THE DICKENS OF DETROIT
Even the universally loved Elmore Leonard didn’t have a bestseller until his 60th year
He was the master of his genre, the Dickens of Detroit, the Chaucer of Crime. Every novel Elmore Leonard wrote from the mid-1980s on was a bestseller, and every fan of crime stories knew his name.
George Clooney was an admirer. So were Quentin Tarantino, Aerosmith, Saul Bellow and Stephen King, not to mention millions of others.
Leonard, winner of an honorary U.S. National Book Award in 2012, died Tuesday morning at his home in Bloomfield Township, a suburb of Detroit, from complications of a stroke, said his researcher, Gregg Sutter. He was surrounded by family when he died, Sutter said.
His millions of fans made all his books since Glitz (1985) bestsellers. When they flocked to watch John Travolta in the movie version of Get Shorty in 1995, its author became the darling of Hollywood. And book critics and literary lions, prone to dismiss crime novels, competed for adjectives to praise him. Last fall, he became the first crime writer to receive an honorary National Book Award, a prize given in the past to Philip Roth, Norman Mailer and Arthur Miller.
Few writers so memorably travelled the low road. His more than 40 novels were populated by pathetic schemers, clever con men and casual killers. Each was characterized by moral ambivalence about crime, black humour and wickedly acute depictions of human nature: the greedy dreams of Armand Degas in Killshot, the wisecracking cool of Chili Palmer in Get Shorty, Jack Belmont’s lust for notoriety in The Hot Kid.
“When something sounds like writing, I rewrite it,” Leonard often said. And critics adored the flawlessly unadorned, colloquial style. As author Ann Arensberg put it in a New York Times book review, “I didn’t know it was possible to be as good as Elmore Leonard.”
Leonard’s novels and short stories have been turned into dozens of feature films, TV movies and series, including the FX show Justified.
“People always say, ‘Where do you get (your characters’) words?’ ” Leonard told The Associated Press last year. “And I say, ‘Can’t you remember people talking or think up people talking in your head?’ That’s all it is. I don’t know why that seems such a wonder to people.”
Leonard spent much of his childhood in Detroit and set many of his novels in the city. Others were set in Miami near his North Palm Beach, Fla., vacation home.
One remarkable thing about Leonard’s talent is how long it took the world to notice. He didn’t have a bestseller until his 60th year, and few critics took him seriously before the 1990s.
He had minor successes in the 1950s and ’60s in writing western stories and novels, a couple of which were made into movies. But when interest in the western dried up, he turned to writing scripts for educational and industrial films while trying his hand at crime novels.
The first, The Big Bounce, was rejected 84 times before it was published as a paperback in 1969. Hollywood came calling again, paying $50,000 for the rights and turning it into a movie starring Ryan O’Neal, that even Leonard called “terrible.”
He followed up with several more well-written, fast-paced crime novels, including Swag (1976). Leonard was following the advice later gave to young writers: “Try to leave out the parts that people skip.”
In 1978, he was commissioned to write an article about the Detroit Police Department. He shadowed the police for nearly three months. Starting with City Primeval in 1980, his crime novels gained a new authenticity, with quirky but believable characters and crisp, slangy dialogue. But sales remained light.
Donald I. Fine, an editor at Arbor House, thought they deserved better and promised to put the muscle of his publicity department behind them. He delivered, and in 1985, Glitz, a stylish novel of vengeance set in Atlantic City, became Leonard’s first bestseller. Leonard never looked back. Hollywood rediscovered him, churning out a succession of bad movies including the humourless 51 Pickup starring Roy Scheider.
It took Barry Sonnenfeld to finally show Hollywood how to turn a Leonard novel into a really good movie. Get Shorty was the first to feel and sound like an Elmore Leonard novel.
Then Quentin Tarantino took a turn with Rum Punch, turning it into Jackie Brown, a campy, Blaxploitation-style film starring Pam Grier. But Steven Soderbergh stayed faithful to Leonard’s story and dialogue with Out of Sight.
Writing well into his 80s, Leonard’s writing process remained the same: He settled in at his home office at about 10 a.m., behind a desk covered with stacks of paper and books. He lit a cigarette, took a drag and set about to writing — longhand, of course — on the 63-page unlined yellow pads that were custom-made for him.
When he finished a page, Leonard transferred the words onto a separate piece of paper using an electric typewriter. He tried to complete three to five pages by the time his workday ended at 6 p.m.
“Well, you’ve got to put in the time if you want to write a book,” he said in 2010 of the shift work that was befitting of his hometown’s standing as the U.S. automotive capital.
Leonard was born in New Orleans on Oct. 11, 1925, the son of General Motors executive Elmore John Leonard and his wife, Flora. The family settled near Detroit when Elmore was 10. The tough, undersized young man played quarterback in high school.
After serving in the navy during the Second World War, he majored in English at the University of Detroit. He started writing copy for an advertising agency before his graduation in 1950.
He married three times: Beverly Cline in 1949, Joan Shepard in 1979 and Christine Kent in 1993. He had five children from his first marriage.
In 2012, after learning he was to become a U.S. National Book Award lifetime achievement recipient, Leonard said he had no intention of ending his life’s work.
“I probably won’t quit until I just quit everything — quit my life — because it’s all I know how to do,” he said. “And it’s fun. I do have fun writing, and a long time ago, I told myself, ‘You got to have fun at this, or it’ll drive you nuts.’ ”