, Terry confronts Bernard and his three friends and asks them to turn themselves in.
Bernard, smiling now, said, "You must be a crazy person." He spoke to his friends in Kinyarwanda and now they were smiling.
Terry said, "They were with you that day?"
"Oh yes, these and others. It was our duty," Bernard said. "We say, 'Tugire gukora akazi.' Let us go do the work, and we did, uh? Go now, we don't want you here."
"Soon as I give you your penance," Terry said.
There's something great about a well-told revenge story, to being introduced to rotten, no good sons of bitches who deserve what's coming to them. These are the kinds of men who usually get away with their crimes in our world, but in the world of a great novel, they get what's coming to them. And Pagan Babies is just getting started.
In Florida, we're introduced to Debbie Dewey, finishing up a three-year sentence at Sawgrass Correctional Institution for aggravated assault with a deadly weapon; she drove a car into her ex-boyfriend Randy after he cleaned her out of every cent she owned, wrecked her BMW and got rid of her dog. Debbie had been working as an investigator for Terry's brother Francis, a personal injury lawyer in Detroit who's in Florida with his homemaker wife Mary Pat and two daughters. Fran thinks he's being discreet by claiming he's golfing while he's visiting Debbie, whose plan after she's free is to return to Detroit and restart her standup comedy career, using her incarceration as material.
Back in Detroit, Terry is staying with Fran while his sister-in-law and nieces are still in Florida. In addition to sending his brother T-shirts and money for the last five years, Fran has smoothed over an indictment from the Wayne County prosecutor for a jam Terry got himself into, driving a truckload of smuggled cigarettes up from Kentucky. Terry's partners Johnny and Dickie Pajonny were arrested and gave Terry up, claiming he was the mastermind behind the tax fraud. Terry left for Rwanda to visit his uncle Tibor, who'd served as the priest in Arisimbi for forty years. While the D.A. is convinced of Fr. Dunn's innocence, Johnny Pajonny believes Terry owes him ten grand from the cigarette job and at his mother's funeral, showed up to question Debbie about it.
Fran takes Terry to a nightclub to introduce him to Debbie after her gig. Irritated by Fran and wanting to hear more from Terry, she offers to drive the priest home. In a stretch of some of the best writing I've read from Elmore Leonard, Debbie uses her candor and wit to break Terry down softly and get to the bottom of what he's really doing back in Detroit and what his story is. Whether she's that good an interrogator and suspicious of men, or Terry is that generous with the truth around her, he confides that (view spoiler). It doesn't deter Debbie from inviting Terry back to her place, where the interrogation continues post-coitus.
In the dark he offered a little more.
"You're the only person who knows."
"You haven't told Fran?"
"Not while he's talking to the prosecutor."
"No one during all that time in Africa?"
"No one."
"Not even your one-armed housekeeper?"
Look at that--she'd picked up on Chantelle.
"Not even her."
"She lived with you?"
"Almost the whole time I was down there."
"Is she pretty?"
"Miss Rwanda, if they ever have a pageant."
"Did you sleep with her?"
Debbie asked it looking straight ahead.
"If you're wondering about AIDS it was never a threat."
"Why would I worry about AIDS?"
"I said 'If you were wondering.'"
Confident that Terry is back in town working on a scam, Debbie tells him that her ex Randy Agley conned a local society matron into marriage and as part of the divorce settlement, received a few million dollars, which Randy used to open a high-class restaurant catering to auto executives, Randy's. The snake, as Debbie sees it, still owes her sixty-seven thousand dollars, even after she ran him over. Planning on a slip-and-fall at Randy's, she believes a priest slipping and falling might be even better. Johnny Pajonny gets in on the scam, the three of them unaware that Randy's silent partner is Vincent Moraco, the gangster Terry and Johnny sold their tax-exempt cigarettes to.
Pagan Babies is Elmore Leonard in peak form. The author is a master at crafting compelling characters whose healthy desires or criminal pathology reveal themselves not through purple prose, but through beautifully crafted dialogue. This more than any of his other Elmore Leonard novel I've read so far also introduces reversals and surprises that feel completely organic to the characters, rather than an author shoehorning his characters into doing pulp fiction plots. I had no idea where this story was headed and flew through the pages, staying up past my curfew the last night to do it. This is almost always a sign I've read a great book.
The attention to detail is impeccable. While genocide might not be a subject some want to encounter in their crime fiction, I appreciated the historical and cultural details on Rwanda in the front of the book and felt Leonard had supreme affection for the Tutsi people. Terry uses the genocide and his experiences in it to stop cold anyone in Detroit who tries to push him and those details similarly got my attention as a reader. The reveal on what pagan babies refers to was sublime. Leonard spares no expense when it comes to putting the reader inside cigarette smuggling, the restaurant business or standup comedy, which Debbie's routines and her comic philosophy feeling very plausible.
Leonard brings three formidable women to the table, two of which I've discussed at length, another I barely hinted at but who is not who she initially appears to be. Great female characters and reversals in expectation are two areas that seem so obvious and yet so many authors struggle with, especially if they're in a hurry. In contrast to a lot of novels I've read--a few of them by Elmore Leonard--that end when the author seems tired of writing, there was nothing extraneous about this one. No fat. Every character, every detail, is there because it pays off in some valuable way. This book is like an ATM for book lovers.
Here's my list of Elmore Leonard novels ranked from favorite to least favorite:
Pagan Babies
Stick
Killshot
Cuba Libre
Pronto
Be Cool
Get Shorty
La Brava
Djibouti
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Reading Progress
October 17, 2015
– Shelved
October 17, 2015
– Shelved as:
to-read
May 20, 2016
–
Started Reading
May 20, 2016
–
8.75%
""I've learned what the essentials of life are. Nails, salt, matches, kerosene, charcoal, batteries, Fanta soda, rolling paper and Johnny Walker red, the black label for a special occasion. Electricity is on in the village until about ten P.M. But there is still only one telephone. It rings in the sector office, occupied by the RPA, the Rwandese Patriotic Army, pretty good guys for a change acting as police.""
page
23
May 23, 2016
–
12.55%
"Terry's answer to any problem was based on the serenity prayer. If you can handle it, do it. If you can't, fuck it."
page
33
May 23, 2016
–
25.48%
"Always he brushed his teeth and smelled of toothpaste when he came to her bed. Once a week he brought two Larium pills, so they wouldn't catch malaria, and a glass of water they shared. The pills were hallucinogenic and in the morning they would try to describe their dreams. Tonight he slipped next to her beneath the netting and remained lying on his back, not moving, leaving to her whatever would come next."
page
67
May 24, 2016
–
35.36%
"Get to the top of a long grade and look around, all you saw were hills in every direction, misty hills, bright green hills, hills that were terraced and cultivated, crops growing among groves of banana trees, the entire country, Terry believed, one big vegetable garden. The red streaks on distant hills were dirt roads, the squares of red dotting the slopes, houses, compounds, a church."
page
93
May 24, 2016
–
45.25%
"It surprised her when he stopped to pick up the machete from the desk. Debbie, behind him, had put her hand out, almost bumping into him. She wondered if it was a reaction left over from Africa: you hear something, grab a machete."
page
119
May 24, 2016
–
53.61%
"Randy became a gangster about two months after opening the restaurant, still into a Pierce Brosnan phase, custom-tailored dark suits and a hint of Brit nonchalance in his speech. His response to problems, a minor fire in the kitchen: "Oh really? Why don't you see Carlo about that?" Carlo his manager-maître d' with thirty years in the business and a small percentage of the restaurant profit as incentive."
page
141
May 25, 2016
–
75.67%
"Now Vincent gave him a look that reminded the Mutt of his mom, the times he'd forget and say "shit" in front of her and she'd call him "young man" and threaten to wash his mouth out with soap, but never did. These people were like her, they liked to try and scare you. Vincent gave him the look but then said, "Stay around here. I'll call you." See? They got by on dirty looks."
page
199
May 25, 2016
–
75.67%
"She stepped forward saying, "Father, sit down, please, before you fall down," pulled out a chair and got him seated, Tony watching now, more interested. Debbie said to him, "I'll cut right to it. I'm involved in this too. If you want to know why, it's because that cocksucker who owns the restaurant conned me out of sixty-seven thousand dollars and refuses to pay me back." She had Tony's attention."
page
199
May 25, 2016
–
99.24%
"Now she pushed the screen door open with her foot and came outside with the tray of glasses and the bowl of ice, the bottle of Johnnie Walker pressed beneath the stump of her arm. She believed it was good for the muscle to be used this way, squeezing the bottle, and believed she would be using it again and again and again, the woman knowing things the man didn't seem to know."
page
261
May 25, 2016
–
Finished Reading
May 26, 2016
– Shelved as:
fiction-crime
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Also, I want to say that I would never have asked him this question.
I am just getting into Leonard myself and read The Moonshine Wars recently. City Primeval next.
Very nice (and complete! review. I remember liking this book a lot as well.
Carmen wrote: "What the fuck, that's not what I asked, hombre. YES OR NO. Is he dodging the question or does he HONESTLY think bringing up AIDS right now is going to calm her!?!?!?!?Great review!."
Terry is asked by a couple of characters about disease because he looks so disheveled when he comes home, so it isn't as if Leonard was ignorant about the biological dangers of the white man traveling to Africa. I'd actually be curious to hear your opinion of this book because Debbie Dewey reminds me a lot of you, up to the point she quizzes her lover about his sex life. That was definitely breaking with your finely developed sense of bedroom decorum. Thank you, as always, for sharing your insight, guapa.
Bam wrote: "I am just getting into Leonard myself and read The Moonshine Wars recently. City Primeval next."Excellent, Bam! I wanted to read Swag and 52 Pick Up but went with the hardcovers on the shelf at my library. I hope you review City Primeval.
James wrote: "Very nice (and complete! review. I remember liking this book a lot as well."Thanks so much, James. I'm glad you enjoyed it.
Your great review made me read this book. You were right - it's a wonderful read.
We must have read a different book, I thought this was awful in every aspect
You’re an elmore leonard fan and you haven’t read ‘rum punch’ yet???? Also, ‘forty lashes less one’ ???? You’re missing out on so much my friend
Debbie asked it looking straight ahead.
"If you're wondering about AIDS it was never a threat."
What the fuck, that's not what I asked, hombre. YES OR NO. Is he dodging the question or does he HONESTLY think bringing up AIDS right now is going to calm her!?!?!?!?
Great review!