Had he survived the stroke that killed him in 2013, Elmore Leonard would be celebrating his 95th birthday in October of this year, 2020. Had his mental faculties remained intact, he would also, presumably, have completed Blue Dreams, the book he was working on when he died. It would have featured a young Hispanic bull‐rider targeted by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent for deportation, and raised to 46 the number of books he had written since 1954. He might also have added another short story or two to the dozens he'd published since his first in 1951. Even to have reached the age of 87 evokes admiration, considering how many fatal diseases threaten to take down chain‐smoking octogenarians, not to mention those who had drunk themselves into the hospital and AA's Twelve‐Step program by middle age. Leonard's physical and mental longevity testifies to a constitutional fortitude that was more than matched by his indefatigable creative energy. Over the span of his writing career, working a regular nine‐to‐five weekday shift in his office while sitting in front of a stack of yellow lined paper and a typewriter, Leonard completed a book every 16 months, on average. During the period when he was writing crime novels predominantly, that rate was closer to a book a year. Impressive as they are, however, longevity and stamina are not sufficient reasons for taking a writer's work seriously enough to devote a collection of critical essays to it. George Simenon wrote upwards of three books a year in the nearly 60 years of his writing life. That's not why his work has drawn the attention of those who devote their careers, academic and otherwise, to studying and writing about crime fiction.
Elmore Leonard found the readers he sought not long after he began writing westerns at the age of 25. That readership continued to grow steadily up to the point where he shifted from westerns to crime fiction in the mid‐1960s, and almost immediately resumed its expansion until, with the publication of Glitz in 1985, he first established himself as an almost permanent fixture on the New York Times bestseller list. Academic interest in Leonard's work, meanwhile, lagged behind. Before the publication of my own critical biography, Being Cool: The Work of Elmore Leonard, in 2013, just days before the author's death, only three books on Leonard had been published, all necessarily partial because they appeared while their prolific subject was still breathing. During that span of years, little other criticism appeared besides reviews and interviews, while the list of Leonard's admirers among serious writers grew to include the likes of Saul Bellow, Martin Amis, Robert Pinsky, Walker Percy, Joyce Carol Oates, and Ann Beattie. This anthology of essays was solicited, selected, edited, and published with the hope of inspiring more of my academic colleagues who teach and write about crime fiction to follow their lead.
What attracted renowned authors like these to Elmore Leonard's work?
Amis may have put it best when he told an American audience, in a public interview he conducted with the writer in January 1998, that Leonard came “as close as anything you have here in America to a national novelist, a concept that almost seemed to die with Charles Dickens but has here been revived” (Amis 1998, p. 1). There's something to this, but also much more. Unlike Dickens's complex, often ornate prose, Leonard's writing is clean and direct, simple but not simplistic, and for that very reason capable of engaging with some of the most enduring and complex themes of American cultural and pop‐cultural history without strain. His characterizations rarely venture beyond a limited set of types, but only because he is interested in the archetypes of American character they represent. Nearly all of them, nonetheless, achieve a vividness of self‐definition that can surprise you, less through physical description than by the idiosyncratic ways they respond to their historical place and time, whether we are talking about Contention, Arizona in 1884, Detroit, Michigan in 1974, Oklahoma City in 1935, or Havana, Cuba in 1898.
Three other features of Leonard's style stand out and, I believe, largely account for his appeal to both professional writers and the common reader. First, his bad guys (and gals) are often the most engaging of his characters and the most distinctly individuated, bordering on grotesque. They run the gamut from highly intelligent to moronic and from cunning to stupid and often combine both of the latter traits without apparent contradiction. They can be buffoonishly amateurish or proudly professional, psychopathic or drawn to a life of crime by what seems (to them) just common sense. Whatever their personality profiles, however, even at their most menacing, Leonard's lawbreakers can elicit an unexpected smile, and even a gleam of recognition in an unwary reader.
One of the things that often helps mitigate their otherwise unappealing qualities is the second outstanding feature of Leonard's writing: its deadpan sense of humor. For all the talk about how funny Leonard's way with dialogue is, it's only so in context. He doesn't, as a rule, write witticisms, because he doesn't find characters funny if they think they're being funny. Here's an example from Killshot, in which Carmen Colson is reading a real‐estate brochure for Cape Girardeau, Missouri. She and her husband, Wayne, are thinking about relocating there as participants in the Federal Witness Security Program because they've been targeted by two career criminals. The brochure tells Carmen that Cape Girardeau is so friendly that strangers on the street will stop to ask who you are, “And if you give them the opportunity, they will take the time to know you.” Carmen imagines being stopped by a friendly citizen and asked where she's from:
She answers, “I'm sorry, I can't tell you. We're in the Federal Witness Security Program, hiding from some people who want to kill us.” And the person says, “Oh, uh‐huh. Yeah, well, have a nice day.”
(Leonard 1999, p. 155)
Most of the time, Leonard's humor works because he's allowing us to listen in on characters like Carmen talking to themselves, not to others, and certainly not in order to get a laugh. As a rule, they don't know they're funny. This was one reason why so few of Leonard's books that seemed tailor‐made for film succeeded onscreen. Many directors didn't understand what made his humor work. Get Shorty did work, in part because Leonard told Barry Sonnenfeld, its director, “When someone delivers a funny line, I hope you don't cut to another actor to get a reaction, like a grin or a laugh or something, because these people are serious” (Orr 2014, para. 11). Sonnenfeld listened.
Third and last, but not least, among the features that distinguish Leonard's style of writing and make it worthy of serious critical attention is his genius at handling free indirect discourse. Here's a minor example, from Tishomingo Blues (Leonard 2016), in which Dennis Lenahan gets his first sight of the Tishomingo Lodge & Casino, where he'll be setting up his high‐diving act:
It featured a tepee‐like structure rising a good three stories above the entrance, a precast concrete tepee with neon tubes running up and around it. Or was it a wigwam?
(Leonard 2016, p. 659)
The question at the end of this passage marks it as free indirect discourse. It's a question, clearly, that Dennis is asking, but it's conveyed in the voice of the narrator. Just as clearly, Dennis is posing the question silently, not vocalizing it. Otherwise, it would be in quotes and we'd call it direct discourse. If it were speech that Dennis was describing or reporting to someone else, without quotes around it, we'd call it indirect discourse. In addition, while we seem to be listening in on Dennis's question as he asks it, it's posed in the historical past tense, rather than the present tense of conscious thought, as would be the case with interior monologue. This is free indirect discourse: third‐person narration that behaves like first‐person reflection. Leonard is capable of making these seamless transitions into and out of his character's heads repeatedly and over narrative stretches that can span several pages at a time. He is as masterful in handling them as Jane Austen or Gustave Flaubert.
Dennis's question is, ostensibly, trivial or even irrelevant to the plot of the book, unless we know that Leonard does know the difference between these two words: he was a painstaking researcher on the culture and history of the Plains Indians populating his early westerns, who lived in “teepees,” and he knew the Delta country, where Tishomingo Blues takes place, as well as its history because he was born in New Orleans, where much of his extended family remained after his immediate family moved away when he was a boy. Tishomingo was among the last full‐blooded chiefs of the Chickasaw Nation that once lived in that region and who lived in dome‐shaped huts generically called, in English, “wigwams” (from the Algonquin and Ojibwa languages). Dennis's hesitation marks the level of indifference that modernity imposes on white America's historical imagination by collapsing history into tokens of the past, most often in order, as here, to make money. Dennis, like every other white character in the book, is thoroughly interpellated into this attenuated cultural sign system. (Entire chapters of Tishomingo Blues are devoted to Civil War reenactments and their participants.) Leonard's free indirect discourse lets us listen in on how a typical modern white subject tries to make sense of what is missing – the past – from the present, and presence, of its simulacra. The result can border on nonsense. At the Tishomingo Lodge & Casino, which occupies land stolen from a people who were force‐marched along President Andrew Jackson's “Trail of Tears” to vast concentration camps called “reservations,” Dennis meets “Chickasaw Charlie,” a washed‐up professional baseball pitcher who now makes a living off tourists who think he can't strike them out.
Free indirect discourse is the primary means by which Leonard achieved his most important aim in writing: authorial transparency. The title of this anthology, in fact, is taken from the “eleventh” of his “10 Rules of Good Writing” (a list cited by several contributors): “If it sounds like writing, I re‐write it.” Well known to Leonard's fans, epigones, and peers, the eleventh rule testifies to the author's success at making himself what he calls “invisible” in his own writing, but it also poses a challenge to any critic trying to understand how Leonard achieves so much with so little “visible” effort. I believe it's a challenge well worth accepting because the payoff can be immense, as I hope the essays assembled here will demonstrate.
The chapters that follow are divided into two parts, the first tracing recurrent threads of interest in the warp and weave of Leonard's writing, the second presenting case studies of individual works. Three of Leonard's titles, Get Shorty, Out of Sight, and Rum Punch, appear repeatedly, in part because these books went on to become popular motion pictures and some of the authors writing about them have things to say about their cinematic as well as written versions. The essays as a whole cover a wide span of Leonard's career, range of interests, and choice of locales: from his westerns to his penultimate completed book, from fashion to metafiction, and from Detroit to Rwanda.
Part I, “Topics and Themes,” opens with an essay by Michael Scrivener, “Nostalgia and Authenticity in Elmore Leonard's Conflicted Heroes,” that focuses on existentialism as a force shaping characterization in City Primeval and Pagan Babies. Leonard's introduction to existentialism, and to Jean‐Paul Sartre in particular, came when he was an undergraduate minoring in philosophy at the University of Detroit. Scrivener is interested in how the Sartrean concept of nostalgia – one's identification with a prefabricated social role – informs the behavior of police detective Raymond Cruz, the protagonist of the first book, and small‐time crook Terry Dunn, the protagonist of the second. Cruz's nostalgia for a vanished archetype of the frontier gunslinger (a theme drawn from Leonard's early days as a writer of westerns) is a form of “bad faith” that leads him into the thickets of inauthenticity, while, ironically, Dunn's cynical adoption of the role of priest, which is, in effect, a family inheritance, leads him in the opposite direction.
“Elmore Leonard and the Romantic Comedy,” by Michael Sinowitz, traces the author's surprising debts to this durable, upbeat genre, principally in its twentieth century cinematic form. Making note of examples ranging from Shakespeare to Woody Allen, Sinowitz focuses on how Leonard adopts, but also adapts to his own purposes as a crime writer, the plots of American romantic comedies that he would have seen growing up, including screwball and divorce variations like The Awful Truth (1937) and The Philadelphia Story (1940). In the end, however, books like Swag, 52‐Pickup, and Killshot seem to have more affinity with the revisionary “radical romantic comedies” of the 1970s than with the classics of the genre.
In “The Sense of Place in Elmore Leonard's Crime Fiction,” David Geherin begins with Leonard's westerns and takes us on a whirlwind tour of times and locales to show how, by being made to observe a place through a particular character's point of view and free indirect discourse, we can learn as much about the character as the place. Detroit, Florida, Atlantic City, and Hollywood appear on the itinerary, revealing Leonard's love of contrasts and his agility at conveying a sense of locale not only through attitudes but also through memories of what is now missing.
Like Geherin, but focusing on representations of character rather than place, Frankie Y. Bailey argues that Leonard's fondness for adopting and shifting among a wide range of points of view provides opportunities to tell readers about the character who is watching as well as the character being watched. “Visual Clues: Dress, Appearance, and Perception in Elmore Leonard's Crime Fiction” first examines this device at work in Leonard's novels before moving on to his best‐known films, where point of view and free indirect discourse are not available for such purposes and an actor's previous movie roles must fill the void, for better or worse.
In “The Mozart of the Motor City: Elmore Leonard and Noir Buffa,” Kris Mecholsky combines Scrivener's interest in existentialism with Sinowitz's interest in genre to produce a historical study of parallel generic developments in the transition from opera seria to opera buffa in the eighteenth century and from noir seria to noir buffa 200 years later. In both developments, he points out, what began as a rebellion on behalf of realism against the artifice and implausibility of, in the one case, Baroque Italian opera and, in the other, the Golden Age whodunit, became itself the target of a rebellion promoting a more tragicomic and quotidian version of realism. Leonard's noir buffa participates in and exemplifies this second‐wave rebellion in American crime fiction.
Part II, “Five Case Studies,” offers close readings and analysis of individual works spanning nearly half a century of Leonard's career, from the publication of Hombre in 1961 to that of Djibouti in 2010.
We begin this second half of the anthology with Korine Powers's “The Man with Five Names: Hombre on Race and the Cinematic Western.” Powers reads this prizewinning novel, the capstone of the author's early engagement with America's most original and characteristic genre, as a commentary on race and racism in postwar Civil Rights America. While noting Leonard's cinematic debts to western films like Stagecoach and Shane, Powers is particularly interested in how Leonard's use of a first‐person narrator – the only such example in his entire oeuvre–crucially mediates and shapes the challenges that the indeterminate race of John Russell, the “hombre” of the title, poses to America's formulaic constructions of race, not only on page and screen, but in the white American imaginary.
“Pitching Cinematic Identification in Get Shorty” examines theories of audience identification through the lens of one of Leonard's best‐known metafictions. Philip Derbesy sees the portrait of the Hollywood film industry in this novel as the author's means of reflecting on the complicated dynamics of sympathy and empathy at play in the novel itself and in Leonard's work as a whole. Does our moral judgment of a character's behavior affect our ability to identify with them? Is it possible to “identify” with a “bad guy”? Do we need to understand a character's “backstory” before we can make sense of their behavior? These are questions that Get Shorty poses as it describes its characters' attempts to conceive, as well as “pitch,” movies. They are also questions that Leonard's fiction consistently raises in the minds of his readers.
My own contribution, “‘It's the way they're done”: Style and Legerdemain in Out of Sight,” pursues a close reading of Leonard's popular novel in light of its title, which I interpret as an allusion to tropes of magic shaping the plot throughout the book and reflecting the author's own writing practices. Shape‐shifting, vanishing, dismemberment, tele‐transportation, and above all, timing are among the repertoire of “illusions” and techniques that Leonard references as we follow bank robber Jack Foley in his amatory pursuit of US Marshal Karen Sisco, his law enforcement nemesis.
Questions of moral judgment take center stage in Rossitsa Terzieva‐Artemis's “Moral Luck and Determinism in Rum Punch.” Drawing on current theories regarding the impact of random events on our moral judgment of others' actions, Terzieva‐Artemis finds ample illustrations of the four major types of “moral luck” shaping readers' judgments in Rum Punch, where the concept affects our moral evaluation of nearly every major character, as well as our feelings about the way the novel ends.
We end Part II, and this anthology, with “Disjointed Djibouti: Elmore Leonard's Final Metafiction,” which I volunteered to coauthor with George Grella when a serious illness prevented him from completing the essay he had originally conceived for this collection. In it, we argue that Leonard's penultimate novel was intended as a career retrospection on the challenges and choices facing narrative artists, conveyed through a story about making a documentary about pirates that starts turning into a much more sensational tale about terrorism. Dara Barr and Xavier LeBo, the filmmaker and her assistant, represent two roads repeatedly diverging in their creator's long history as a popular writer with one eye on the cinema and TV screens: remaining true to your talents, to your respect for the facts, and to your worldview, or compromising them in the pursuit of a Hollywood success. All the hard lessons he had to learn are here summarized in Dara's and Xavier's opposing views of what kind of movie – a documentary or a feature film – they should be making. Dara's final choice, though strongly implied, is never confirmed.
On that note, I end with the hope that readers will find in these essays evidence enough to confirm that the choices Elmore Leonard made over the six decades of his writing life were not only the right ones, but also worth our critical attention, reflection, and discussion.
References
1. Amis, M. (1998) “Martin Amis interviews Elmore Leonard at the Writers Guild Theatre, Beverly Hills, January 23, 1998.” http://www.martinamisweb.com/interviews_files/amis_int_leonard.pdf (accessed 18 August 2019).
2. Leonard, E. (1999). Killshot. New York: Quill/Morrow.
3. Leonard, E. (2016). Tishomingo Blues. In: Four Later Novels (ed. G. Sutter), 653–885. New York: Library of America.
4. Orr, C. (2014). The Elmore Leonard paradox. The Atlantic (January‐February) https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/01/the‐elmore‐leonard‐paradox/355734 (accessed 31 May 2019).