Judging from Elmore Leonard's latest, the old guy's still got it

Elmore Leonard, at 85, is unlikely to be described as writing at the height of his powers, and that fact must surely make this master of irony smile. Indeed, in his new adventure novel, "Djibouti," Leonard casts an amused eye on male aging and on male vanity, a weakness that he has lethally skewered in his fiction for decades.

"It's too bad you're an old man," says filmmaker Dara Barr, flirting with 72-year-old Xavier LeBo, her longtime assistant from New Orleans. They're in Djibouti, a tiny country in the Horn of Africa, to make a documentary about Somali pirates. Dara is a familiar Leonard character, the hot ticket with brains (and, in this case, a strong resemblance to real-life film director Kathryn Bigelow). But it is Xavier's world-weary eyes that take in every detail on this alien African terrain crowded with terrorists and assorted criminals. Soon he and Dara meet the swaggering pirates who make millions hijacking ships, "the bad boys with AKs and . . . rockets," as Xavier describes them. "I said to one of 'em I'm talkin to in a club last night, 'You always high you out to sea?' The man say, 'If we not drunk, what are we doin in a skiff and think we can seize an oil tanker?' "  Read More