Author Elmore Leonard poses during a portrait session prior to a reading and signing of his latest novel "Up In Honey's Room" on May 24, 2007 at Book Soup in Los Angeles, California.
My first Leonard novel was Glitz. I opened the paperback on a whim in the college bookstore where I worked as a clerk. It started, "The night Vincent was shot he saw it coming." Forty-five minutes later, my boss poked me in the shoulder and said, "Get back to work."
That's how you do it.
That's how you do it.
Leonard died at 87, not long after suffering a stroke. He was spare, direct, and funny. He didn't waste your time or his. "I leave out the parts people skip," he said.
Leonard was prolific: 46 books, seven screenplays, two teleplays. He was catnip to TV and film producers looking for material; nearly two dozen of his novels and short stories became movies or shows, including Justified, Get Shorty, Be Cool, 52 Pick-Up (also adapted as The Ambassador), Mr. Majestyk, Hombre, The Tall T, Jackie Brown, 3:10 to Yuma (two versions) … hell, just look up his CV, like you need to. You've read him. You've seen the films and TV shows by people who consumed his work and on some level wanted to be him. Quentin Tarantino's Jackie Brown — based on Leonard's novel Rum Punch — is his warmest film partly because it's a love letter to two people, Pam Grier and Elmore Leonard. Tarantino didn't just adapt him for one movie, he learned a lot about dialogue from reading him. So, it would appear, did the Coen Brothers, and Vince Gilligan of Breaking Bad, and everyone who ever wrote for The Wire — many of them crime novelists who couldn't help but be influenced by Leonard, because you can't not be; that'd be like trying to write a musical without being influenced by Stephen Sondheim, or act without being influenced by Marlon Brando, or sing torch songs without being influenced by Billie Holliday or Frank Sinatra. Leonard was the Man, and always will be.
Anybody in the last four, maybe five decades who has tried to write colorful but believable crime fiction with characters who behave realistically and don't sound phony has either studied Leonard, or failed because they should have studied him more.
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Anybody in the last four, maybe five decades who has tried to write colorful but believable crime fiction with characters who behave realistically and don't sound phony has either studied Leonard, or failed because they should have studied him more.
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