Elmore Leonard remembered by Peter Leonard

'Elmore was the coolest guy I knew,' says the acclaimed American crime writer's son, himself a writer of crime fiction

Peter Leonard - The Observer, Friday 13 December 2013 

‘He appreciated his readers and loved the letters he received, especially from convicts.’ Elmore Leonard in Detroit, Michigan, 1992. Photograph: Michael Brennan/Getty Images

We lost a good one. I remember when I was nine years old, going down the stairs to the basement to watch my father write. He sat at a small red desk in a cinder block room painted white. He wrote longhand on unlined yellow paper. His typewriter was on a metal stand next to the desk. Across the room was a red wicker waste basket that had half a dozen balls of crumpled yellow paper on the floor around it, scenes that didn't work, shots that didn't make it. In retrospect it looked like a prison cell, but my father didn't seem conscious of his surroundings, or of me standing at the bottom of the stairs; he was deep in concentration, midway through a western called Hombre that would be made into a movie starring Paul Newman.

Growing up, Elmore was a blast. We'd play hide and seek with guns. My brothers and sisters and I would hide somewhere in the house and when Elmore found us we'd shoot him. He loved the game as much as we did; he was a kid at heart.

On family trips to Florida, Elmore would make up songs. A couple of his favourites were: "It's a blue and green, keen kind of a day", and "Why did I ever go to your high school?" My father would belt out the lyrics as we sped along Interstate 75, and we would sing with him.

There were always a lot of people hanging out at the Leonard house. I was one of five kids and we would all invite friends over for lunch on Saturday. Elmore would fry hamburgers in an electric skillet and serve them with a slice of red onion. It was the Elmore Burger.
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