Decision 2007

Entries to The Rap Sheet’s Elmore Leonard Limericks Contest continue to trickle in. The winner, who’ll be sent a free signed copy of the forthcoming volume Elmore Leonard’s 10 Rules of Writing, will be announced a week from today, on October 30. To be considered, original limericks must be e-mailed to jpwrites@sprynet.com by this coming Saturday, October 27.

Meanwhile, we’re launching a poll to see what our readers think about Leonard’s past literary output. In the right-hand column on this page, you’ll find a silver-shaded box headlined, “Which Are Your Favorite Elmore Leonard Crime Novels?” Because he has penned more than three dozen novels since the early 1950s, we have narrowed the choices down to those books which are obviously crime fiction, or can arguably be defined as such. That still leaves 30 choices, which we’ve broken down into two parts.

If the Pollhost technology works as it’s designed to do, every time you click over to The Rap Sheet, you will be shown an alternate half of our survey, featuring 15 titles. Feel free to vote for as many or as few of Leonard’s novels as you wish. And you can vote on multiple days, though only once per day in each half of this poll. If you need to remind yourself of what individual books were about (believe us, we know how easy it is to forget such things), refer to Fantastic Fiction’s Elmore Leonard page.

This survey will remain open until next Wednesday, October 31. We’ll announce the top vote-getters later that week.