And the Winner Is ...

When we announced, just over two weeks ago, that The Rap Sheet would hold a contest to give away one signed and numbered copy of Elmore Leonard’s 10 Rules of Writing--which is finally being released today under the William Morrow and Company imprint--we really had no idea how we were going to choose a winner. We finally settled on the concept of a limericks contest, with the book going to the person who sent us the cleverest Leonard-related five-line limerick by this last Saturday, October 27.

As we suggested in our introduction to this contest, “Feel free to integrate the titles of Leonard’s novels or any of his characters into your submission, or you might incorporate one or two of the 10 rules of writing that this author has spelled out before, and about which we assume he has more to say in his forthcoming book. Alternatively, you could set out deliberately to break as many of his rules as possible in your limerick. Anything you can do to make your doggerel distinctly Leonard-esque is fine with us. Extra points will be given for rampant creativity.”

In all, we received 22 submissions. A terrific response. Some of the entries were pretty funny, though a few were overloaded with Leonard book titles (and betrayed little understanding of the author or his work), while others failed to quite capture the precise rhythm of limericks. As one of our judges remarked, “I found myself wanting to rewrite them just to get the rhythm right.”

To help pick a winner, I asked for assistance from two other Rap Sheet contributors: Linda L. Richards, who’s also a novelist and the editor of January Magazine; and Kevin Burton Smith, the creator and editor of The Thrilling Detective Web Site. Individually, we sifted through the submissions, Linda recruiting her partner, graphic designer David Middleton (who reviews art and culture books for January), to help narrow down her choices. In the end, there were three entries that showed up on all of our lists, though not always in the No. 1 position. And from those, I’ve selected the winner. It was sent in by Robert Holland of Toronto, Ontario, Canada, and is entitled “Less Is Elmore”:

At his best, he is not even there.
No descriptions obscure our true care.
All his characters speak
In a voice so unique
That their innermost selves are laid bare.

Publisher HarperCollins, the parent company of William Morrow, should soon be sending Holland a limited-edition copy of Elmore Leonard’s 10 Rules of Writing. We hope he enjoys receiving it as much as we enjoyed giving it away.

Rather than simply dispose of the other entries to this contest, we want to share with you the two runners-up, at least. The first of those comes from Barbara Fister, a novelist (On the Edge) and academic librarian in rural Minnesota. Her entry is called “Elmore Leonard Pens a Break-Out Book”:

When a bullet puts him on the fritz
Vincent Mora relies on his witz.
As soon as he’s able
He goes to the table
And rakes in a helping of Glitz.

“I’m not much for limericks,” Fister admits in an e-mail note, “and I break a lot of the rules, but I find them fun to apply to other people’s writing--especially the ‘try to leave out the parts that readers tend to skip’ one. My appreciation of Leonard started years ago when I picked up a copy of Glitz, which is still one of my favorite books of all time. Killshot is another that is hard to top and has one of the best women protagonists written by a man ever. Leonard is not only a master of understated humor and natural dialogue and the acute detail, like the photo of Jesus that Cruz notices hanging in an apartment in City Primeval (when he shows it to a friend--it’s a photo!--the friend doesn’t get it, but it still cracks me up), but he also has such enormous fondness for all of his characters--the halt, the lame, the wicked, and the truly stupid--that it makes me believe the universe is a more generous place than it appears.”

The second runner-up comes from Michael Chaney, who’s been a criminal defense attorney in Los Angeles for 26 years, and is currently at work on Gator Bait, a novel that he calls “a half-assed rip-off of Elmore Leonard.” Like Holland’s entry, Chaney’s alludes to Leonard’s infamous 10 rules:

Elmore wrote this in red,
“Guy talks, you only use ‘said,’
And never but never
Begin with the weather,
And stay out of the character’s head.”

“I’ve been reading Elmore Leonard since the mid-’80s,” Chaney explains. “I was in a used bookstore on Westwood Boulevard. I picked up a paper copy of Swag and gave it the old first-sentence test and was knocked out. Then [I] read more and couldn’t believe it, the part where Frank’s summer-weight suit is “made out of that material that’s shiny and looks like it has snags in it.” And Frank “has on” a nice smile. I knew more about Frank than most writers could have told me in a long chapter. Pure genius.

“I went on to read all Elmore’s books, some half a dozen times. ...

“Bottom line, for me, Elmore is Hemingway with humor, plus more interesting characters and much better dialogue. He’s written a dozen flat-out masterpieces. Why hasn’t he won the Nobel Prize?”

We want to thank everyone who participated in this contest. And we look forward sometime to reading Elmore Leonard’s 10 Rules of Writing ourselves. Funny thing: Even though we have now given away a copy of this brand-new work, the book has not yet shown up in The Rap Sheet’s mailbox. Go figure.