Real Tinsel

By John Skow

GET SHORTY by Elmore Leonard

Delacorte; 292 pages; $18.95

When Elmore Leonard writes a thriller called Get Shorty, you know he's going to get Shorty. Leonard does not fool around. It does occur to the reader, a couple of pages before the end of the last chapter, that no character named Shorty has yet appeared. But Leonard is our funniest and most reliable folklorist of low, middle and upper-middle lowlife -- the kind of human lint that accumulates in society's navel. He knows his business, doesn't he?

Sure he does. Shorty will turn up any moment now. In the meantime, as in all his novels, Leonard has introduced us to a few friends. Whodunit is not the issue, because almost everyone in the book is indictable for some villainy. The question is how much trouble the hero, a semiadmirable Miami loan shark named Chili Palmer, will bring down on his head by his squabble with a syndicate wide-body named Bones. A lot, is the answer. Bones walked off with Chili's leather jacket, and Chili, quite reasonably, punched Bones out and shot a crease in his scalp.

This caused Bones to become surly, and Chili, a man of peace, decides it is time to clear out of Miami. He follows a welsher to Los Angeles and, in the process of collecting some money he is owed, becomes fascinated by the movie business. He wants to direct films, of course, and he has an idea for a script about a good-looking, sympathetic loan shark. The author's lovely, slightly malicious joke (Leonard has worked in Hollywood) is that among the movie town's barracudas, electric eels and ink-ejecting squid, a loan shark fits right in. Chili clearly has a great future, despite a disagreement with his prospective film's star, a handsome fellow of towering ego but -- got it! -- small stature. Finally meeting Shorty is one of the summer's real pleasures.