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The author of such best-selling novels as Stick (1983) and Glitz (1985), Leonard has been lauded as one of the finest contemporary crime writers in the United States. His gritty accounts of urban life feature the exploits of lower-class characters trying to make fast money and are often set in the locales of southern Florida and Detroit.

Works in Biographical and Historical Context

Military Service and Marriage

Elmore John Leonard Jr. was born on October 11, 1925, in New Orleans, Louisiana. After moving around the Southwest, the family settled in Detroit, Michigan. In the fifth grade Leonard was already writing plays, including a war setting in which the coward redeems himself by rescuing the hero. Called “Dutch” by his classmates (after American League pitcher Dutch Leonard), Leonard still goes by that nickname, and Arbor House has made use of it in titling collections of his novels: Dutch Treat (1985) and Double Dutch Treat (1986).

After graduating from high school in 1943, Leonard failed a physical for the U.S. Marine Corps and was then drafted into the U.S. Navy. He served in the South Pacific as a Seabee during World War II. Lasting from 19401945, World War II united much of the developed world into either Allied or Axis alliances, with the Allies comprising Great Britain, France, the Soviet Union, the United States, and other nations. The Allies ultimately defeated the Axis powers, including Adolf Hitler and his German forces, whose extermination of six million Jews during wartime is referred to as the Holocaust. Leonard later used this background in drawing the character of Walter Majestyk in The Big Bounce (1969). On his discharge from the navy, Leonard entered the University of Detroit in 1946 as an English and philosophy major. While at the university, he twice entered short-story contests, and on one occasion earned a second prize. On July 30, 1949, he married Beverly Cline, with whom he subsequently had five children, and in 1950 he graduated. He took a job as a copywriter for the Campbell-Ewald Advertising Agency in Detroit. Though he soon discovered that writing ads was not the least bit satisfying, he remained with the company until 1961. In the early 1950s he developed the habit of rising at 5:00 A.M. so he could write fiction for two hours before going to work to ”write zingy copy for Chevrolet trucks.” Sometimes he also managed to work on his fiction at the office.

Advertising Leads to Writing

In 1953 Leonard published the first of seven western novels. In 1961 Leonard left Campbell-Ewald to write industrial films and educational films for Encyclopaedia Britannica Films. Two years later he started the Elmore Leonard Advertising Agency, which he ran until 1966. During that same decade he began writing contemporary crime fiction.

Publishers shied away from Leonard’s first crime novel, The Big Bounce, because it did not fit easily into an established genre and featured what were considered immoral protagonists. It was rejected eighty-four times in New York and Hollywood before the film rights were sold for $50,000. Subsequently, the book was sold to Fawcett for publication as a Gold Medal paperback original. The sale of the movie rights allowed Leonard to become a full-time crime fiction and screenplay writer.

In 1973, at the suggestion of his agent, Leonard read the dialogue-driven crime novel The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1972), by George V. Higgins, whose technique seems clearly to have influenced Leonard’s subsequent works. Yet while many of Higgins’s characters deliver rambling monologues, the speech of Leonard’s characters tends to be terse, elliptical, and understated.

During the 1970s and early 1980s Leonard built a modest but solid core readership for his crime novels, which were often set in Detroit. He also wrote such screenplays as Joe Kidd (1972) for Clint Eastwood and Mr. Majestyk (1974) for Charles Bronson. Although he had been writing critically acclaimed crime novels for a decade, and his work was being adapted for the screen, Leonard had only a small cadre of fans until the early 1980s, when his novels began to attract the attention of a larger audience. With the novel Stick in 1982, Leonard suddenly became a best-selling writer. One sign of this sudden success can be seen in the agreeable change in Leonard’s finances that year. The paperback rights for Split Images (1981) earned him $7,000; the rights for Stick a year later earned $50,000. Then, in 1983, LaBrava won an Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America as the best novel of the year. The book sold over 400,000 copies. Leonard’s next novel, Glitz, hit the bestseller lists in 1985 and was a Book-of-the-Month Club selection. Leonard’s popularity continued to increase throughout the 1990s. In Get Shorty (1990), for instance, he used his years of experience as a screenwriter to create an intricate story full of inside jokes about the seamy underbelly of Hollywood. Books like Rum Punch (1992) continue to be bestsellers, and his newer works include The Hot Kid (2006) and Up in Honey’s Room (2007). Leonard still lives in the Detroit suburb of Bloomfield Village, within one mile of his five children and ten grandchildren, explaining that if he lived in Los Angeles he would spend all his time talking to producers.

Works in Literary Context

Use of Dialect

No aspect of Leonard’s talent has been more often singled out for critical praise than his ear for dialogue. To get his dialogue right, Leonard listens to the way people really talk and copies it down as faithfully as possible. When writing the novel City Primeval: High Noon in Detroit (1980), Leonard even sat in at the Detroit police department’s homicide squad room for several months, listening to the way that police officers, lawyers, and suspects spoke. His writing is full of slang terms and peculiarities of speech that mark each of his characters as a true individual. More important, he captures the speech rhythms of his characters. Leonard reproduces speech patterns so well, Alan Cheuse writes in the Los Angeles Times Book Review, that ”it’s difficult to say… who among this novelist’s contemporaries has a better ear.” Herbert Mit-gang of the New York Times agrees. The conversations in Leonard’s books, Mitgang writes, ”sound absolutely authentic.” Avoiding narration and description, Leonard moves his novels along with dialogue, letting his characters’ conversations tell the story. Speaking of the novel Freaky Deaky (1988), Jonathan Kirsch writes in the Los Angeles Times that the book ”is all dialogue—cool banter, jive talk, interior monologue. Virtually everything we learn about the plot and the characters is imparted through conversation, and so the book reads like a radio script.” This emphasis on dialogue also reflects Leonard’s experience as a screenwriter.

Crime Novels

Leonard writes realistically about the underworld in the tradition of James M. Cain and W. R. Burnett. His characters on the margins of society are often career criminals looking to get rich quick, hustling for a scam, or primed for the big heist. They may be con artists and they may be psychopathic killers. For most of his characters, survival is difficult enough, and success is impossibly elusive. In one of several unpublished interviews Leonard gave in the spring and summer of 1997, he asserted that his characters are ”the kind of people who think they’re hip, who are looking for a big score.” He attempts to portray ”the way they talk, the street parlance. People in crime and on the fringes of crime and people on the other side—they interest me.”

Works in Critical Context

Many critics consider Elmore Leonard to be the best living writer of crime fiction in the United States. Since the mid-1980s he has enjoyed enormous commercial success, and his style has influenced a generation of writers.

Glitz

The success of this book brought him national media attention, and Leonard was featured as a Newsweek cover story on April 22, 1985. There, Robert S. Prescott wrote that Elmore Leonard ”is the best American writer of crime fiction alive, possibly the best we’ve ever had.” Of Glitz, Prescott wrote, ”If it’s not his best story, it’s his most carefully textured novel; besides, the margin of difference between Leonard’s better and lesser works would admit, with difficulty, a butterfly’s wing.” Stephen King wrote in his review for The New York Times that

Mr. Leonard moves from low comedy to high action to a couple of surprisingly tender love scenes with a pro’s unobtrusive ease and the impeccable rhythms of a born entertainer. He isn’t out front, orating at the top of his lungs. . . . He’s behind the scenes where he belongs, moving the props around and keeping the story on a constant roll.

Get Shorty

The protagonist in Get Shorty is Chili Palmer, a Miami loan shark who travels to California in pursuit of a man. He is also being pursued, and in the course of the action, he becomes entangled with a third-rate producer, a washed-up actress, and some cocaine dealers. Writing in the Los Angeles Times Book Review, Charles Champlin applauds the accuracy of Leonard’s portrait of the movie business, calling it ”less angry than ‘Day of the Locust’ but not less devastating in its tour of the industry’s soiled follies and the gaminess beneath the grandeurs.” Even more sweeping praise comes from Whitney Balliett of The New Yorker, who declares that

book by book (he publishes almost one a year), the tireless and ingenious genre novelist Elmore Leonard is painting an intimate, precise, funny, frightening, and irresistible mural of the American underworld…. Leonard treats [his characters] with the understanding and the detailed attention that Jane Austen gives her Darcys and Emma Woodhouses.

References:

Geherin, David. Elmore Leonard. New York: Continuum, 1989.
Balliet, Whitney. ”Elmore Leonard in Hollywood.” The New Yorker (September 3, 1990): 106-107.
Champlin, Charley. ”Leonard Cocks a Snook at Hollywood.” Los Angeles Times Book Review (July 29, 1990): 9.
Cheuse, Alan. ”A Pleasure for the Hard-Boiled Fans.” Los Angeles Times Book Review (December 4, 1983): 3.
Hynes, Joseph. ”’High Noon in Detroit’: Elmore Leonard’s Career.” Journal of Popular Culture 25 (1991): 183-184, 186.
King, Stephen. ”What Went Down When Magyk Went Up.” New York Times Book Review (February 10, 1985): 7.
Kirsch, Jonathan. Review of Freaky Deaky. Los Angeles Times (May 4, 1988).
McGrath, Charles. ”’The Hot Kid’: The Old Master.” New York Times Book Review (May 8, 2005).
Mitgang, Herbert. ”Novelist Discovered after 23 Books.” New York Times (October 23, 1983).
Prescott, Robert S. ”Making a Killing: With ‘Glitz,’ Leonard Finally Brings in the Gold.” Newsweek 105 (April 22, 1985): 62-67.
Sutter, Gregg. ”Getting It Right: Researching Elmore Leonard’s Novels, Part I.” Armchair Detective 19 (1986) : 4-19.
———. ”Getting It Right: Researching Elmore Leonard’s Novels, Part II.” Armchair Detective 19 (1987) : 160-172.
The Elmore Leonard Website. Retrieved October 23, 2008, from http://elmoreleonard.com.