Elmore Leonard

American crime novelist

• Born: October 11, 1925
• Birthplace: New Orleans, Louisiana
• Died: August 20, 2013
• Place of death: Bloomfield Township, Michigan

Biography

Elmore “Dutch” Leonard’s success did not come easily. It was the result of years of apprenticeship to his craft, painstaking research, self-discipline, high standards, and strong motivation to be independent. His life can be viewed as a study in overcoming obstacles that confront aspiring writers in a precarious, constantly evolving profession.

Leonard was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, in 1925, but his family moved to Detroit, Michigan, in 1934. That tough, multiracial metropolis is the setting of many of his crime novels. He attended a Catholic elementary school and the Jesuit-run University of Detroit High School. He was never an outstanding student but loved reading.

In 1943 he was drafted into the US Navy Seabees. Like most servicemen stuck on South Pacific islands during World War II, he had plenty of time for reading. One early literary influence was Ernest Hemingway. After the war Leonard enrolled at the University of Detroit in 1946 and majored in English and philosophy. Upon graduation in 1950 he found an entry-level job with Campbell-Ewald Advertising in Detroit and eventually became a copywriter specializing in creating ideas for advertising Chevrolet trucks.

Leonard’s interest in creative writing was whetted by joining a writers’ club. After graduation from college he decided to become a professional writer. He was challenged by holding down a full-time job to support a wife and two children. He showed his strength of character by setting up a schedule he was to follow for years. He got up at 5:00 am every morning and wrote for two hours before leaving for work.

He began by writing Westerns because he liked Western movies. His first sale was a story titled “Trail of the Apache,” for which Argosy magazine paid him ninety dollars. During the 1950s he sold about thirty short stories and five novels, all Westerns. Two were sold to Hollywood, but the money he received was not substantial.

Realizing that he was handicapped by his ignorance of the real West, he began doing intensive research. This became a habit he continued when he switched to crime fiction. By 1965 he had acquired a solid reputation as a writer of Westerns. When he sold his novel Hombre to Twentieth Century-Fox for ten thousand dollars, he decided to devote most of his time to writing fiction.

The market for Westerns was shrinking, however, because of overexploitation of the genre in television serials. Leonard demonstrated his adaptability by switching from cowboys to cops and robbers, proving the truth of the adage that problems are opportunities in disguise. Fame and fortune came only after this radical change. Characteristically, he devoted intensive research to his new field, acquiring a reputation for authenticity unusual in a field overrun with hacks.

Another major turning point occurred in 1974 when he joined Alcoholics Anonymous. The key to recovering from acute alcoholism, he stated, is “getting outside of yourself.” He projected this insight into his fiction by progressively minimizing his role as a narrator. “I started to realize,” he told an interviewer, “that the way to describe anywhere, anywhere, was to do it from someone’s point of view . . . and leave me out of it.” Beginning in 1974 with Fifty-Two Pickup, Leonard started perfecting the objective, cinematic technique that won for him critical acclaim and made him a multimillionaire. Leonard and his first wife Beverly Claire Cline, who he married in 1949, divorced in 1977. They had five children together.

Leonard did not become famous until 1983, with publication of his novel Stick. Also that year, LaBrava won the Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America and sold more than four hundred thousand copies. Glitz was a best-seller in 1985. Leonard’s novels have been best-sellers ever since.

Leonard’s career has always been closely associated with motion pictures. During the early 1960s, he wrote scripts for educational and industrial films. He adapted many of his own and other authors’ novels for the screen and had many of his novels adapted by others. He also wrote original screenplays, including Joe Kidd, starring Clint Eastwood, and Mr. Majestyk, starring Charles Bronson. The influence of films, in which the viewer must be shown and not told, can be seen in the “cinematic” style of his novels. They contain action, crackling dialogue, colorful characters, interesting settings—all elements that make good films. The screen adaptation of Get Shorty, set in Hollywood and drawing upon Leonard’s years of interaction with its zany inhabitants, was one of the top box-office moneymakers of 1995.

Though rich and famous, Leonard would continue to write on a rigorous schedule. Married to his second wife, Joan Leanne Lancaster, in 1979, he settled with her in suburban Detroit, occasionally vacationing in Florida and using that exotic, crime-plagued state as the setting for many crime novels. Their marriage ended in Joan’s death in 1993. Later that year Leonard married Christin Kent. They divorced in 2012, the same year that Leonard’s last novel, Raylan, was published.

Leonard suffered a stroke in July 2013 and died in his home in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, less than two months later from complications. He was survived by his five children, thirteen grandchildren, and five great-grandchildren. At the time of his death he was writing another novel that had the working title Blue Dreams. Initially, Leonard’s son Peter, who is himself a published author, toyed with the idea of finishing his father’s book. After reading what Leonard had left behind, however, Peter decided that he didn’t want to try to mimic Leonard’s writing style and voice and that it was a form of sacrilege to finish the book for his father, that the work should be left unfinished. A collection of previously unpublished short stories, most of which were written during Leonard’s copy writing days, was published in 2015. In mid-2016, Leonard’s writing was in print in 3,773 publications and translated into 25 languages.

A lifetime of hard work gained for Leonard financial and critical success, and he is generally regarded as the king of crime fiction writers of the late twentieth century.

Author Works

Long Fiction:

The Bounty Hunters, 1953

The Law at Randado, 1954

Escape from Five Shadows, 1956

Last Stand at Saber River, 1959 (also known as Lawless River and Stand on the Saber)

Hombre, 1961

The Big Bounce, 1969

The Moonshine War, 1969

Valdez Is Coming, 1970

Forty Lashes Less One, 1972

Mr. Majestyk, 1974

Fifty-Two Pickup, 1974

Swag, 1976 (also known as Ryan’s Rules)

The Hunted, 1977

Unknown Man No. 89, 1977

The Switch, 1978

Gunsights, 1979

City Primeval: High Noon in Detroit, 1980

Gold Coast, 1980

Split Images, 1981

Cat Chaser, 1982

Stick, 1983

LaBrava, 1983

Glitz, 1985

Elmore Leonard’s Dutch Treat: Three Novels, 1986 (also known as Elmore Leonard’s Double Dutch Treat: Three Novels)

Bandits, 1987

Touch, 1987

Freaky Deaky, 1988

Killshot, 1989

Get Shorty, 1990

Maximum Bob, 1991

Rum Punch, 1992 (also known as Jackie Brown)

Pronto, 1993

Riding the Rap, 1995

Out of Sight, 1996

Naked Came the Manatee, 1996 (with 12 other Florida writers)

Cuba Libre, 1998

Be Cool, 1999

Pagan Babies, 2000

Tishomingo Blues, 2002

A Coyote’s in the House, 2004

Mr. Paradise, 2004

The Hot Kid, 2005

Up in Honey’s Room, 2007

Road Dogs, 2009

Djibouti, 2010

Raylan, 2012

Short Fiction:

The Tonto Woman, and Other Western Stories, 1998

When the Women Come Out to Dance, 2002

The Complete Western Stories of Elmore Leonard, 2004

Blood Money and Other Stories, 2006

Moment of Vengeance and Other Stories, 2006

Three-Ten to Yuma and Other Stories, 2006

Comfort to the Enemy and Other Carl Webster Tales, 2009 (also known as Comfort to the Enemy and Other Carl Webster Stories)

Charlie Martz and Other Stories: The Unpublished Stories, 2015

Nonfiction:

Elmore Leonard’s Ten Rules of Writing, 2007 (illustrations by Joe Ciardiello)

Screenplays:

The Moonshine War, 1970

Joe Kidd, 1972

Mr. Majestyk, 1974

Stick, 1985 (with Joseph C. Stinson)

Fifty-Two Pickup, 1986 (with John Steppling)

The Rosary Murders, 1987 (with Fred Walton)

Cat Chaser, 1989

Teleplays:

High Noon Part 2: The Return of Will Kane, 1980

Desperado, 1987

Bibliography

Acocella, Joan. “The Elmore Leonard Story." New York Review of Books. NYRev, 24 Sept. 2015. Web. 31 Mar. 2016.

Anderson, Patrick. The Triumph of the Thriller: How Cops, Crooks, and Cannibals Captured Popular Fiction. New York: Random House, 2007. Section on Leonard describes his minimalism, which produced lean, effective books. Contains discussion of LaBrava.

Challen, Paul C. Get Dutch! A Biography of Elmore Leonard. Toronto: ECW, 2001. Uses personal interviews with the author, his personal research assistant, screenwriters, academics, and crime-fiction experts to assess the thirty-six novels that Leonard had published to that point.

Cunningham, Bob. “Crime Fiction Writer Peter Leonard Learned from His Late Father, Elmore.” Toledo Blade. The Blade, 6 Apr. 2014. Web. 31 Mar. 2016. Writer Peter Leonard describes discussions he had with his father, Elmore Leonard, about writing.

Delamater, Jerome H., and Ruth Prigozy, eds. Theory and Practice of Classic Detective Fiction. Westport: Greenwood, 1997. Collection of essays that examine the purpose and place of detective fiction in contemporary culture, though including references back to the beginning of the subgenre in the early nineteenth century.

Devlin, James E. Elmore Leonard. New York: Twayne, 1999. Contains a biography of Leonard as well as criticism of his works.

Geherin, David. Elmore Leonard (Literature and Life). New York: Continuum, 1989. A popular biography of the author that was used as the basis for a 1991 British Broadcasting Corporation documentary, Elmore Leonard’s Criminal Records.

Leonard, Elmore. “Ten Questions for Elmore Leonard.” Time. Time, 20 Aug. 2013. Web. 31 Mar. 2016. In this short interview, Leonard says why he writes genre fiction and why he does not have a series character.

Leonard, Elmore. “Writers on Writing: Easy on the Adverbs, Exclamation Points, and Especially Hooptedoodle.” New York Times. New York Times, 16 July 2001. Web. 31 Mar. 2016. Elmore provides aspiring writers with ten rules of writing that guide his own work.

Millner, C. “Elmore Leonard: The Best Ear in the Business.” Writer’s Digest, June, 1997, 30–32. Many commentators call attention to Leonard’s skill at creating realistic dialogue. Though this article does not offer much in the way of new insights, it is of interest because it is addressed primarily to writers, both professionals and those aspiring to become such.

Most, Glenn. “Elmore Leonard: Splitting Images.” Western Humanities Review 41 (Spring, 1987): 78–86. This in-depth scholarly analysis of Split Images suggests some of the hidden psychological and sociological implications of Leonard’s apparently simple writing. It also exemplifies the serious critical attention that Leonard’s work has begun to receive.

Orr, Christopher. “The Elmore Leonard Paradox.” Atlantic. Atlantic Monthly Group, Jan./Feb. 2014. Web. 31 Mar. 2016. Discusses why some screen adaptations of Leonard’s work are less successful than others.

Schuessler, Jennifer. “Unpublished Elmore Leonard Stories Coming in 2015.” New York Times. New York Times, 17 July 2014. Web. 31 Mar. 2016. Announces that some of Leonard’s unpublished stories will be published posthumously.

Skinner, Robert E. “To Write Realistically: An Interview with Elmore Leonard.” Xavier Review 7 (1987): 37–46. Less diffuse than most that have appeared in newspapers and magazines, this article deals primarily with Leonard’s realism. The sources of this often praised quality are his extensive preliminary research into potential milieus (including visits and interviews by him or surrogates) and his keen ear for nuances of speech patterns.

Wilkinson, A. “Elmore’s Legs: Where Does Elmore Leonard Get His Atmosphere?” New Yorker, September 30, 1996, 43–47. Writers for many years focused upon a few notable aspects of Leonard’s novels; his creation of atmosphere is one of them. This piece is one of many, but it offers some different perspectives and insights into a career that spans decades and has produced more than two dozen novels.