Remembering Elmore "Dutch" Leonard
Because my boyfriend was Elmore Leonard's researcher of 33 years, I was privileged to get to spend some time with him. He was fun as hell, and full of mirth and curiosity, and asked the best questions of people -- the stuff you'd really want to know if you'd thought to ask it.
He died last year on today's date, and I miss him a lot, and Gregg sure does. Here's a photo Gregg took of him standing by his desk:
Gregg wrote about him:
Elmore "Dutch" Leonard October 11, 1925 - August 20, 2013His friends called him Dutch. Perfect strangers called him Dutch. Some folks called him Elmore. I've called him Dutch and Elmore in the same sentence. Whatever you called him, there he was, the coolest guy in the room, any room.
Here we are hanging out and laughing in his kitchen:
My favorite Elmore book is Swag, a buddy book about two guys who start a career in bank robbery, coming up with the 10 Rules For Success And Happiness In Bank Robbery. They break every one.
Excerpt from a terrific blog post on Elmore by Jim Shelley:
Leonard loves to put different types together (different races, different types of criminal: different types of talker) then sit back to see what happens."You know from the time they look at one another that one is gonna end up shooting the other. 'Killshot' is a good example of that. A French Canadian/Ojibway Indian (The Blackbird) comes from Toronto to Detroit to shoot somebody and runs into this guy named Richie Nix, a young bank-robber who wants to rob a bank in every state in America except Alaska - 'Fuck Alaska', he says haha."
Leonard's non-judgmental attitude to such low-lifes has lead some critics to assume to feels some sort of sympathy for them, which he denies, saying that he simply grew tired of stories full of "sneering" bad guys who anyone could tell were criminals. What he doesn't do is analyse why they turned bad ("that's boring").
These days, he has a researcher who sends him newspaper stories and then "does the legwork" once an idea is underway - digging round in libraries, scouting out locations, finding information about specific jails or casinos or courtrooms.
"He gets me an aerial photo, sends me something about the weather, stuff like that. He'll find the best bails-bondsmen or homicide detective for me to talk to in the area I wanna write about. Then I go down and get to know him."
He has people, policemen, in Florida or Detroit, he can call if he wants to check something - like "what guns are popular with hitmen right now."
The 'Hush Puppy', a gun developed for culling seals, is one current favourite.
"It has a suppresser on it," says Leonard calmly. "But also the slide on top doesn't rack back to eject when it's fired, so it's absolutely silent."He has talked to criminals in the past for research but "not much though".
"I hear from inmates, yeah. They wanna know if I've done time, if I'm black. Or both. They wanna know how I get into the way they think. I try to explain, 'well it's called imagination. I make it up."
"What he doesn't do is analyse why they turned bad ("that's boring"
I love the guy and his books. I got introduced via watching Jackie Brown, which lead me to read Rum Punch.
"The fine big girl had in thirteen years become bigger, show tits grown to circus tits but still okay, tan..."
Great writer.
Ppen at August 20, 2014 8:26 AM
Valdez is Coming was my first Elmore Leonard novel. I read it after watching the Burt Lancaster movie. Stick with the book.
Having lived there for more than twenty years, I got into the whole "Florida school" of writers, including Elmore Leonard, Edna Buchannan, Dave Barry, John D. MacDonald, Tim Dorsey, Carl Hiassen, Les Standiford, James Hall, et al.
Though Leonard was less Florida-bound than the others and not solely a "Florida school" writer, he understood the unique crazy that is Florida.
It was actually Leonard who got me interested in Florida-crazy fiction with Maximum Bob. The short-lived television show almost captured the manic Florida-crazy from the novel that it inspired me to read. In a review of the show, the novel was compared to several others of the same ilk. After reading Leonard's take on Florida-crazy, I had to read the others'.
For a while, I stuck mostly with Leonard's novels with a Florida connection, Out of Sight, Get Shorty, etc.
Get Shorty remains one of my favorites - despite and, in some ways, due to the movie. It's a good "attitude" movie.
Later, "Justified" led me to Pronto and Riding the Rap. Raylan is still on my to-read list.
Like Ppen, I was led to Rum Punch after seeing Jackie Brown.
Conan the Grammarian at August 20, 2014 10:28 AM
I don't like speaking ill of the recently deceased, but if Leonard thought that a suppressor and slide lock can make a 9mm pistol "absolutely silent", he needed to do more research. Suppressors can reduce the sound of a shot sufficiently that the shooter doesn't lose his hearing and the neighbors don't complain about the noise from a firing range, but it's still fairly loud.
markm at August 22, 2014 4:39 PM
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