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Tishomingo Blues

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Overview

Dennis Lenahan the high diver would tell people that if you put a fifty-cent piece on the floor and looked down at it, that's what the tank looked like from the top of that eighty-foot steel ladder.

Dennis is a daredevil and the girls love him. Things are going along okay with his gig at the Tishomingo Lodge & Casino in Tunica, Mississippi, "the Casino Capital of the South," until the day he looks down from the high-dive platform and witnesses a mob hit -- Dixie style. The killer looks up and says, "Let's see you dive." Suddenly, being a daredevil has lost its kick.

Turns out there was a second witness, Robert Taylor from Detroit, who carries a picture of his great-granddaddy's lynching along with a gun in a briefcase and listens to Marvin Pontiac while cruising the back roads of Mississippi in his black Jaguar. Robert works for a man from up north who has come to play General Grant in a Civil War battle reenactment, but like Dennis, Robert has a death-defying act of his own: he's sleeping with his boss's wife.

Thirty-seven miles from Tunica is the famous "crossroads" where Robert Johnson sold his soul to the devil for a style of funky blues that had never been heard before.

Robert Taylor is about to introduce Dennis to a "crossroads" of his own. He has a secret agenda for taking on the Cornbread Cosa Nostra and wants Dennis in on it.

To complicate matters are the women. Some are dressed in hoop skirts, and all of them have plans of their own. Vernice lures Dennis with the whitest thighs he's ever seen. Diane comes to do a story on him and wants to take him to Memphis. And still another comes along to give Dennis the surprise of his life. But it's the scams Robert Taylor plays, drawing Dennis into his game, that move the action through all kinds of unexpected twists and turns. Before he knows it, Dennis has agreed to join Robert in the battle reenactment, which leads to a showdown between the bad guys and the really bad guys.

Tishomingo Blues rings true with the bestselling author's dead-on dialogue, capturing the flavor and rhythms of the South, and finds him plotting at his unpredictable best.

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Author Information

Bio of Elmore Leonard

Elmore John Leonard, Jr., popularly known as mystery and western writer Elmore Leonard, was born in New Orleans on October 11, 1925. English was an early favorite subject and Leonard earned a Ph.D. in the subject from the University of Detroit in 1950. Prior to enrolling in college, Leonard served in the United States Naval Reserve from 1943 to 1946. Leonard wrote short stories and western novels as well as advertising and education film scripts. One of his most famous early short stories, "3:10 to Yuma," a western, was adapted to film in 1967. Leonard continued to publish both westerns and crime novels throughout the coming decades. In 1967, he began to write fulltime and received such awards as the 1977 Western Writers of America award and the 1984 Writers of America Edgar Allan Poe award. His novel Hombre was judged one of the top 25 all-time westerns by the Western Writers of America. It was later adapted to film, starring Paul Newman. In both his westerns and mystery crime novels Leonard often chooses as his main character a person seemingly reserved who eventually seeks justice openly and concretely. Elmore Leonard has been married twice, to Beverly Claire Cline in 1949 and then to Joan Leanne Lancaster in 1979. He has two daughters and three sons. Leonard successfully conquered alcoholism in the 1970s; details of his struggle with the bottle appear in author Dennis Wholey's 1986 book The Courage to Change.

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Additional Info

Imprint

HarperCollins

Filesize

596.99 KB

Number of Pages

400

eBook ISBN

9780061179976

Awards

  • Audie Award
  • Listen Up Awards
  • Publishers Weekly Best Books of the Year

Excerpt from: Tishomingo Blues by Elmore Leonard

Dennis Lenahan the high diver would tell people that if you put a fifty-cent piece on the floor and looked down at it, that's what the tank looked like from the top of that eighty-foot steel ladder. The tank itself was twenty-two feet across and the water in it never more than nine feet deep. Dennis said from that high up you want to come out of your dive to enter the water feet first, your hands at the last moment protecting your privates and your butt squeezed tight, or it was like getting a 40,000-gallon enema.

When he told this to girls who hung out at amusement parks they'd put a cute look of pain on their faces and say what he did was awesome. But wasn't it like really dangerous Dennis would tell them you could break your back if you didn't kill yourself, but the rush you got was worth it. These summertime girls loved daredevils, even ones twice their age. It kept Dennis going off that perch eighty feet in the air and going out for beers after to tell stories. Once in a while he'd fall in love for the summer, or part of it.

The past few years Dennis had been putting on one-man shows during the week. Then for Saturday and Sunday he'd bring in a couple of young divers when he could to join him in a repertoire of comedy dives they called "dillies," the three of them acting nutty as they went off from different levels and hit the water at the same time. It meant dirt-cheap motel rooms during the summer and sleeping in the setup truck between gigs, a way of life Dennis the high diver had to accept if he wanted to perform. What he couldn't take anymore, finally, were the amusement parks, the tiresome pizzazz, the smells, the colored lights, rides going round and round to that calliope sound forever.

What he did as a plan of escape was call resort hotels in South Florida and tell whoever would listen he was Dennis Lenahan, a professional exhibition diver who had performed in major diving shows all over the world, including the cliffs of Acapulco. What he proposed, he'd dive into their swimming pool from the top of the hotel or off his eighty-foot ladder twice a day as a special attraction.

They'd say, "Leave your number," and never call back.

They'd say, "Yeah, right," and hang up.

One of them told him, "The pool's only five feet deep," and Dennis said no problem, he knew a guy in New Orleans went off from twenty-nine feet into twelve inches of water. A pool five feet deep Dennis was sure they could work something out.

No they couldn't.

He happened to see a brochure that advertised Tunica, Mississippi, as "The Casino Capital of the South" with photos of the hotels located along the Mississippi River. One of them caught his eye, the Tishomingo Lodge & Casino. Dennis recognized the manager's name, Billy Darwin, and made the call.