At 05:56 PM 13/03/2007, you wrote:
>Hmm, re Elmore Leonard, I don't see how he can't be
considered a
>major innovator. I actually see him as THE major
innovator of the
>past thirty years. Though I wouldn't consider Leonard
a noir writer
>(to me his major books are pure crime fiction), I
think he picked up
>on what George V. Higgins did, with dialogue-driven,
character-
>driven, vernacular-driven crime fiction, and took it
to another
>level.
And a slightly different location and context.
I agree with you that Leonard is not a noir writer, but he
brought hardboil to the middle classes. His is a more
middle-class perspective on the genre, and the protagonists,
as in Kill Shot, can themselves be average, middle-class
folks whose lives intersect with more hardboiled characters.
With Chilli Palmer in Get Shorty, we had a protagonist trying
to move from the world of crime to middle-class
respectability and finding there was just as much
questionable behaviour in the movie business as in loan
sharking, though perhaps not always competently handled. And
settings are quite varied, but not usually what you could
call the mean streets of American cities. More likely to be a
shopping mall or beach-front condo.
Still, this is no longer a recent innovation, unless we're
talking geologically.
> Leonard also is an outstanding plotter, an aspect of
writing
>that I think is ignored, or taken for granted, by
many critics. I
>think it takes at least as much to skill to craft a
great plot as it
>does to craft a great sentence, and Leonard is a
genius at both.
Yeah, many "literary" critics prefer authors use internal
dialogue to reveal characters as opposed to action and plot.
It has the advantage of allowing the author to make
definitive statements about motivation etc. as they spell
things out for those critics. Saves any second guessing later
on.
Best, Kerry
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