A funeral was held earlier today for
Elmore Leonard, the acclaimed Detroit, Michigan-area crime novelist who
died this last Tuesday at age 87.
Detroit Free Press staff reporter Jim Schaefer
explains that Leonard’s Mass included “tears and laughter, and military honors for his time in the Navy during World War II.” He adds:
About 325 people gathered inside Holy Name Catholic Church in Birmingham on Saturday morning to say good-bye. The listeners included longtime friend Mike Lupica, a sportswriter and novelist, and Timothy Olyphant, an actor in the FX TV series “Justified,” which is based on Leonard’s works.
“Elmore truly was gifted with creativity, skill and talent,” the Rev. Joe Grimaldi said during his homily. “The twinkle in his eye showed he also enjoyed having fun.”
Fun was certainly had as well by Leonard’s millions of devoted readers. In Part II of The Rap Sheet’s tribute to this late author, posted below, we offer more than two dozen recollections of his work, as well as thoughts on his legacy, contributed by novelists and critics both. Part I of our feature can be enjoyed
here.
Again, Rap Sheet readers may add their own thoughts on Leonard’s life and work in the Comments section at the end of this post.
Back in the early ’80s, before I’d published my first novel,
I wrote Elmore Leonard a fan letter. In it I told him about my experience with
teaching
LaBrava
(1983) in a university class and how delighted I was to find that a novel I
loved also stood up to critical analysis. We’d spent a lot of time in class
dissecting the book’s techniques. I mentioned we were particularly impressed
with his use of black-and-white image patterns that recurred throughout the
novel (which in part has to do with black-and-white movies and black-and-white
photographs and black and white people). I was speaking as a fan and as a
professor of English, and I really expected no response. However, a few weeks
later I received a very gracious note from Elmore thanking me for my comments
and expressing his gratitude that someone was teaching his novels in a
literature class. But then he went on to say that he didn’t think he’d do very
well in that course, because he had no idea in hell what an image pattern was.
Ah, yes, one of Dutch’s classic zingers.
Years later he wrote a wonderful blurb for my first novel, and afterwards we
were thrown together on several occasions and got to know each other fairly
well. At some point I learned that he’d incorporated my long-ago fan-boy letter
to him in his “funny letters speech” that he gave regularly at libraries and on
book tours. I was honored to have become a butt of Dutch’s jokes.
Whether or not Dutch Leonard was actually aware of the
literary substance of his own work, we’ll never know for sure. But there’s a
lot of evidence that he was quite a student of literature and read widely not
just in the crime-fiction genre. To retain his blue-collar reputation, though,
he couldn't admit to any of that. One of his friends and contemporaries,
Bob
Parker, had a Ph.D. in literature, but he rarely discussed that phase of
his life and was happy to project the leather jacket version of himself. I
think Dutch was cut from the same cloth as Parker. Every bit as smart and just
as funny, and a writer who based many of his aesthetic values on Hemingway’s
muscular, minimalist prose. A writer’s writer. A man who spawned a thousand
painfully inadequate imitators.
But as they say in the sports world, you can’t teach
quickness. In Dutch’s case, he’d mastered the poetic cadence of speech as only
someone with a great ear can do. He often cited
George
V. Higgins as an influence on his dialogue and you can hear that, of
course. But Dutch pushed into new territory. That dialogue in
LaBrava and
Stick and most of his best books is the heart and soul of the work.
The characters come alive and inhabit three-dimensional worlds in large part
because they talk with such crunchy energy. No one really talks that way. But
everyone, in a perfect world, should.
Dutch was one of the greats. That goes without saying, but
let’s say it. He made me smile more times per book than almost any other
author. Now, a smile isn’t always what you’re looking for from a book, but
sometimes it is, and when it is you could never go wrong pulling an Elmore
Leonard book off the shelf.
His sentences, his dialogue--it’s all been written about, to
death. It’s like writing about a soufflé. You can say light, you can say airy,
but the only thing that means a damn is when you put a forkful in your mouth.
Dutch’s books were delicious. Are
delicious. But it hurts to know that we’ve
tasted a new one for the last time.
I remember the first time I read
Gold Coast and
Stick and
Swag.
Max Phillips
introduced me to them. He loved them and knew I would too. He was right.
When Max and I started Hard Case Crime, Dutch was one of the
first people I reached out to. Could he maybe write us a book? How about
letting us reprint one of the two or three of his that were then out of print?
No and no. But he wrote back and shared his memories of the period that
inspired us, his thoughts about some of the guys we were thinking of
reprinting--Erle Stanley Gardner, John D. MacDonald. More recently he found out
about our friends the
Outdoor
Co-Ed Topless Pulp Fiction Appreciation Society and sent them a huge crate
full of his books, which they then
spent
weeks devouring on the grass in New York’s Central Park. Topless. With cops
watching from a few yards away, or pretending not to watch, then coming over to
banter nervously with the girls. It was a perfect Elmore Leonard scene.
The leader of that merry band tells me that Dutch took a
photo of himself wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the OCTPFAS logo and a photo
of a buxom dame unencumbered by brassiere. He indicated that they were not to
publish it, not to share it on their blog. She keeps it as a cherished memento.
What have I got? Three dozen books and memories of reading
them that I wouldn't swap for anything in this world or the next.
Good-bye, Dutch. You were the best.
Elmore Leonard was the last of my writing heroes to go. I
met
Donald E. Westlake a couple of times, and I just
missed meeting
Ross
Thomas when he died before a mystery conference at which he was to be the
guest of honor. I’ve been influenced by lots of crime writers, but those three
gentlemen are the ones who inspired me most.
I met Elmore Leonard one time, and I had to finagle that. I
was at the 2000 Bouchercon in Denver where he unveiled his “
10
Rules of Writing,” and I tried all weekend to get a moment with the guest
of honor. He was always surrounded by adoring fans and authors. Finally,
running out of time, I barged into the green room shortly before he was to
scheduled to take part in a panel discussion. I knew the moderator and she
looked the other way while I had my five minutes with Dutch. We chatted mostly
about movies made from his books (he didn’t really like
any of them), but I did get the chance to tell him how much I
admired and emulated his work. He was gracious and friendly.
I’ve read all of his books, some of them multiple times, and his deadpan
dialogue and straightforward storytelling never fail to grab me. Want to see
what I mean? Read
Killshot. Read
Rum Punch. Read
Get Shorty. See if they don’t change the way you look at fiction.
They sure did it for me.
As a teenager, I pretty much jumped straight from Lord of the Rings to reading Elmore
Leonard, and suffice it to say, I never went back to anything that had dragons
and elves in it. I think I started with Swag
and Unknown Man #89, and went
from there. His books were so immediate and engaging, so uncluttered and
fast-paced, and of course, I was blown away by the brilliance of Leonard’s
dialogue. He did everything with dialogue; every conversation, a master
class.
I was lucky enough to get to hang out with him a few years back, over a weekend
at a French crime festival. Faced with my gushing fan-boy gibbering, he was
gracious and funny. I enjoyed listening to him crack sly, dry jokes that few of
the French people in his audience understood. I was struck by his laid-back and
modest attitude to his books; an approach that to me is typical of all the
writers I admire and none more so than with him. He clearly took the work
seriously, but not so much himself.
Of course he’ll be remembered for an immense body of work; the Westerns and the
crime novels. But he was also brilliant at writing about writing. His
“10 Rules” should be compulsory reading for all writers. They should be nailed
above the desk of everyone who so much as calls him- or herself a
writer. The simple profundity of “Try to avoid the parts readers tend to skip”
is hard to top. And he knew what he was talking about, because who the hell
ever skipped a word of an Elmore Leonard novel?
Mention Elmore Leonard’s name to authors who don’t write
crime fiction, and they remember
his
2001 New York Times piece. “Oh,
he’s the one who hates hooptedoodle, right?” That’s usually followed by a rule
remembered (impressively) by number, or they paraphrase the final rule: “Didn’t
he say to not write the things that people don’t want to read?” He did not. Or
rather, he did essentially say that, only he said it better. In fewer words.
And with more panache.
That’s what Leonard always did. He said it better than you or I ever could--and
in fewer words--and he made it look like he was strolling along on a Sunday
while he did it. He made it look easy, is what I’m saying. He made it feel
easy.
His summarizing paragraph in that
Times
essay explains that feeling of ease. Among other things, he said that “if
proper usage gets in the way, it may have to go. I can’t allow what we learned
in English composition to disrupt the sound and rhythm of the narrative. It’s
my attempt to remain invisible, not distract the reader from the story with
obvious writing.”
And you and I? We try to do that. Sometimes we try real hard. And maybe (as I
do) we have Leonard’s “10 Rules of Writing” pinned up somewhere in our office,
to help us get there more smoothly while not “perpetrating hooptedoodle,” the
named and most deadly sin.
Leonard did it every time, with no effort that we could see. In more than a
score of books, he brought us effortless, edge-of-seat pleasure and, in his
spare time, he tried to help us do that, too.
Leonard’s influence on his craft will be felt for all time, that’s what I
think. He taught us with his words about writing, sure. But he also instructed
us with the writing itself: clean, sharp, tight, and deeply engaging. His
lessons all live on.
Elmore Leonard was one of the few
crime writers who reinvented the genre. He avoided elaborate plotting and
instead told stories through the development of quirky characters and witty
dialogue. His achievements seem all the more
remarkable, as he followed simple rules about writing: “Try to
leave out the parts that people skip.” The immediacy of his writing often gave
the impression that he was talking to you directly. He took the role of
entertaining the reader very seriously, and he never shortchanged you on
violence, thrills, or humor. Novels such as 52 Pick-Up (1974) and The
Switch (1978) were eye-openers to me. He could keep you on the edge of
your seat till the very last sentence of a novel. Leonard’s narratives were not
intricately plotted; they resembled more of a series of loosely connected
violent events. In the last line of the stunning thriller Cat Chaser (1982),
lead character George Moran asks himself, “Boy, what next?” Leonard’s thrilling
concision had me asking the same question.
Some authors grasp for profound
meaning in their writing as they grow in stature. Elmore Leonard ranked among
the greatest of modern writers because he never forgot that his ultimate job
was to tell stories: and what an incredible legacy of great stories he has left
us.
Elmore Leonard was fun to read--Get Shorty is probably my favorite of his novels--but I also
enjoyed his “Rules of Writing.” I’m sure he recognized that the only rule is
that there are no rules, but you have to be an exceptional writer to ignore
some of his tips. Above all, he was right to say that it’s best to “eave out
the part that readers tend to skip.” There are plenty of good books that would
be even better if they didn’t contain stuff that is skippable. But if you
skipped an Elmore Leonard, you were missing a treat.
It was 25 years ago that a friend of mine, who was writing a
series of crime novels, looked at some travel stories of mine and said, “You
should write crime and the writer you should read is Elmore Leonard.” The first
book I read was Stick and from the
moment I read the first line I was hooked, and I read the entire Elmore Leonard
canon. Like Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett before him, he took crime
fiction to another literary level. He made me into an evangelist. My
father-in-law, a famous screenwriter with a profound interest in dialogue,
became a huge fan of Leonard’s as did many of my other friends, even those who
had no interest in crime fiction. He is one of the few writers who make you
feel that you’re not reading writing. You are so forcibly embraced by story and
character that you enter into a domain that’s more powerful than cinema,
because it becomes your world. Your are living it. You are in the heads of the
characters. There is no distraction. It offers the complete experience. He is
unparalleled in the crime fiction world.
Max Allan Collins, author of the Nate Heller series (Target Lancer), the latest Mike Hammer novel, Complex 90 (with Mickey Spillane), and the forthcoming
thriller What Doesn't Kill Her:
Elmore Leonard signed a paperback edition of
The Big Bounce for me at a long-ago (probably 1977) Bouchercon, commenting that he’d walked out of
the movie
version. I didn’t have the heart to tell him I’d liked it. After all, few novelists had a better feel for movies than Leonard, whose stripped-down no-nonsense style reflected storytelling abilities found in his own screenplays and works of his that had become films (including
The Big Bounce ... I bet he didn’t like
the second
version, either).
Leonard, when I encountered him on perhaps half a dozen occasions, was always good-humored and kind. He was a pro who had seen Westerns go away and replaced them with crime fiction, but there was always a gritty, Wild West nature to his stories. He cared much more about character and the dialogue that builds it than plot, and he helped crime fiction grow up into something less genre-bound. He brought humor to the work without losing any of a crime story’s nasty spine. I have always protested his “10 Rules of Writing,” because they are designed to make you write like Elmore Leonard, and (I have said) we already have one of those. We still do.
The first Elmore Leonard book I read was
Cat Chaser, followed quickly by
Unknown Man #89,
52 Pick-Up,
Glitz,
Bandits,
Valdez Is Coming, and so many others.
Two elements I’ve noticed. The first is that his stories usually have people
who want to reinvent themselves. It’s an American kind of story, dating back to
Gatsby and probably even further.
What is it about that theme that is so attractive?
So many of Leonard’s heroes
are trying to re-imagine themselves. Think Chili Palmer, Karen Sisco, Jack
Foley, George Moran, Vincent Mora, Stick--the list goes on.
The second element is the dimensional nature of his characters--there’s
something incredibly free about Leonard’s people. As if Leonard were directing
a play and his characters were somehow like actors. The director has told them
to improvise, so long as they stay in character. The result? As I go deeper into
a Leonard book, I find I can’t say for sure which way a character will jump, I
can’t predict what he or she might do next. Yet, when they do it, it feels
unexpected, and at the same time inevitable. And above all else, I can believe
this character would make that decision. That’s because Elmore Leonard wrote
about complex, believable people. He was the kind of writer you trusted. The
kind you’d follow anywhere.
Most people knew Elmore Leonard from Get Shorty or Justified,
or Be Cool or Bandits, so this may surprise you, me being a crime writer, but my
favorites are his Westerns. Not to say I don’t love the quirky, violent, funny
crime novels that made him famous--I do--but I discovered him way back in my
teenage years through cheesy, stained, secondhand paperback copies of Hombre and Valdez Is Coming, bought for 17 cents each (I still have them) at
the same used bookstore in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, where I discovered Raymond
Chandler.
Now, after the news of his passing, I can’t stop thinking
about those days when I was a young, wannabe writer reading those paperbacks.
And then Leonard became a star, the hippest of the hip, the very definition of
lit cool ... only, that was stuff others put on him. Elmore Leonard was the
real deal, a blue-collar writer who went to work every day, and worked every
day of his life. No pretensions, no B.S., no attitude--he was totally cool, all
right, but not because of John Travolta or Annie Leibowitz or Quentin
Tarantino. He was cool because Dutch was a writer who did his own thing, his
own way, and he was--and remains--a helluva inspiration.
I thought Elmore Leonard was going to live forever. He had
survived the jungles of pulp fiction to swagger across the best-seller lists,
but, of course, sooner or later every writer’s typewriter goes cold. I
interviewed him on my mystery-author radio show back in 2002, when
Tishomingo
Blues was originally published. It was the first book of his I’d read.
He asked me to call him Dutch, an address that sounded as if we were old
friends. He sounded as happy to be on the show as I was to have him: relaxed
but to the point. I asked what advice he had for beginning writers, and he said,
“Read all you can and never use exclamation points.” Thinking of his books, I
can’t believe how much he could get out of so little. His prose made it clear
that superior technique stated a point with concision and clarity, and that
there’s more elegance and poetry in directness than in complication. That his
books translate wonderfully to movies should give everyone hope.
A couple
of years ago, I was on a panel at the Tucson Festival of Books, and in the
second row, I was being eyeballed by this old fella. It didn’t matter what I
said, I couldn’t get a rise out of him. Not even a glimmer of a smile. Just
this dead-eye, poker-player stare. Thirty minutes into the panel, it hits him.
That stone-faced, old bugger is Elmore Leonard. I’ll admit I freaked out at
this point. I’m trying to be funny and charming and hopefully entertaining,
talking about thrillers and crime when the grandmaster of crime is sitting
right there. There was only one thing I could do: raise my game. I never got a
smile, but he didn’t walk out either--so I consider that a win.
Thinking
about his books today, I managed to finally nail down what they meant to me.
Through his characters he illustrated the struggles of staying on the right
side of the law. Whether it was good guys or bad guys, you witnessed the levels
his characters went to--and they came in all shades. We could all have sympathy
for a devil like Jack Foley (Out of Sight)
and his various schemes, but we couldn’t for the dark and twisted Armand Degas
(Killshot). Even his heroes had their
problems. Raylan Givens is a lawman who worked his own brand of justice. Poor
Harry Mitchell (52 Pick-Up) was a
product of his own mistakes and had to suffer for them. You could say Elmore
Leonard wrote about good guys and bad guys. But he didn’t. He wrote about
people and their personal morality--for better or worse. That’s Elmore’s human
touch.
Elmore Leonard was a master
craftsman long before he had that epiphany after reading George V. Higgins’
classic novel, The
Friends of Eddie Coyle, and decided he had found the true path to
writing novels. He made some adjustments to his style. He brought his Westerns
into the present day. Then he did what he did better than even Higgins could.
Since then, 
generations of writers have learned from him and will continue to
learn from him. His influence runs deep. There are legions of Leonard
imitators, some good, some bad. But you can spot them a mile away. They cannot
do it better.
I can’t pick a favorite book of
Leonard’s. There are so many great ones. But the one I think of most often is
probably City Primeval: High Noon in
Detroit (1980). If any book ever screamed “urban Western,” this was it.
From the title to the very last, dry line. Funny, lean and brutal, it's prime
Leonard. It’s a book of his I don’t see mentioned that often, probably because
there was no film made from it. Fifteen years ago or so I asked him about the
movie rights to that book. He said MGM held it captive in a safe and it would
take a master boxman and an army of lawyers to get it away from them. Too bad.
I’d like to see that flick. But it probably wouldn’t hold a candle to the
original book. Few of his film adaptations did, but they were always
interesting to watch, if for no other reason than to see how Hollywood could
mess up a good thing. The ones that were the best were those that tampered with
the material the least. I saw [screenwriter] Scott Frank and Dutch at a book
festival in Santa Barbara not long after Get
Shorty was released. Dutch read a chapter from the book, then they showed
the scene in the movie that was based on the chapter. The dialogue was
verbatim. The audience began laughing halfway through, because it didn’t appear
that anything had been changed from the book. Afterwards, Frank was red-faced
and said adapting Leonard was really more like transcribing than writing. But
what most people in the room didn’t realize was that Scott Frank had finally
figured out what so many screenwriters before him had not understood: the best
way to adapt Elmore Leonard is to stay as close to the book as possible. It
seems simple enough, but in Hollywood this is rare thinking indeed.
Another great book of his that I
don’t hear mentioned often enough is Maximum Bob
(1991). There is a bit in it that I always remember when anyone ever talks
about action as character. A cop has been killed in a barbershop by the
not-so-smart bad guy. The cop’s love interest, a probation officer, remembers
him telling the bad guy about his gun philosophy during an earlier encounter:
“If I pull it, I shoot it.” The cop’s unfired gun was found in his dead hand in
the barbershop. He had pulled it, but he had pulled it too late. The bad guy
knew he would have to surprise the cop to kill him. And now the probation
officer knew she couldn’t make the same mistake of not having a gun in her own
hand when she next encountered the bad guy. So much said with so few words.
Magic.
The wonderful thing about Elmore Leonard’s writing is how
unobtrusive it is ... it gets out of the way and puts you right there with the
characters. And oh, what great characters they are, each one every bit as rich
and complex as those in “literary fiction,” emerging through action and
dialogue rather than belabored, self-conscious prose. He knew the power of
simplicity and humor to convey character, ethical issues, and the often
contradictory impulses that shape what we do. His characters are never simply
good or bad. Even the most vicious sociopath in one of his stories can be
surprisingly likable, gentle, and polite in certain situations. His cops and
marshals were often more bloodthirsty and lawless than the criminals they
pursued. Nobody was simply a good guy or a bad guy in an Elmore Leonard story.
I return to his books not just for the pleasure of a great story well told, but
to learn how to say more with less (something I’ve failed to do here) and to
use humor to reveal character.
I was lucky enough to meet him on two occasions, and I’d
intended both times to tell him how much his writing meant to me, but that’s
not what ended up happening. We didn’t talk about writing at all. We shared a
few Hollywood anecdotes, but mostly we just chatted about this and that.
Amusing, time-passing small talk. In some ways, that was more gratifying and
revealing than me gushing over him or grilling him. The easy familiarity he
could create in person was the same experience he created in his books. I
realized that his writing talent came naturally, that it wasn’t so much a skill
as it was an outgrowth of who he was. And that, in itself, was a writing lesson
... and maybe a life lesson, too.
I felt cooler every time I read an Elmore Leonard novel. And
when I was lucky enough to meet him, I felt grateful. He was one of the very
best, in every way.
Stephen Miller, contributor to The Rap Sheet:
Elmore Leonard gave me my love of crime fiction.
Despite being a fairly voracious reader even as a young boy,
my tastes had always been safe and predictable. My great aunt loved Agatha
Christie, so being a dutiful kid, I read a lot of Christie, particularly the
stories involving the Belgian detective my sister called “Pirate.” My father
adored Dashiell Hammett, so I read The
Maltese Falcon, not really understanding it at the time, but loving the
dialogue. I took a class in mystery fiction during my sophomore year at Indiana
University, during which I was introduced to Dorothy L. Sayers, Georges
Simenon, and Wilkie Collins. I enjoyed them all. But, looking back from the
distance of more than 30 years, they now seem middlebrow and a bit stale. And
they certainly didn’t arouse a passion for the genre.
Then, one day I was in the student union and walked over to
the magazine section. There on the cover of
Newsweek was a crime writer I had never heard of before with a bizarre first name. The article coincided with the publication of
Glitz (1985), and the cover
photo featured the classic Elmore Leonard stare. His eyes stared right at the camera as though he was interrogating the viewer. A cigarette dangled from one hand. I seem to recall the cover photo showing
Leonard wearing a turtleneck and sports jacket. I had to learn about this guy.
I bought the issue immediately, took it back to my dorm
room, and inhaled it. The cover story featured an interview with Leonard to be
sure, but it also mentioned several other writers whose names were totally
unfamiliar to me--Donald E. Westlake,
Arthur
Lyons, and Ross Thomas. There were others, but those are the three I
remember now. These authors not only had the total essence of cool, but they
possessed voices that seemed fresh, knowing, and more than a little irreverent.
These were writers I just had to read.
Over the next several weeks, and after a number of trips to
off-campus used bookstores, I made serious headway with these new writers. And
despite occasional detours into other types of reading whenever obsessions
develop, I always return to crime fiction. I don’t believe that would have been
the case if Elmore Leonard hadn’t appeared in my line of sight back then. The
man introduced me to a type of sensibility that stuck. I wouldn’t have become
the reader I am without him.
Elmore Leonard’s great talent was his ability to tell a
thrilling, pacy story in a realistic manner, and to tell it quickly. He always
said “Leave out the bits that readers skip,” and although that sounds like
common sense, very few writers manage it, and none as effectively as Leonard.
He was an original, clever storyteller and his pioneering use of dialogue
(i.e., actually writing it as people say it) has been a huge influence on
modern writers everywhere. He’ll be sorely missed, but never forgotten.
I think the Elmore Leonard books that affected the most were
the Detroit novels, especially 52 Pick-Up and City Primeval. This
is partly because I lived across the river in Windsor, Ontario, for a while and
knew the place quite well, but it was also the first time I'd been exposed to
such tight, thrilling, pared-down writing since I first read Chandler and
Hammett. I was fortunate enough to meet “Dutch” a couple of times at
conventions and to interview him for a Toronto magazine. He was a real
gentleman and a fascinating interviewee. We talked for ages longer than
necessary. His “10 Rules” are a must for every writer to try and break
successfully! He's a great loss to the crime-writing community.
I’m more familiar with Elmore Leonard through the movies
based upon his incredibly fine work, and quite probably through the writing of
a generation of authors inspired by his work. Sadly, I never met Leonard in
person, and am saddened that I will not now get the opportunity. It’s probably
time for me to go read some of his acclaimed backlist and get to know him
through his writing.
I never had the pleasure of meeting Elmore Leonard, but he
is (and continues to be, even after his passing) one of those authors whose
voice was so gripping that you felt he was in the room with you. By
coincidence, I’ve been watching the end of the third season of
Justified
on Greek TV these days, so he was already in my mind.
Of course, we all rave about his dialogue, which is indeed
unsurpassable in the genres he wrote in. But I think it’s easy to overlook that
he was a great comic writer too, even if the humor was dark--the way I like
it--and intercut with sudden violence. He was unusually blessed in recent years
by fine screen versions of his works, but the novels
Rum Punch,
Out of Sight,
and
Get Shorty remain superior to the
movies because of his unique style. Hats off to him, too, for writing out of
his comfort zone.
Djibouti
was a late-career surprise. I raise several glasses to him.
Of course, I am among those who somehow just assumed that
Dutch would always be with us ... as his work always will be. He was more than
generous to me and to every writer whom I know who followed in his footsteps.
Rarely is there a person of such talent who is as giving of his time to others.
He was as much a delight as a person as he was as a writer.
The first book I read of his was
Mr. Majestyk--it was well before his glory days, but I still
remember the book with fondness: I mean, who else could pull off a thriller
about a melon farmer up against the system? But it was
Stick that convinced me that Elmore Leonard was the real deal:
a master of character, dialogue, and plot who just happened to like working the
mystery-thriller vein. Any writer in any genre can learn from this master of
economy and precision.
Last thing: I love that Dutch was quietly proud of his work
and took it seriously. I introduced him once a few years back and got to the
point where I said, “author of 25 books ...,” at which point there was an
“Ahem” from the front row. I looked up to see Dutch with his hand raised.
“That’s 27, matter of fact,” he
said quietly.
Elmore “Dutch” Leonard was one of the giants of crime
fiction. While his legacy is as great as those of James M. Cain or Raymond
Chandler or Dashiell Hammett or
Ross
Macdonald, he did not write like any of them. He wasn’t striving for
the perfect metaphor. He never tried to dazzle with clever writing. He didn’t
contrive complicated plots. I’d be surprised if he did much plotting at all.
What he did do, in book after book, was throw a bunch of interesting characters
together and waited to see what would happen.
That’s the key. Elmore Leonard’s spare writing, his
economical use of language, was his genius. Less is more.
Consider the following paragraph, in its entirety, from Riding
the Rap: “Raylan got ready.”
This follows a long stretch of dialogue from a prisoner, Dale
Crowe Junior, who Deputy U.S. Marshal Raylan Givens is transporting to another
facility. Crowe is rambling on about how he could end up doing five years for
nothing more than a busted taillight.
And then comes that three-word paragraph.
Here’s what it tells you. It tells you Crowe’s jabbering is
intended as a distraction. It tells you he’s getting ready to get the jump on
Raylan. It tells you Raylan is on to him. It tells you Raylan’s waiting for
Crowe to make his move, and when he does, he’s going to be sorry.
All that, in three words.
You have to be an absolute genius to get that much out of
that little. I’m really going to miss Elmore Leonard.
Nancie Clare, co-founder of Noir Magazine and the former editor-in-chief of LA, The Los Angeles Times Magazine:
If you are a fan of mystery fiction--no wait, a fan of fiction--who is lucky, you came to Elmore Leonard’s novels and short stories early in your reading life
rather than later.
For a brief time I was the editor of the
Los Angeles Times Magazine, and every year we did an issue devoted to mysteries. In the magazine world there is a mad scramble for interview subjects, “gets” we call them. As in Brad Pitt is a huge get. I think my biggest get--certainly in the top three--was Elmore Leonard. And because we loved an embarrassment of
riches, I assigned
Megan Abbott to write the piece. Her questions were on point; his answers were a revelation. On being asked if he had read any of the hard-boiled masters, his reply was frank: he never read Chandler, was light on Hammett, and Spillane, he opined, was good--but his books never changed. But Spillane influenced him nevertheless. After a
Detroit News article that compared his female characters to Spillane’s, Leonard was on the case. He stopped thinking of female characters as women and started to regard them as people. And from that the world got Karen Sisco.
Leonard was different, funny--both in a “ha-ha” way and in an eccentric way. One of the keys to Leonard’s success was just that: he had a healthy contempt for anything smacking of self-righteousness. Even his good guys had wonky moral compasses. And he had a huge appreciation for the humor found in the most unlikely places. I think he was best with criminals who were stupid,
but thought they were smart, like Boyd Crowder. In Leonard’s stories most of
the success enjoyed by his criminals was the result of dumb luck, cunning, and
the availability of muscle, rather than the possession of a keen criminal mastermind.
He was eccentric; in a world of word processors, Leonard wrote in longhand. He
said doing so brought him closer to the work, that even when things were
crossed out, when there was a line drawn through them, the words were still
there. Every fan of fiction should be eternally thankful to Leonard for that.
It’s still strange to think of a
world without Leonard. He was 87. That’s a good long life, but some people you
just expect to be there forever. Leonard was one of them. A new Leonard novel,
for me, was always an event, something to look forward to. My dad gave me a
copy of Mr Majestyk when I was 16 or
17 and I always wish I’d read it sooner than I did. But it was a movie that
convinced me to read Leonard’s books. Get Shorty--the
one with John Travolta--was what finally sent me haring to read this guy’s
work. And I got hooked. Like Chandler before him, Leonard had fireworks on
every page.
I never knew Leonard. Except through his books. He’s one of the few authors I
will willingly reread, and on a regular basis. He’s the guy who showed me that
crime fiction didn’t have to just be about cops and procedures. He’s the guy
who wrote crime novels about real people, talking the way real people do
(albeit much, much cooler). And more important, his books weren’t about justice
and catching the bad guys. He’s the guy who created Chili Palmer, Raylan
Givens, Karen Sisco, so many others. He was a giant not just in crime fiction,
but in fiction. And he will be missed.
Anthony Rainone, a
Brooklyn novelist, screenwriter, blogger, and too-infrequent
contributor to The Rap Sheet:
For me, it was 1989’s
Killshot.
I was just starting to explore crime fiction, and I was mesmerized by the
cadence of Elmore Leonard’s sentences, and the clarity of what he wanted to
present minus the “stuff people don’t want to read.” I immediately started
reading
whatever else I could find by him. No one was writing like Leonard. No
one ever will, because of the unique way he saw the world.
I met him for the first time at a New Yorker Festival, and my gosh, he couldn’t have looked less like a Hollywood crime
master--frumpy sweater, white athletic socks, and running shoes. I don’t
remember the exact words spoken. But he was direct and truthful, just like his
writing. I remember one specific piece of advice he gave me: he said to find a
writer and know his work inside and out. Study it. See where the commas are
placed, the periods. See how long the sentences run, which are short or long?
I think any writer, regardless of genre, would do him- or
herself well to pick Elmore Leonard as a writer to study. His work will be
timeless.
Elmore Leonard was a master of the craft of writing fiction,
the rare writer admired by other writers for his technical skills, as well as
by readers for the entertainment value of his stories. I could write about his
use of dialogue to define character and structure narrative, his ability to
stress the telling details of a scene and eliminate the chiefly decorative
ones, his understanding of how white space draws the eye forward, the
virtuosity of his plots, or any one of a dozen other aspects of writerly craft,
but I won’t. Instead, I’ll pluck one of his books from my bookshelf--Rum
Punch calls to me right now--and appreciate how effortlessly he flings me
into the vividly authentic world his characters populate.
When I think of Elmore Leonard I remember an author who
brought me a lot of joy whilst reading his work. His self-deprecating style
came through in his writing, and anyone who read his “rules” would be better
off for having done so. His place in history will not be forgotten, mainly
because he has had a major influence on so many of us--readers, critics,
bloggers, and authors alike. His writing has always been sparse and to the
point, but also snappy and heartfelt. His work is not solely for crime-fiction
readers, but for all. He has always, in my opinion, had a broader appeal. My
one and only meeting with Elmore Leonard was when he
came to the UK to receive his Diamond Dagger Award. He was as gracious as I expected him to be, and whilst I don’t get tongue-tied often I certainly was when I met him.
As to the books that he wrote that affected me the most, there are two that
spring to the fore:
LaBrava and
Rum Punch. Two totally different books,
but both of them were realistic and gritty. You can’t read either book without
appreciating the sense of place and the extremely well-written characters in
both tales. Leonard’s death is a major loss to literature as a whole, but he
will also have a place in history as someone who wrote the type of novel that
many aspired to produce, but that few were able replicate.
It is hardly tragic that a man dies
at 87 years of age. Rather, such longevity ranks as a kind of victory that most
of us will unlikely achieve. What would have been tragic is if Elmore Leonard
had decided never to write a book. He had every reason not to. He worked a
full-time job; he had a family, but he chose to write Westerns, and later crime
fiction. Many crime writers feel a debt of gratitude for his novels. He was an
unofficial mentor to hundreds if not thousands of writers.
I happen to be one of them. I’ve
read a number of reasons why he was important to so many writers. What these
writers share is the belief that Elmore Leonard had a unique talent, and it not
only informed his fiction, but it also shaped their vision of the high standard
a novel could accomplish. His life and books are a study of what a combination
of attitudes, skills, luck, and determination can produce: outstanding novels,
decade after decade. Elmore Leonard never went out of date. His books are
timeless.
He set a high bar for writers. Not
the kind of bar you visit in order to drink and avoid the first draft of your
new novel, but the Olympic High Bar you need to clear before what you write
will be read and loved by a general readership.
My own debt to Elmore Leonard came
from his crime fiction, books such as Get Shorty and Glitz, and
Rum Punch. You knew he’d heard and seen stuff in the human relationship that
the rest of us hadn’t heard or seen. The cadence and rhythm of his dialogue
created a musicality that forged his characters in your memory. He rendered
into words a world about people from the underclass of criminals and thugs,
transforming their fictional lives into something real, tangible, and true.
Mastering character at his level of writing is as difficult as time travel.
Elmore Leonard’s novels are a gift for future generations.
None of us can predict the future direction of writing and publishing, but so
long as there are dreamers and creators who have a good story to tell, I
predict a lot of them will benefit from Elmore Leonard’s legacy.
Elmore Leonard taught us all how to write. Before he came
along we were still using complete sentences, promiscuously strewing them with
adverbs and having our characters say, add, retort, bark, blurt, and snarl
things. Elmore Leonard showed us how to write lean, straight-to-the-point, no-frills,
no-fat prose. He showed us that a lot of the words we were using were
unnecessary and that getting rid of them produced a new, laconic but if need
be urgent tone.
Above all, he invented cool. You will never see an
exclamation point in an Elmore Leonard novel. An Elmore Leonard hero getting
mugged calmly asks the stickup man to look at his car and informs him, “It’s a
police car, asshole.” Such a man has no use for exclamation points.
Martin Amis, a highbrow critic if there ever was one,
recognized that this Yank genre writer was doing new things with the language.
He cited Leonard’s use of the present participle to replace active verbs (“Cars
with tourists passing slowly, sightseeing.”), claiming Leonard had “discovered
a way of slowing down and suspending the English sentence.”
These are technicalities. The real greatness of Elmore
Leonard is in the stories themselves, of course, in unforgettable moments:
Stick bluffing the massive thug with a glass of water and a cigarette lighter;
Raymond coolly dialing the Wayne County morgue as the villain he’s just shot
pleads with him to call an ambulance.
But there’s more to it than the vignettes. Leonard had a
theme, and it was at heart a moral one. Martin Amis summarized it this way: “Death
roams the land ... disguised as money.”
Elmore Leonard wrote Westerns before he
broke out as a crime writer, and my favorite Elmore Leonard book may be Hombre.
Leonard wrote it way back in 1961, and in it he nailed the essence of honor. “He
did what he felt had to be done. Even if it meant dying.” Nothing captures
Elmore Leonard’s vision like that novel’s protagonist, John Russell, walking
down that slope. “You can look at something for a long time and not see it
until it has moved or run off.” Now that Elmore Leonard has run off, it’s time
to see him for what he was: a great American writer, without qualifications.
Howard Shrier, the author of Miss Montreal:
Like many crime writers, I first fell for this genre after reading a book by
Ross Macdonald in my early 20s. I devoured all of his books, then those by
Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, and eventually Robert B. Parker. All
were first-person private-eye writers, for the most part, and I knew that
would be the genre I would explore as an author, which I have done in my four
Jonah
Geller novels. Why, then, did Elmore Leonard become my all-time favorite?
Besides the great characters, dialogue, and settings, he was a true original.
Like the songwriter Tom Waits and the playwright Sam Shepard (two other favorites
of mine), he owed nothing to anyone who came before him. His crime novels grew
out of the themes he first explored in his Westerns: quiet men in tough
settings, easily underestimated, often at the peril of their enemies.
Stick,
for example, shares a lot with
Valdez Is Coming: both books feature
men who court trouble simply because they believe the bad guy should pay
something for the death of an innocent man.
Decent men in trouble. That, Leonard once told me, summed up his approach to
crime fiction. I had the pleasure of speaking with him twice in 1987. Once in a
long phone conversation, once in person when he came to Toronto’s International
Festival of Authors. We talked at length about his characters and his use of
point of view to bring scenes to life. The best example he gave: a scene in
Glitz between the unhappily married Tommy and Nancy Donovan, who run a casino in Atlantic City. The scene wasn’t working, he told me, because it was just two
people bitching at each other. Then came an inspiration: he brought in a third
character, Jackie Garbo, and told the scene from his POV. You get all the
bitching, plus Jackie’s caustically funny take on it, and it comes completely
to life.
Glitz remains my favorite of all his books, but I’m also partial to
Stick,
LaBrava,
City Primeval,
Split Images,
The Switch,
Out of Sight, and for sentimental reasons,
Swag--the first one I discovered, back in 1984. I picked it up in a bookstore, read the first page, and thus began a 30-year love affair. It is sad to know that no more books are coming, but he left a great body of work that can be re-read time and again.
The first and last time I met
Elmore Leonard was at the Crime Writers’ Association
Diamond Dagger event in
2006. He smiled obligingly for a photograph but didn’t say much. Reading his
work, I didn’t expect him to. Only recently I read
Raylan
and fell in love with that spare prose and that immediacy of story all over
again.
I can still remember coming across
his “10 Rules of Writing” some years ago, which included gems such as “Never
use a verb other than ‘said’ to carry dialogue” and “Don’t go into great detail
describing places and things.” Ditto characters. But the one I loved most was,
“Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.” I’ve been doing my best
ever since.
A lot of writers try to draw
lessons from Elmore Leonard’s style, and there’s certainly much to be learned
from observing how he went about his business. But looking back at two of my
favorite Leonard novels--1970’s Valdez Is
Coming and 1991’s Maximum Bob--I’m
struck by how different they are. Valdez
Is Coming is a stark, propulsive, revenge-driven Western. Maximum Bob is a funny, discursive,
farce-fueled thriller. Neither one fits the classic Elmore Leonard mold, as
people think of it. Because the truth is this: He was bigger and better than
the mold. He wasn’t a master because of some list of rules for putting words
together. He simply told engaging stories and told them well. Learn from
that what you will.
Cameron Hughes, Rap Sheet contributor:
Dim the lights.
Lower the flag.
Fire the 21-gun salute.
Elmore Leonard is dead.
But he’s not gone.
All sluggers want to call their shot and blast it out of the park like Babe
Ruth when they step up to plate. Bands dream of hitting the same heights and
winning the same glories as the Stones and the Beatles did. Scientists dream of
finding something incredible in their research, just like Einstein. The young
pianist yearns to be Beethoven. Every young athlete who picks up a basketball
thinks of Jordan.
And all modern crime writers take a bow to Elmore Leonard.
He was the undisputed king. He raised the bar for everyone, and he hated
pretension. He was a fan of Hemingway until he realized the man had no sense of
humor. I have no idea what two thugs in Miami or Detroit sound like, but I’m
pretty sure Leonard knew. He was an anthropologist of people and put it all
down on paper. His plots were meandering but tight and his character work was
flawless. His dialogue showed the talents of an artist always at the top of his
game. There are so many writers, book authors, and people working in television
and movies, who have been inspired by Elmore Leonard that we’ll feel his
influence forever, even though we won’t get anything more from the man himself.
He was an American icon and legend, and I’ll miss him terribly.
Dim the lights.
Lower the flag.
Fire the 21-gun salute.
Elmore Leonard is dead.
But he’s not gone.
READ MORE: “
A
Tribute to Dutch: Loren D. Estleman Recalls Elmore Leonard” (
Detroit Free Press); “
Elmore
Leonard: Dutch Farewell,” by John Harvey (Mellotone7 Blog); “
Elmore
Leonard: Always Cool,” by Oline Cogdill (
Mystery Scene); “
Elmore
Leonard: Michael Connelly Hails the Book World’s King of Cool” (
Los Angeles Times); “
Mysteries:
Remembering Elmore Leonard,” by Tom Nolan (
The Wall Street Journal--subscription required); “
Good
Medicine: A Tribute to Elmore Leonard,” by David Abrams (Book Riot); “
Carole
Baron Remembers Elmore Leonard” (Omnivoracious); “
Postscript:
Elmore Leonard (1925-2013),” by Joan Acocella (
The New Yorker); “
Learning
How to Write by Breaking Elmore Leonard’s 10 Rules,” by Kelly Robinson
(Book Dirt); “
Elmore Leonard,” by Gary Phillips (SF Site); “
Author
Elmore Leonard Created a U.S. Marshal Who Will Live On,” by Alan Stamm (Tickle
the Wire): “
Appreciation:
Elmore Leonard’s Unique Voice Lives on in Justified,” by
Robert Lloyd (Los Angeles Times); “
50 Years of Elmore Leonard Westerns on Film,” by Jedediah Ayres (Hard-boiled Wonderland).
moderated by deadpan, quick-quipping Lee Goldberg. Lee got a big laugh in a session full of big laughs when he told his story about a signing session at a Waldenbooks many years ago. After a slow period during which almost no one was coming by his table, an older woman finally approached, picked up his latest book, and flipped through the interior. “Any cats in it?” she asked. Lee responded that he hated the idea of featuring animals in novels, especially as crime-solving protagonists. “No wonder it’s not selling,” snapped the woman and threw the book down.
Daily Show correspondent and author Larry Wilmore
L.A. Times Book Prize winner Michael Koryta
“Surfer noir” master Don Winslow
Novelist and screenwriter Lisa Lutz
The tattooed and hard-boiled Christa Faust
