I have been hesitant to de-lurk, but I know a bit about both
men and their writing styles and their strategies. RM came up
with the notion that the detective was the least important
character in the piece. The victim, the corpse, was the most
important. The story was about the corpse. The line about
Archer turning sideways and he can't be seen, well, that was
RM's hard-earned goal. He used to tell me that a good writer
never has to describe the detective; the questions the
detective asks describe the detective. He also said the
detective is like a welder's gloves; the material of the
story was hot enough, it could singe. So the detective was
the go-between; he carries the heat for the reader. RM wanted
distance to be important. RM was literary; he said that The
Great Gatsby was a detective story, just written from a
different character's POV than we expect. Oh, and all of his
lost children look like young Huck Finn, who was an abused
teenager, by the way. RM was about saving the lost children;
he himself lived in fifty different places growing up; I
guess that's where that came from. I have always loved the
compassion in his stories. Want to see it? read the last two
pages of The Blue Hammer, his last book. In these days of
neo-noir, how quaint. How ... unsaleable.
Elmore Leonard grew up in the South during the Bonnie &
Clyde era. One of his earliest memories was about those
cross-country gangsters of the 1930s. He was born the same
year as Flannery O'Connor; they both wrote from their Roman
Catholicism. She was a fierce Catholic, while Leonard
switched to Alcoholics Anonymous. (He lived; she didn't.)
Leonard, compared to RM, erases every trace of the author. If
you look at any page, notice he has cleaned away all the
adjectives, adverbs, and the like. Shit, he erases speech
tags. Description? Less than the bare minimum. Almost all
dialogue, and most of it is written obliquely, away from the
plot arcs. Dig out your copy of GLITZ, and there is a scene
where two detectives are talking on the phone from two
different cities. As clean, as bare as page 16 in your
Postman Always Rings Twice. Just look at that one, two pages,
in Glitz from a writer's standpoint, and wow, Leonard pulls
it off, and we never notice. Also, Leonard writes each scene
absolutely separate, absoluetly stand-aone, without CARING
what the ending will be. Notice also that almost every one of
his novels is a re-write of High Noon. That movie really got
to him. Oh, and there is two bad guys at the start of almost
every novel, one white
& one black. Sooner or later, Leonard told me, one of
them will kill the other. It's how he starts. Next strategem?
Well, pick any scene in any of his books over the last, oh,
25 years. Notice that the character in the scene with the
most POWER is the main character in that scene. He will junk
the whole scene, or re-writing it for days on end, until he
knows who is the POWER in that scene. That character gets his
moment of glory. That momemnt of glory is more important than
where the plot was going toward.
Every writer today imitates Leonard. Ross Macdonald's style
is nowhere imitated.
Go figure. Me, I figure it's a fad. I blame the movies. Oh,
yeah, Leonard laughs about how almost all 40 of his books has
been made into a movie.
"They don't know how to do it." But he cashes the
check.
This past weekend, in the 21 August, 2007, New Yorker, Adam
Gopnik, in his essay, "Blows Against the Empire: The return
of Philip K. Dick," actually writes, "No one hates the rise
of Elmore Leonard so much as a lover of Ross Macdonald." He's
full of shit, but I can see how he got that idea.
My two cents.
Fred Zackel
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