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Elmore Leonard

kevinburtonsmith

(1925-2013)

“. . . I don’t think of them as bad guys. I just think of them as, for the most part, normal people who get up in the morning and they wonder what they’re going to have for breakfast, and they sneeze, and they wonder if they should call their mother, and then they rob a bank. Because that’s the way they are. . . .”
— Elmore Leonard on his characters

Not a private eye writer, really, but many of ELMORE LEONARD‘s protagonists (it would be too charitable to call them heroes) fulfill most of the requirements of what most of us deem necessary for “private eye” status, being loners or outsiders of some sort trying to follow what they feel is a code of honour, be they bail bondsman, bounty hunters, airline stewardesses, or car thieves.

And it’s hard to believe many crime writers following in his wake, particularly at the harder, tougher end of the spectrum, haven’t been at least partially inspired by his taut, tight dialogue-heavy style.

Sure, Jack Ryan, for example, a thief who shows up in a couple of his early books, and becomes a process server in Unknown Man No. 89 (1977) might be considered a P.I. of sorts, and a case could be made for a handful of Leonard’s other characters as private eyes, at least as defined on this site. But honestly, with stuff this good, who cares about splitting hairs? If you like Chandler, Hammett, Stark, Block, etc., you’ll like Elmore Leonard.

And make no mistake, he was one hell of a writer–not just a genre writer, but, as Stephen King tagged Leonard, “the great American writer.” His writing took all that was good and true about earlier pulp fiction and jacked it up for a modern era. As Publishers Weekly put it, “his fiction valued dialogue, urgency and agency over muddling prose.”

Or, as Leonard himself famously once proclaimed, he “left out the stuff people didn’t read.”

In other words, in Leonard’s fiction, people talk and things happen. Relentlessly.

* * * * *

Leonard was one of those guys who wrote and wrote and wrote, for years and years and years, only to become an “overnight success” in the nineteen eighties.

Elmore John “Dutch” Leonard Jr. was born October 11, 1925 in New Orleans, but the family moved often–his father was a location scout for General Motors.  Eventually, though, the family settled down in the Detroit area when young Elmore was about nine. He attended University of Detroit Jesuit High School and graduated in 1943, smack dab in the middle of the Second World War. After being rejected for the Marines for weak eyesight, he served with the Seabees in the US Navy in the South Pacific from 1943-45.

Upon his return home, he enrolled at the University of Detroit, and eventually received a bachelor’s degree in English and Philosophy. While still in university, he landed a copywriting gig with a local advertising agency, Campbell-Ewald, and perhaps more significantly, began entering his short stories in various contests and  submitting them to magazines. Westerns were big at the time, so he wrote Westerns. He landed his first sale in in the December 1951 issue of Argosy with “Trail of the Apaches.” 

Upon graduation, he continued at Campbell-Ewald for several years, writing in his spare time and at lunch, writing all his first drafts in longhand, then rewriting on a typewriter. Encouraged by his first sale, he continued writing short stories and submitting them to the Western pulps, and sold his first novel, The Bounty Hunters, in 1953. His Westerns met with considerable success, and he wrote four more, all while still working as a copywriter in Detroit. He even made several sales to Hollywood (most notably 3:10 to Yuma and Hombre), but change was in the wind.

In 1969, though, he sold his first “real” crime novel, The Big Bounce, but his writing was already developing, dialogue-rich plots that often veered off in unexpected directions, peppered with increasingly diverse characters, often on the fringe of society.

It was really only the settings that changed. Hell, most of his Westerns read like crime novels, anyway. It’s easy to re-imagine Hombre, for example, recast in modern times as a crime novel, with an abandoned shopping mall and Greyhound bus replacing the deserted mine and stage coach.

Elmore’s always been a quality act — it just took the reading public a little while to catch up to him. The drop-dead dialogue, the moral ambivalence, the shady two-bit hoods and working class cops, be they cattle rustlers or drug dealers, stage coach robbers or carjackers, tin star sheriffs or big city detectives, all struggling for their piece of the pie, have always been there. The normal joes, caught between various rocks and assorted hard places, trying to not so much do the right thing, as the least-wrong thing, and hopefully survive, remained constants in his writing over a career that lasted a remarkable sixty years.

His plots take weird bounces, his characters bobbed and bounced in unexpected ways, betrayed by their own poor and sometimes seemingly random choices. Sometimes it’s played for keeps; sometimes it’s played for laughs — and we can thank Leonard for helping launch a new wave of gonzo crime novels that shows no signs of abating.

And if the reading public was ignoring him in the early part of his career, Hollywood wasn’t. They continued to adapt his short stories and novels for film, and more than a few (Jackie Brown, Out of Sight, Get Shorty, Hombre, the TV series Justified) have been excellent.

In fact, given the quality of the source material, the real mystery may be how anyone can make a bad flick from a Elmore Leonard book. And yet, much to his — and our — dismay, they did. Regularly.

Why?

The answer may come from Elmore himself. In Elmore’s office, the tale goes, was a movie poster promoting Burt Reynold’s Stick, one of the most dismal and disappointing of all the flicks based on his work, made worse by the fact Leonard himself participated in writing the original screenplay. The tag for the film, blazed across the poster, reads “The only thing he couldn’t stick to were the rules.”

Elmore himself had crossed out the word “rules” and substituted “the script.”

But eventually the reading public came around. In the latter part of his career, Leonard was a permanent fixture on the bestseller lists, and garnered awards and acclaim, becoming one of the most respected crime writers around, receiving everything from the Lifetime Achievement Award from PEN USA to the Grand Master Award from the Mystery Writers of America. He published over 40 books, and had twenty-six of his works (and counting) adapted for the screen.

Not bad for a guy who was once told by a literary agent “Don’t give up your job to write.”

When he passed away on August 20, 2013, we lost a great one.

UNDER OATH

NOVELS

 

SHORT STORIES & NOVELLAS

COLLECTIONS

FILMS

 

FILMS THAT COULDA BEEN CONTENDERS

Of course, like many successful writers, Leonard had a lot of his work optioned over the years, only to have the projects wither somewhere on the production vine. Here are some of the most promising ones:.

TELEVISION

FURTHER INVESTIGATION

 

Respectfully submitted by Kevin Burton Smith.

 
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