Puppies. Ice Cream. World Peace. Elmore Leonard. Even if you wanted to, what could you say bad about them?

Mr. Leonard’s new book, “The Hot Kid” (William Morrow, 312 pages, $25.95) is just out. I read it last weekend because I love his stuff and wanted to tell everyone about it, but it’s too late. It’s already agreed, by one and all, to be another masterpiece. Well, of course it is. That’s what he writes. He makes it look as easy as Sunday morning. Trying to find a flaw in the novel – indeed, in almost anything he’s written during the past half-century – is as futile as hammering cold iron.

In case you’ve been out of the country or in a coma for the past couple of weeks, here’s what “The Hot Kid” is about – though that’s usually the least important part of Mr. Leonard’s books.

Unlike most of his crime novels, “The Hot Kid” is not set in contemporary Detroit or Florida, places he’s lived (though he was born in New Orleans). Instead, it’s an old-fashioned gangster story from the Golden Age of famous and colorful (at least in newspaper accounts) bad men, when John Dillinger, Ma Barker and her boys, Bonnie and Clyde, Baby Face Nelson, and others like them were robbing banks all across America – frequently to the delight of the public, who blamed those institutions for many of their problems during the Depression.

Carlos Webster is a young boy when he witnesses a robber shoot dead a lawman who had his back turned. When he tells the story to U.S. marshals, he admires how cool they are when they catch the bad guy, and he decides to become one himself. In fact, he decides to become the most famous lawman in America, though he’s far from fanatical about following the law to the letter himself.

A young woman named Louly Brown falls for him, though she wants everybody to think she’s the girlfriend of Pretty Boy Floyd. Carlos, now known as Carl, needs to capture Jack Belmont (whose dream is to be Public Enemy No. 1) and put him away. First, though, he has to protect him from Nestor Lott, a former FBI agent who has decided that the only way to clean up his region is through vigilante justice, abetted by a coterie of Klansmen.

There are some good shootouts, but, as always, the great joy of the novel is the smooth, unhurried, dead-on dialogue and the characters you get to know so well in a page or two that you feel as if they’ve been the main focus of the narrative. And always the names are just right.

Long ago, heavily influenced by Ernest Hemingway, Mr. Leonard analyzed “For Whom the Bell Tolls” to see how Hemingway approached a scene, how the manner in which characters talked showed a great deal about who they were, and how the brevity of the dialogue kept the momentum at a desirable level. He soon realized, however, that his attitude was very different from that of his literary hero: He liked people more and was more tolerant – a trait as obvious in his real life as it is in his books.

A brief personal anecdote, if you’ll indulge me. Back in 1981 I read “Split Images” and thought it was the coolest book I’d read in a long time. I then read Mr. Leonard’s novel of the previous year, “City Primeval,” and immediately called his publisher to see if there was a chance I could get this amazing writer (who I’d just discovered, though he’d been writing for more than a quarter-century) to my bookshop to do an autographing event. They said okay and flew him to New York.

I was pretty new to this whole book business and looked again at the dust jacket. I saw an author photo of a very tough-looking guy squinting at the camera, basically saying: If you mess with me, I’ll slit your throat from ear to ear, and I won’t spill a drop of my drink while I’m doing it. Waiting for him to arrive, I was as nervous as a high school kid meeting his girlfriend’s parents for the first time.

The first thing he did was stick out his hand, thank me for the invitation, and say it was the first signing he’d ever done outside of his hometown. As he left, he put his arm around my shoulder. The next year, I took a picture of the toughest writer in America hanging an ornament on my Christmas tree.

The point is, Mr. Leonard really does like people, including the car thieves, whores, shooters, pimps, and the whole gallery of crooks who populate his novels.

And the dialogue is as real as a punch in the face. I mean, I think it is. I once congratulated him for getting so pitch-perfect a conversation between some drug dealers belonging to a particular minority group (I can’t remember which). He said, “How do you know?” He pointed out that I don’t hang around with guys like that, and neither does he. He makes it up.

Mr. Leonard is famous for his 10 rules of writing (“Never start with weather”; “Leave out the parts that people skip”; “Don’t use a semicolon in dialogue.”) But earlier in his career, he had a three-rule plan, and he continues to use it: “Get it right”; “Let it happen”; “Be natural.” Another rule might be “Don’t waste good stuff.” Chapter five of “The Hot Kid” is an almost exact transcription of a wonderful short story, “Louly and Pretty Boy,” which he wrote for an anthology, “Dangerous Women” (The Mysterious Press, 363 pages, $13.95), which came out in January.

For me to praise the work of Elmore Leonard is less necessary than a fourth tenor, so just reward yourself for something and get a copy of this impeccable crime novel.

But look again at the author photo on the back panel, and consider something maybe you didn’t know. You’re looking at one of the nicest people on the planet, a man more tender than the filet mignon at Peter Luger’s, warmer than Dante’s eighth circle of Hades, but cooler than New Year’s Eve in Bangor, Maine.

Mr. Penzler is the proprietor of the Mysterious Bookshop in Manhattan and the series editor of the annual “Best American Mystery Stories.” He can be reached at openzler@nysun.com.