The new Library of America volume of four Elmore Leonard novels from the 1970s has a winner on just about every page.
Let’s flip through...
From Fifty-Two Pickup: Harry Mitchell’s lawyer is asking him about his mistress, an affair for which he’s being blackmailed:
“You score that night?”
“Jim, we were having a nice time, that’s all. I didn’t even think about it.”
“Well, when did you start thinking about it?”
“I guess when I saw her without any clothes on.”
“That could do it.”
See, that deadpan thing? In the middle of murderous blackmail?
That’s not easy, brother. Maybe in one line, one book. But to build dozens of violent crime novels based on character, not plot, with a pitch-perfect ear for dialogue, often as funny as it is frightening?
Influence
It didn’t do anything less than change (and elevate) the way the modern American crime novel is written, and today Leonard’s influence is everywhere from the films of Quentin Tarantino to FX’s hit series, Justified. The release of the book on which it was based — one year after Leonard died at 87 — coincides with the opening in the UAE on Thursday of Life of Crime, starring Jennifer Aniston and Tim Robbins, which is based on The Switch, also included in this edition.
“He’s the giant figure who looms in the second half of the 20th century” in crime fiction, says Max Rudin, Library of America’s publisher. “He’s the one who recharged the American crime novel.”
The National Book Foundation awarded Leonard the 2012 medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, putting him on a pedestal with the likes of Norman Mailer, Toni Morrison and John Updike.
The famously unassuming Leonard — we were friends for 20 years — always downplayed the highbrow. In his acceptance speech for the foundation’s award, he noted that he preferred an assessment by the New Musical Express in London, which had dubbed him “the poet laureate of wild a-holes with revolvers.”
After the laughter died down, Leonard said, still dry as a martini: “You hope in vain to see a quote like that on the back cover of your next book.”
Early life
Quiet, with a slender build (he was about 5-foot-9 and 68 kilograms), Leonard was born in New Orleans but mostly grew up in Detroit. He served in the Navy, came home to write for an advertising agency and married young.
He wrote westerns in the mornings before work (and sneaked in a few pages at his desk when no one was looking), selling short stories to magazines. His first novel, The Bounty Hunters, sold for $3,000 (Dh11,019) in 1953 (about $26,000 today).
He had solid, if not spectacular, success over the next two decades. A short story, 3:10 to Yuma, became a classic film starring Glenn Ford in 1957 and was remade in 2007. Paul Newman starred in his Hombre a decade later. He wrote Joe Kidd for Clint Eastwood, who asked him to write another screenplay. Eastwood passed on the result, which became Mr. Majestyk, but Charles Bronson didn’t.
Then, in the winter of 1972, his agent told him to get George V. Higgins’s new book, The Friends of Eddie Coyle. Higgins’s characters were lowlifes and working-class cops, none of whom were the brightest guys you ever met.
He began a new career phase, with crime novels set in Detroit. His character-driven stories were not mysteries — you always knew who did it, because that was the person or people helping narrate the story.
Alcohol addiction
In the four-year-span Leonard wrote the novels in this volume, he was battling alcohol addiction, getting divorced from his wife, and writing screenplays and two other novels.
He would not be on the New York Times bestseller list until 1985, when Glitz — his 23rd book — went big and he blew up. In the 1980s, Newsweek put him on the cover, naming him the nation’s “greatest living crime writer.” Time magazine dubbed him “the Dickens of Detroit”. The Washington Post’s Jonathan Yardley said he raised the suspense novel into “the realm of social commentary”.
He became a literary star after that, augmented by films of his books that finally got his style — Get Shorty, Jackie Brown, Out of Sight — starring the likes of John Travolta, George Clooney, Jennifer Lopez and Gene Hackman. Directors such as Quentin Tarantino, Steven Soderbergh and Barry Sonnenfeld. Screenwriters such as Scott Frank.
He died last August, three weeks after a devastating stroke. He was working on his 46th novel at the time. The night before his death, his family moved his bed into the open room on the first floor of his house where he’d done most of his writing — by longhand and typewriter — for so many years.
“That was really just right,” says Mike Lupica, the sports columnist and novelist who was one of Leonard’s closest friends. The conversation lapses into memories of Leonard’s off-hand humour, his lack of ego, his kind demeanour. Lupica pauses, then, on the fly, rewords one of his blurbs of Leonard’s work.
“The only thing better than reading him,” he says, “was knowing him.”
