Jake Blumgart
is a freelance writer and researcher in Philadelphia
Elmore Leonard is one of those names you know, like Stephen King or Tom Clancy, an author whose name you'll see on the beach, his book obscuring the face a towel or two over from your own. Here's the difference: The guy could not only write novels, but edit them down, too, and he didn't let his ego ruin the story.
Leonard, who died Tuesday in his home near Detroit, wrote for 60 years, beginning with westerns in the 1950s (when there was still a market for them). But he never suffered from the bloat that almost inevitably afflicts wildly successful novelists. You get the sense, reading King's or Clancy's later novels, that their editors just stopped bothering them.
Leonard's first big hit, the mid-'80s Glitz, is just as lean and neat as his last book. Every one of his novels is worth reading, even if some of the later stuff is weaker. (Be Cool is a less-gripping version of the novel it's a sequel to, the near-perfect Get Shorty.) I haven't read every one of his 49 books, but I feel confident in that assertion. No other author has so consistently kept me up past midnight every single time I pick up one of his novels.
The books start strong and never let up, the kind of read where you pull the paperback out at the bar to get a page or two in while your girlfriend is in the bathroom. Leonard wrote with a kind of clipped, sparse prose modeled on Ernest Hemingway, his favorite writer until he realized the man didn't have a sense of humor. But the influence still shows, in a good way. (First sentence of Out of Sight: "Foley had never seen a prison where you could walk right up to the fence without getting shot.")
In the early 1970s, he got a call from his agent telling him to read The Friends of Eddie Coyle, the first book by Boston lawyer George V. Higgins, whose novels unfold almost entirely in profanity-laden dialogue. Before that Leonard had avoided bad language in his writing, for fear of offending his mother. Thereafter, he allowed himself to write as the characters would talk. Because he dealt mostly with cops and criminals, there's generally a whole lot of swearing.
His novels aren't noir in the mold of Raymond Chandler or Dashiell Hammett - Leonard is funnier, for one thing - and his books aren't mystery novels in any sense. Chandler's plots were so confusing that even he didn't know who murdered the chauffeur in The Big Sleep. In Leonard's novels, not only does he know who killed the chauffeur, but you do too. And so do the cops. His novels aren't mysteries and his criminals aren't masterminds. A lot of them are downright dumb. They get stoned, watch an old movie on TV, and think, heck, it doesn't look too hard to rob a bank. Everyone has schemes in Leonard's novels - frequently framing themselves in cinematic terms - but rarely do they work out.
That doesn't make the threat of violence any less scary. A man doesn't need a lair, a genius IQ, or a vast criminal empire to do evil. He just needs a gun and a mean disposition.
The cops aren't clear-cut heroes, and they aren't ultimate hard cases. The lead in Glitz, Vincent Mora, is more traumatized by the fact that he killed a junkie than by the gunshot wound inflicted upon him by said addict.
There is an exception, but it's a good one.
In 1993, Leonard wrote a novel called Pronto, about an aging bookie in Miami who has been ripping off the Mob for years. But after the first 100 pages, the novel is taken over by a seemingly minor character, the habitually Stetson-clad U.S. Marshal Raylan Givens, an ex-Kentucky coal miner and the fastest draw in Florida. Leonard went on to write another novel and a novella starring the character, the latter featuring his professional exile back to Harlan County. The latter story, "Fire in the Hole," was turned into the award-winning FX series Justified, starring Timothy Olyphant. Leonard liked the series so much that he brought Givens back for 2012's Raylan, which he admitted writing to give the show's creators more ideas to work with. They dutifully and seamlessly fit most of the novel's stories into the show's second, third, and fourth seasons. (The fifth begins in January.)
Raylan was Leonard's last novel, and it isn't his best. If you are looking to start somewhere, I recommend the Atlantic City-focused Glitz - his only novel set near Philly that I know of - or Rum Punch, which inspired Quentin Tarantino's best film, Jackie Brown. (It's Leonard's favorite of the numerous Hollywood adaptations of his novels: Pretty much the only things Tarantino changed were the title and the main character's race.)
Leonard said he never tried to insert his voice in his stories, never outlined the plot in advance. Instead, he just let the characters talk and wrote where things went. That dictum extended beyond his prose to his discipline. None of his novels are indulgent, pretentious, or overlong. Mostly, they finish just right, belying Chili Palmer's musing in the last sentence of Get Shorty: "[E]ndings, man, they weren't as easy as they looked."