The film Get Shorty was a success on many fronts. It introduced a new style of hip gangster that revised the stereotype of the Godfather series. It also helped relaunch the career of John Travolta. And it brought Elmore Leonard's impressive body of fiction to larger public attention. In Hollywood, such a triumph usually spawns a sequel--a film that rehashes the great jokes and cool scenes of the first film, but with none of the panache that initially inspired audiences.

In the beginning of Be Cool, the sequel to the novel Get Shorty, readers are reminded that Chili Palmer--like his creator--scored a huge success with a gangster film (his was entitled Get Leo). But the sequel, Get Lost, was a predictable dud. Rather than follow that sordid story, however, Leonard takes Chili into a totally new direction. He places Chili on a murder investigation (in which he is a prime suspect) and then traces Chili's entry into the music business. Meanwhile, Leonard reveals a whole new cast of fresh, funny, and flaky characters to populate Chili's world, characters like Elliot the gigantic, gay, Samoan bodyguard who lives to be on the stage. Throughout, the voice of John Travolta rings in Chili's every speech (word has it that Travolta has already been cast to reprise the role) as Leonard pokes fun at the Hollywood apparatus and the task of a sequel writer.

Be Cool surpasses its original because it is so self-consciously a novel about sequels, about the sometimes cowardice that limits the creativity of the American film industry. It is hard to imagine how Leonard could top the multilayered satire/crime novel/exposé. One only hopes for a sequel. Fans of Be Cool might want to check out music from The Stone Coyotes, the band that served as Leonard's model in the book. --Patrick O'Kelley

Amazon.com Audiobook Review
Chili Palmer, antihero from Get Shorty, is back. This time, Chili stumbles into and through the music business, tangling with Russian mobsters, gangsta rappers, two-bit promoters, and a feisty singer named Linda Moon. Along the way he manipulates events to watch them play out--plotting his new movie--to the consternation of others. Reader Jason Culp turns in an excellent performance, giving each character a distinct and fitting voice. (Running time: 6 hours, 4 cassettes) --C.B. Delaney

From Publishers Weekly
Despite the title and the cover shot of John Travolta and Uma Thurman, who star in the MGM film based on Leonard's follow-up to Get Shorty, this production is curiously lacking in "cool." A few bars of funky music kick off the story, which follows shylock–turned–movie producer Chili Palmer as he outmaneuvers mobsters, crooked music business execs and some menacing rappers to make a CD—and possibly another movie. Narrator Scott, who starred in the film Dying Young, attempts a low-key, laid-back performance, but the result sounds sedate rather than coolly casual. He gives Chili an inflectionless tone that's hardly reminiscent of the character's Italian roots, and all of his female voices sound virtually the same. Though Scott lends a few secondary characters more definition—a spot-on Brooklyn accent for Chili's friend, Tommy, and a self-consciously tough tone for a murderous music manager—this production largely succeeds in rendering Leonard's lively text listless. Based on the Delacorte hardcover (Forecasts, Nov. 16, 1998). (Feb.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Library Journal
Ex-loan-shark-turned-movie-producer Chili Palmer needs a new hit. Get Lost, the sequel to his successful first film Get Leo, tanked at the box office. When a record producer he's power lunching with is gunned down in a Russian mob hit, Chili gets inspired: "You couldn't have the star get popped ten minutes into the picture...but it could be the way to open it. A movie about the music business." Despite being pursued by several assassins (he promises one a screen test), the always unflappable Chili uses his own life to develop his movie, manipulating the people he meets and staging events to see how they would fit in a screenplay. ("I love how you work," studio executive Elaine Levin dryly tells Chili.) Leonard incorporates his trademark black humor, sharp dialog, and eccentric characters into this hilarious follow-up to Get Shorty (Delacorte, 1990); this is one sequel that is as good as the original. One hopes that an expected film version (possibly with John Travolta again) will uphold the high standards set by its cinematic predecessor.-?Wilda Williams, "Library Journal"Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

The New York Times Book Review, Kinky Friedman
There is a fine line between fiction and nonfiction, and Leonard ... has no doubt spent much of his literary life erasing it.

The Wall Street Journal, Tom Nolan
Mr. Leonard is famous for writing brilliantly about Detroit and Miami, but Hollywood--where the novelist has spent many a season turning his books into screenplays--brings out his comic best. This eminently satisfying sequel to Get Shorty may well become a film, but don't wait for the movie. Be cool now.

The New York Times, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt
...thoroughly entertaining.... What's impressive about Be Cool is the number of plot complications Leonard juggles so wittily.

From Booklist
In Get Shorty (1990), Chili Palmer was a Miami loan shark who ventured to the strange land of Los Angeles and stumbled into the movie business. Now, with two movies under his belt, he's looking for another big hit. Both Chili Palmer novels are stories about a guy who converts events in his own life into feature-film fodder, sort of writing a movie as he goes, turning fact into fiction. As good as Get Shorty was--and it was very good--its sequel is better. Chili's new quest for a box-office smash, which involves a beautiful young singer, several shady music-business insiders, and an assortment of villains, reaches a level of comic surrealism that its predecessor only approached. This time, Chili knows from the beginning that he's going to turn his life into a movie. The loan shark turned producer becomes a kind of puppet master, staging real-life events to see how they'd work in a screenplay, orchestrating scenes, manipulating people as though they were big-screen characters. He knows there are folks who want to kill him, but what a movie it will all make--if only he can survive to the fade-out. This is a funnier novel than Get Shorty, too, chock-full of entertainment-industry in-jokes, and with a liberal supply of Leonard's always engaging characters and music-to-the-ears dialogue. With the master's name on it, Be Cool will immediately pole-vault toward the top of most best-seller lists. This one deserves its success. David Pitt

From Kirkus Reviews
Nine years after his farcical conquest of Hollywood in Get Shorty, former loan shark Chili Palmer aims to scale equally unlikely new heights as a music producer. As you'd expect, it all happens more or less by accident. Stung by the failure of Get Lost, the sequel to his triumphant debut, Get Leo, Chili's not sure what story will put him back on top of Hollywood's greasy pole. Should his comeback film be about a rocker like Linda Moon, a singer who works for a dating service, or about a record pro ducer like Chili's acquaintance Tommy Athens? The decision gets complicated when Tommy is executed in the middle of a power lunch with Chili, and when Chili tells Raji, the pimplike manager of Linda's girl group, that Linda is suddenly free to reconvene h er old band Odessa (``AC/DC meets Patsy Cline'') because Chili himself will be managing her from now on. In short order, then, Chili's getting serious homicidal attention from the outraged Raji, his gay Samoan bodyguard, and the shooter who took out Tommy Athensall helping to explain the dead man in Chili's living room. (Raji's hit man, chagrined at having zapped another hit man by mistake, aptly observes that people are lining up to kill this guy.) A lesser executive would be toast. But not Chili, with h is unshakeable confidence and his would-be killers' boundless capacity for self-delusion: he tells one assassin he'll get him a screen test, manufactures for a second the tale of a scam only Chili can straighten out, and puts himself in the middle of a de al a third needs to clinch before he can murder Chili. As the corpses who aren't Chili pile up, Leonard (Cuba Libre, 1998, etc.) tosses off a dozen new spins on Get Shorty's gorgeous premisethat nobody can run the entertainment industry as well as a low-l evel mobster armed with Leonard's endless stream of wisecracksto produce a good-natured thriller as relaxing as it is exhilarating. (Author tour; TV satellite tour) -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

FROM OUR EDITORS

The Barnes & Noble Review
When I first heard that Elmore Leonard was writing a sequel to Get Shorty, I wondered if he saw the irony in such a book. Here was Leonard making fun of Hollywood, yet doing just what Hollywood always does — creating a sequel to a successful property.

Well, not only was Leonard aware of that irony, that irony is the central theme of Be Cool. Our friend Chili Palmer, former gangster, is back in L.A. again, this time in the music business. If there is a business sleazier, dumber, and more duplicitous than the movie business, it's got to be the music business. Chili feels right at home.

The principal story line concerns Chili's attempts to create a hit movie and thus become a major Hollywood player again. But being an ironist — and borrowing a technique from the great Italian playwright Pirandello — Chili begins to see how his own life can become a great movie. Gangsters, music-biz pimps/executives/clowns, luckless bodyguards — the whole sick crew of music biz and movie biz are at his disposal. Some of them love him; some of them want to kill him; sensibly, none of them trust him.

This is Leonard's most overtly comic novel, and certainly one of his most artistically successful. If Evelyn Waugh and Nathanael West had ever collaborated on a novel about La-La-Land, you'd have something like Be Cool.

Like West, Leonard is poised midway between scorn and pity when looking at his own particular ship of fools. I keep thinking of Dennis Farina's performance in Get Shorty. The guy's a jerk and a menace, yet you can't help feeling justabit sorry for him — and the same for the Gene Hackman character — because he's so stupid.

One senses that with this book Leonard has moved beyond the crime novel per se. It'll be interesting to see where he takes us next. I'll probably always be partial to some of his earlier stuff — 52 Pick-UP, Unknown Man No. 89, Valdez Is Coming — but at the same time I have to acknowledge that Leonard is taking the kind of artistic risks few popular novelists would ever dare.

It will also be interesting to see what his innumerable imitators will make of this book. Will they also become dark satirists? One hopes not. Only Elmore Leonard himself could have pulled this novel off. His imitators shouldn't even give it a try. —Ed Gorman

Ed Gorman's latest novels include The Day the Music Died, Daughter of Darkness, Harlot's Moon, and Black River Falls, the latter of which proves "Gorman's mastery of the pure suspense novel," says Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine. ABC-TV has optioned the novel as a movie. Gorman is also the editor of Mystery Scene Magazine, which Stephen King calls "indispensable" for mystery readers.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Get Shorty's Chili Palmer is back. No more Mr. Nice Guy.

SYNOPSIS

The New York Times bestselling author Elmore Leonard is back, and he's brought Get Shorty's Chili Palmer along for the ride. Be Cool is an unforgettable, hilarious and dead-on insider's look at Hollywood as only Leonard could write it.

FROM THE CRITICS

Gary Krist

Say one thing for Elmore Leonard -- the man knows enough not to fool with a sure bet. Take his new novel, Be Cool, the much-anticipated sequel to Get Shorty. Some writers, eager to prove their literary chops, might have followed up a popular success like Shorty with a more inflated and pretentious performance, pushing old characters into new artistic territory. Fortunately, Leonard knew better. Some of his weaker books have been overpraised in the past, but Get Shorty was the real thing, a masterpiece of ironic storytelling. And Leonard, old pro that he is, must have realized that extensive fiddling would only spoil the magic of the original formula. So instead of trying to "grow artistically" (can you imagine what Norman Mailer's Tough Guys Don't Dance II would look like?), he went ahead and wrote the same perfect book all over again. And made it even better the second time around.

For those who might have spent the '90s in a coma in Papua New Guinea, I should explain that Get Shorty was the 1990 novel (and then the 1995 film) that first introduced the world to Chili Palmer, a Miami loan shark who stumbles into the movie business while in Los Angeles trying to collect on a debt. Chili was an inspired comic creation -- an unflappable small-time operator whose Mob-style methods of persuasion proved to be remarkably effective in Hollywood, probably because they represent only a slight exaggeration of the unscrupulous business practices of real industry players. What made Chili so terrifically appealing, though, was his fundamental sweetness. He was a big teddy bear under that iron glance and tough-guy swagger. Leonard has always been adept at creating rogues with charm, but Chili had a kind of knowing innocence that somehow thrived amid the venal insanity of Hollywood, where everybody's got ideas for a movie but few have the power to make one. Chili may not have known the business, but as an ex-shylock he did know how to get people to do what he wanted.

In Be Cool, Chili's back, only now he's a successful Hollywood producer with two films under his belt. As in Get Shorty, he's got a concept for a new movie -- one about the music industry this time -- but no clear plot or ending. And since he can't seem to develop a script by imagination alone, he again has to manipulate characters in his real life to get ideas for his movie ("I'm plotting," he explains at one point as he schemes to get rid of the hit man who's after him). The story line is too convoluted to summarize here, but take my word for it: It's Get Shorty all over again, this time with plenty of cynical details about the popular music business. Chili again plays puppeteer, setting one group of his antagonists against another (here it's the Russian mafia, a rock singer's sleazy manager and a scary hip-hop group instead of Colombian drug lords, crooked limo drivers and an angry Miami gangster). Much good-natured bloodletting ensues, leading one L.A. detective to remark: "My wife wants to know how come I'm putting in so much overtime lately. I told her 'cause Chili Palmer's making a movie."

It's all very deftly done, and -- remarkably -- just as fresh as it was almost a decade ago. The movie version (complete with soundtrack CD) is no doubt already in the works, and I'll be first in line for the premiere. But what I'd really like to see is a third installment of the Palmer saga, in which Chili decides to do a movie about the absurdities of the New York publishing industry. Man, would I have some ideas for him there.
— Salon

John Skow

...[N]onsense of the highest quality. It proves both to scolds who think that funk, grunge and rap and the rest are rhythmic vomiting, and to those who actually like the stuff, that music today is a racket.
— Time Magazine

Esquire

The scandalous funny sequel to Get Shorty.

Los Angeles Times

An exhilarating read.

Wall Street Journal