Elmore Leonard, the great US writer who has died aged 87, mastered every genre he turned his hand to, says Mark Sanderson.
Elmore Leonard: 'If there's a
funny line don't cut away to a wink. That kills it'
Elmore
Leonard’s later novels were notable for what he left out of them as
much as what he put in. In his essay "Elmore Leonard's Ten Rules of
Writing", he wrote: “My most important rule is one that sums up the
10: If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.” And yet, paradoxically, it was
this that made him a writer’s writer – praised to the skies by literary
luminaries such as Saul Bellow, Martin Amis and Stephen
King – as well as a global bestseller.
In commercial terms his breakthrough book was Glitz (1985) in which a
serial rapist stalks the detective who put him away. Finally, his pulpy
popularity had caught up with his critical reception.
Leonard mastered whatever genre he chose to explore. His first five novels
were westerns, but when the market for them began to shrink in the Sixties he
turned his attention to crime fiction, starting with The Big Bounce
(1969). In 1972 he read George V Higgins’s The Friends of Eddie Coyle, a
comic tale of small-time crooks in Boston told mainly through dialogue, which
proved to have a profound effect on him. The result was Fifty-Two Pickup
(1974), his first big success as a crime writer.
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