Acclaimed American writer who praised plain writing achieved literary daring across 60-year publishing career
Elmore Leonard working on a manuscript at his home in Michigan. Photograph: Carlos Osorio/AP
Although the death of the American writer Elmore Leonard – on Tuesday, aged 87, in Detroit, from complications from a recent stroke – is certainly a matter for sadness and regret, the writer would not want to be responsible for anyone speaking of the news "sadly" or "regretfully".
One of his much-circulated 10 Rules for Successful Writing – in which he distilled the approach that brought him six decades of bestsellerdom – was that dialogue should never have any descriptive modifier. "'Leonard is dead,' they said," is something like the way the news should be communicated, according to his stylistic strictures, which always emphasised simplicity. Another is "try to leave out the parts that readers skip".
If there was a Leonard formula, it was remarkably efficient. The publication this year of the paperback edition of Raylan, his 45th novel, means that he achieved a 60-year publishing career that began with The Bounty Hunters in 1953. It was a literary longevity approached by only a few other novelists, including Agatha Christie and Georges Simenon.
In common with them, Leonard is generally classified as a crime or mystery writer, but he began and ended his career with stories more or less belonging to the genre of the western. He was strict about the definition of that form: stories set on the frontier of the American old west, such as The Bounty Hunters and its immediate successors. However, he retained many characteristics of the western – standoffs between law officials and bounty hunters, protagonists living on geographical and moral borders – when his books moved east and into a different genre.
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One of his much-circulated 10 Rules for Successful Writing – in which he distilled the approach that brought him six decades of bestsellerdom – was that dialogue should never have any descriptive modifier. "'Leonard is dead,' they said," is something like the way the news should be communicated, according to his stylistic strictures, which always emphasised simplicity. Another is "try to leave out the parts that readers skip".
If there was a Leonard formula, it was remarkably efficient. The publication this year of the paperback edition of Raylan, his 45th novel, means that he achieved a 60-year publishing career that began with The Bounty Hunters in 1953. It was a literary longevity approached by only a few other novelists, including Agatha Christie and Georges Simenon.
In common with them, Leonard is generally classified as a crime or mystery writer, but he began and ended his career with stories more or less belonging to the genre of the western. He was strict about the definition of that form: stories set on the frontier of the American old west, such as The Bounty Hunters and its immediate successors. However, he retained many characteristics of the western – standoffs between law officials and bounty hunters, protagonists living on geographical and moral borders – when his books moved east and into a different genre.
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