I wrote a 24,000 word biography this past summer on Elmore
Leonard for the
Dictionary of Literary Biography and a 4000-odd word piece on
Leonard's
Out Of Sight for Encyclopedia of Pop fiction. The center of
all that work
was a dozen hours of telephone interviews with Leonard
himself, who is
really remarkable, although very low-profile. So I know a
little about
how he works, etc. I learned lots about writing from
him.
I think in some ways he works like Ross Macdonald, with
variations on a
theme, one that has been carefully crafted. He has a formula.
Usually a
white bad guy and a black bad guy team up; one will kill the
other about
three-quarters from the ending, and the good guy will battle
the survivor
and kill him in the last three pages. The bad guys have
different names,
somewhat diferent characteristics, but they all seem to come
from big vats
on the shelf. If you took all his blacks, they'd be a salad
of a singl;e
black man. If you take all his whites, they'd be a salad of a
single
white man.
All his homicide lieutenants, marshalls, etc., seem patterns
on Will
Kane(?), from High Noon. (Can't go wrong, can you, with Gary
Cooper?)
His women have become sharper, from Gold Coast through
Killshot through
Out of Sight. He is more surefooted with practice.
Because his first Hollywood agent told him not to write
series characters,
Leonard never has . . . well, sort of. But in City Primevil,
there is
still one instance where the main character is called by the
name of the
main character in the previous book. (Can you find it?)
Martin Amis in a NYTimes review some years back said
Leonard's success was
based on his use of the present particple in sentence
construction. When
Leonard saw that I'd used that in his biography, he instantly
agreed with
Amis, and said, "Yes, I do!" I was surprised.
I think Out Of Sight is a masterpiece, like Glitz, Moonshine
War, &
others. There is no lessoning of skill. I also read Cuba
Libra in an ARC
from Delacorte in September. Leonard in high school was
impressed with
Ernest Hemingway's "Spanish westerns" (i.e., For whom the
bells toll,
etc.) At 72, Leonard wrote his, and I think he's better than
Hemingway.
The work does NOT mimick the style of Hemingway, which would
have been
devastating.
Last I heard he's halfway done with BE COOL, the sequel to
Get Shorty. I
hope Leonard writes another ten books. (If only he'd quit
smoking!)
Vaya con dios
Frederick Zackel
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