Word: swag
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...this building is simple, masculine, direct -- the federal style in all its confidence. This exalted plainness of utterance would permeate crafts other than architecture; it was the general style of the early Republic. Cabinetmakers no less than builders now preferred explicit, abstract shapes: circle, ellipse, square. Deep carving and swag work became flattened and were replaced by abstractions of depth, mimicking light and shade in veneer. Back to basics: antiquity is destiny...
...publisher. All those ads certainly did not hurt. But Leonard's triumph may have a somewhat less expensive explanation: the devoted readers who enjoyed and passed along the writer's early westerns (Hombre) and those who discovered somewhere along the way his ensuing string of crime and mystery novels (Swag, Stick, LaBrava) finally coalesced into a critical, bookstore-stampeding mass...
...result, told largely in Hill's words, has the sound and horror of authenticity, The Godfather minus the glamour. There is no rich, family feeling here, no accretion of loyalties and vendettas. There is only the nostalgia of a successful sociopath for a lawless past. "Truckloads of swag. Fur coats, televisions, clothes--all for the asking," the thug recalls. "When I was broke I just went out and robbed some more. We ran everything. We paid the lawyers. We paid the cops. Everybody had their hands out. We walked out laughing. We had the best of everything...
Detroit Policeman Raymond Cruz of City Primeval (1980), for instance, is mistaken for a high school shop teacher by a girl he tries to pick up in a bar. Ernest Stickley Jr. is a dour Oklahoma hick who, in Swag (1976), conducts a doomed 100-day armed-robbery career. Resurfacing in Stick, seven years and a prison stretch later, he has scarcely improved; he worships Actor Warren Oates and thinks disco is dynamite. But, like all of Leonard's main men, deep down he is as incorrodable as a zinc bar and as heady as the stuff...
...dinner and crooks pinkies and drinks Perrier with lime and practices sneering at all the encroaching riffraff that are really its own terrors of inadequacy. Snobbery is a grasping after little dignities, little validations and reassurances. It is a way of swanking up the self, of giving it some swag and flounce and ormolu. It is a way of asserting what one is not (not like them), what one is better than...