Vince Majestyk is a simple man with a complicated past. He’s decorated Vietnam veteran but also an ex-con with an ex-wife and a daughter somewhere out there. But for now, he’s just a melon farmer looking to make up for last year’s losses with a bumper crop. Majestyk hires day laborers at fair wages to pick his melons, but one day he shows up to the field to find other men working the job. Majestyk is being squeezed by a local tough-guy who imagines he can pressure Majestyk into hiring his men instead. He’s messed with the wrong melon farmer, though, and winds up with a broken nose and a few other maladies for his efforts. Majestyk, though, winds up in jail. And that’s when his real trouble begins.
Majestyk is paired in a cell with Frank Renda, a hitman with no conscience. When his friends try to break Renda out during a prison transfer, Majestyk is caught in the crosshairs, until he takes action with his unnerving confidence and stubbornness. Unwilling to take the easy way out, Majestyk makes a powerful enemy out of Renda, and the two are then destined to meet in a final, climactic confrontation.
Mr. Majestyk is typical Elmore Leonard, a grimly humorous look at the way criminals and others on the margins of society really think, feel, and act. However, the story is so slight here (the novel runs just 151 pages) and it’s all essentially a set-up to an inevitable, uninspiring punchline. Majestyk is a cipher, a man with an interesting past and a completely uninteresting present. He’s classic Western movie tough-guy machismo, with precious little besides. A romantic subplot is sketched in and adds very little to the story.
Mr. Majestyk lacks the memorability of Leonard’s best work, but has a unique set-up and is brief enough that fans of the author will only be slightly disappointed.