"So he's in this treatment you're living?," a character asks Chili Palmer, the unflappable Miami shylock turned Hollywood movie producer in Be Cool, Elmore Leonard's colorful and often ingenious sequel to Get Shorty. When he needs material for a new project, Palmer, a big believer in authenticity, engages in what could best be described as method screenwriting, involving himself in a real-life situation, pitting its shady cast of characters against each other, and leading the story to a satisfying—and presumably bankable—conclusion. What better way for Leonard to send up a culture in which everything becomes grist for the movie industry and anyone can be seduced by the faintest whiff of fame? Palmer gets a slam-bang opening scene when a lunch-hour meeting with a crooked record executive ends with his companion getting shot in the head by a Russian gangster. From there, he finds his protagonist, a tough-minded Texan songstress whose country-tinged rock band (described as "AC/DC meets Patsy Cline") can't get off the ground until she wrests herself from a long-term contract doing Spice Girls covers for an erstwhile pimp. Intrigued by the music industry, Palmer takes over management duties and soon becomes the target of Russian baddies and the pimp's 260-pound Samoan bodyguard. Be Cool doesn't deviate much from the Get Shorty formula, but Chili Palmer is a sturdy character: He's a supremely confident hero in a hostile environment, like a more talkative version of "The Man With No Name" in Yojimbo and Sergio Leone's spaghetti Westerns. Now 35 novels into his career, Leonard has long since mastered the no-nonsense, economical style of the crime genre: "They made love and it went well" is all he says and needs to say about one romantic encounter. But unlike such past greats as James M. Cain or Jim Thompson, or contemporary ones like James Ellroy, Leonard isn't interested in plumbing America's sinister underbelly so much as viewing it from a skewed, gently ironic perspective. His breezily entertaining twist on dark material has suddenly made him cachet in the current Hollywood, and Be Cool, a hardcover screenplay, should be easily translated into another fine movie.