Get Shorty

Get Shorty, crime novel and Hollywood satire written by American master of the literary thriller Elmore Leonard and published in 1990. In an irony worthy of Leonard himself, the 1995 movie version of Get Shorty, a story about the stupidity and vacuity of Hollywood filmmakers, became the best and most successful of all Leonard adaptations.

Get Shorty is a fast-paced novel with a complex and convoluted plot. Chili Palmer, a Miami-based, Mob-connected debt collector and one in a long line of no-nonsense Leonard heroes, is assigned to collect a debt from a dry cleaner in Las Vegas. Chili learns that the dry cleaner had faked his own death in a plane crash and received a large insurance payment, so he has no trouble collecting the money owed. However, Chili then loses the money gambling. He offers to collect a debt owed to the casino by a schlock movie producer and heads to Los Angeles. He delivers the casino’s message to the producer and also pitches a movie script based on his interactions with the dry cleaner. The producer agrees to work with Chili, as long as Chili helps him get the cash to buy a different script, which he cannot afford because he owes money to a drug dealer. The drug dealer, in turn, wants Chili to collect money from a locker in the airport that is being watched by DEA agents. By the end of the book, Chili is a film producer. The story, which involves double crosses, confidence games, and violence, is handled with a comic but assured touch.

As with Leonard’s other novels, the plot is less the focus of the story than the characters. Leonard’s characters discuss movies with passion and humor. They see themselves as performing roles, and their relationship to these roles has been shaped by their interaction with the movies. The dialogue, which effectively drives both plot and character, is one of the chief pleasures of Get Shorty.