Obituary Note: Elmore Leonard

Shelf Awareness

Elmore Leonard, a prolific and influential novelist "whose louche characters, deadpan dialogue and immaculate prose style in novels like Get Shorty, Freaky Deaky, Glitz and La Brava secured his status as a modern master of American genre writing," died yesterday, the New York Times reported. He was 87.

Among his many awards, Leonard was honored in 1992 with the Grand Master Award from the Mystery Writers of America. On its website, MWA called him "truly a giant of the genre and will be sorely missed by fans all around the world."

USA Today noted that when he was asked the secret of his success, Leonard once said, "My purpose is to entertain and please myself. I feel that if I am entertained, then there will be enough other readers who will be entertained, too."

On his Facebook page, Dennis Lehane wrote:
"Elmore Leonard has left us, which sucks. One of the biggest influences on my own work, if not the biggest. He was one of our most underrated satirists and social commentators and the most influential, game-changing crime novelist of the last several decades. When it came to writing dialogue, he sat on the mountaintop while the rest of us wandered in the valley. He's truly irreplaceable, and the world is poorer for his leaving it. RIP, Dutch."