There's a streak of perversity in Elmore Leonard, contemporary
American fiction's master of dialogue, choosing the laconic
cowboy type as a hero for his crime fiction. True, Leonard
started out writing westerns, but the characters who populate
his crime stories are talkers, some profane, some funny, some
sarcastic, many all at once. But they are talkers.  Raylan
Givens, the U.S. marshal who first appeared in Leonard's short
story "Fire in the Hole" and has since become the hero of the FX
series Justified (about to start its third season on January
17th; the first two are available on DVD), occupies the center
of Leonard's new Raylan, essentially a couple of long short
stories woven loosely into a novel. Leonard's Raylan is a bit
more upfront about his appetites than he is in Timothy
Olyphant's wittily underplayed portrayal of the character in the
series. He's still no chatterbox, though.  Both Raylan and
Justified are contemporary westerns, moving the conventions of
horse opera to present-day Kentucky. Oxycon