His influence as a great American stylist extended far beyond the boundaries of crime writing
Wednesday, Aug 21, 2013
Elmore Leonard (Credit: AP/Paul Sancya)
Elmore Leonard was best known for writing crime fiction, fast-paced novels about ex-cons, aspiring kidnappers, gun dealers and loan sharks, and the world-weary lawmen and -women who chase them and usually catch them, often as not shaking their heads over how damned dumb criminals can be. His novels were always expertly plotted and sardonically funny, but to tell the truth I can barely recall the story lines of the ones I’ve read — except for “Get Shorty,” on account of the improbable device of a gangster turned movie producer. What was impossible to forget about anything Elmore Leonard ever wrote was his voice.
You could say there are two main schools of American prose style: the pulpit and the porch steps. The first is forceful, openly intent on asserting its import, and apt to assume the cadences of a hallowed literary predecessor in defining the American experience or character, from Milton (Melville) to the King James Bible (Faulkner and, by extension, Toni Morrison) to the poetry of the Romantics (Fitzgerald). The porch-steps school, by contrast, the academy presided over by the spirit of Mark Twain, believes you can tell your readers everything worth knowing about Americans by showing them how we talk.
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You could say there are two main schools of American prose style: the pulpit and the porch steps. The first is forceful, openly intent on asserting its import, and apt to assume the cadences of a hallowed literary predecessor in defining the American experience or character, from Milton (Melville) to the King James Bible (Faulkner and, by extension, Toni Morrison) to the poetry of the Romantics (Fitzgerald). The porch-steps school, by contrast, the academy presided over by the spirit of Mark Twain, believes you can tell your readers everything worth knowing about Americans by showing them how we talk.
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