"Man, you were the one taught me how to be cool, you remember? Showed me how to make it, not take everything personal, you remember that? Serious things, yeah, you go all the way, but not bullshit things."—Rene Moya to Ernest "Stick" Stickley Jr., in Stick (1983)
Hundreds of tiny houses line the highway out from Detroit's Metro Airport. On this mid-December day, no snow covers these matchbox homes and their patches of turf, and strings of Christmas lights can't hide the blight. It's as if bad-ass Detroit, unseen in the distance, had reached out to rake a dirty fingernail along the road's edge. But as PW's car rolls northwest, the city falls away. The houses grow larger and farther apart, separated now not by iron mesh but by wooden fences and lawns bordered by evergreens.
With a little more money, the Cleavers could live within this particular enclave of stately homes, a model of affluent postwar suburbia; probably many bankers, doctors and lawyers do. Yet of all the fine houses we see here, the finest belongs to an author and his wife, an author who for half a century has written not of peaceful suburbs but of corrupt cities and glittering gold coasts and, in his earliest novels, of the American West., of desolate prairies and towns steeped in violence, places where law and order succumb to the rule of the gun and the pursuit of money gives way only, and rarely, to the preservation of honor and cool.
Elmore Leonard beckons us inside. He's slender and not tall, with thinning gray hair and a goatee that, with his jeans, black turtleneck and leather sandals, convey aging hipster; but inside his living room, where he writes and where we go to talk, a room made holiday splendid with gold and silver ribbons everywhere and a tree bearing ornaments like heavy fruit, LLeonard can pass for one of Santa's elves. His wire glasses enhance the image; so does the temperature in the room, cool, verging on cold.
When Leonard settles behind the large antique table at which he works, however, he looks only like a writer. A pen and a pad of yellow paper filled with blue script are on the table. Leonard shakes a True Blue out of a pack and lights it.
"I wrote this page yesterday," he says in a thin, gentle voice, nodding at the pad, "and probably threw away a half dozen longhand pages to get to that. "
He picks up the pen. "I began writing with a 29 cent Scripto, and went to a 98 cent pen, in orange. I used a Saint Laurent pen after that. I started using this two-thirds of the way through Tishomingo Blues. Before that I used a Mont Blanc that I'd been using for several books. It was a table favor at a PEN America function. But this is perfect. I'm trying blue. I like the blue."
To Leonard's left sits the IBM electric typewriter on which he reworks his handwritten pages. He doesn't own a computer. Leonard, born in New Orleans in 1925, moved to Detroit with his family nine years later; it has been his hometown ever since. ("My memory of it was a big, vibrant, tough town, full of a lot of hardworking people," he recalls.) He's been married three times and has five children. His nickname, Dutch, reportedly was lifted as a child from a favorite Washington Senators baseball player. Leonard began writing professionally in the early 1950s, selling stories to western pulps like Dime Western and men's action mags like Argosy. While working full time as an advertising copywriter, he published his first novel, The Bounty Hunters, with Houghton in 1953. He wrote four more westerns, several of which sold to Hollywood (see "Screen Shots" sidebar), until the sagebrush market tumbled away and he founded the Elmore Leonard Advertising Company, to which he devoted four years.
Leonard returned to writing and added crime fiction to his list with The Big Bounce in 1969. It wasn't an easy transition; the book was rejected by 84 publishers and film production companies before appearing as a Gold Medal paperback. Sixteen novels, most of them crime stories set around Detroit or in Florida, followed over the next 16 years until 1985, when Leonard was discovered by the mainstream press for his novel Glitz. That black-humored crime drama hit national bestseller lists, gained Leonard a cover story in Newsweek and was reviewed by Stephen King in the New York Times Book Review. Each of Leonard's subsequent 13 novels have ridden the lists. His next, Tishomingo Blues, due out on January 29 from Morrow, will have a first printing of 250,000 copies.
A lot of writers can sell out a quarter of a million copies. It's not Leonard's bottom line, however sweet, that makes him one of today's most innovative and influential writers. His power arises from his unique style—instantly recognizable, working through narratives set along the margins of society, featuring characters charged with life ("After I finish a book I think about them for at least a couple of weeks, wondering, 'what are they doing?' "), the stories told in dreamy prose, always flowing from a particular character's point of view ("It's about the writing, not the story. It's about the characters. They're the writing, the plot just comes along") and distinguished by dialogue as pitch perfect as any in fiction ("It's a question of how they say it and what word they may leave out rather than specific slang," Leonard says).
Like many of the great literary innovators, Leonard has established his own genre, the South Florida crime thriller, through novels including La Brava, Glitz and Stick, albeit by treading a path initially scouted by Charles Willeford. The traditions set down by Leonard—of darkly humorous tales of quiet, dangerous men and smart, resourceful women who work the edge, skirting or breaking the law, matched against quirky, psychopathic villains—have influenced a number of writers, Carl Hiaasen, Edna Buchanan, John Dufresne, Les Standiford and James W. Hall among them. But ultimately Leonard is sui generis. To get a handle on him, for a long time people compared him to someone else—most often by far to Hammett and Chandler, which Leonard finds absurd. "I don't write private eye," he points out. "And I don't write first person." The copy on a Quill line of his books gets it right: "He has been likened to everyone from Dostoevsky to Dickens to Dashiell Hammett—but he is, in fact, entirely and entertainingly unique."
Leonard is one of the very few genre writers who has won the approval of the mainstream literary critical establishment. His crime novels have been praised by reviewers worldwide and by writers as diverse as King, Walker Percy and Martin Amis, who wrote, invoking another heavyweight, "Saul Bellow and I agreed that for an absolutely reliable and unstinting infusion of narrative pleasure in a prose miraculously purged of all false qualities, there was no one quite like Elmore Leonard." Leonard's westerns, too, are highly regarded; his 1961 novel, Hombre, was chosen one of the 25 best western novels of all time by the Western Writers of America.
Leonard momentarily excuses himself. While he's gone, we look out the windows to the back of the house. The writer owns 1.25 acres here, much of it lawn. There's an in-ground swimming pool, covered for the winter, and at the back of the land, a tennis court.
We notice a copy of Charlotte's Web on the desk. Leonard is reading it, he tells us when he returns, for a children's book he'll be writing for HarperCollins Children's.
"There's a coyote in the Hollywood Hills," Leonard says, "an L.A. street coyote, Antoine, with his own gang, called the Howling Diablos. Movie star garbage cans are the best. Antoine meets a German shepherd that's just hanging around the house but wants to go up to the hills. The German shepherd brings him into the house and Antoine's never— he jumps up on the kitchen table and he starts eating peanut butter cookies and he looks down at the German shepherd and says, 'Homes, can't you smell?' "
Leonard speaks softly and not quickly, in a mid-American twang that's slightly nasal. "And he says, 'Yeah, I can smell.' 'And you haven't eaten all these cookies?' The German shepherd says, 'We got our own food over here, we're not allowed cookies.' There are two dog dishes, Buddy and Miss Betty. Antoine says, 'Which one's yours?' Well, then he meets Miss Betty, who is a show poodle, all tricked out. And he goes over and sniffs her. 'Girl, you smell good enough to eat.' "
It's growing colder in the living room. A dark-haired woman, younger than Leonard, enters. It's Christine, his wife, who tells him there's something wrong with the furnace.
When she leaves we ask Leonard how he likes being at HarperCollins, which in May of last year announced a reported near-eight-figure deal by which the house gets North American rights to two new Leonard books as well as the writer's huge backlist. Leonard deems HarperCollins "great. There's so much energy there. "
The publisher Leonard remembers with the most gratitude is Arbor House and its controversial founder, Don Fine, who presided over Leonard's leap to national prominence in the mid-1980s. "He said, 'You come with me and I'll sell you.' This was the problem, to get someone to sell me and that's why I've been with, I think, 10 different publishers. The idea is to sell me, not as the second coming of Raymond Chandler or Dashiell Hammett." Yet despite having been with so many publishers, Leonard says that "I've always had a good relationship with my editor and often, the publisher. I'm no trouble, I always deliver in plenty of time. I haven't had any editing in years. Because it's ready."
Leonard also speaks of his debt to literary agent H.N. Swanson, who looks down at Leonard's desk from a framed photo. It was Swanson who stuck with Leonard through the 84 rejections on The Big Bounce and who guided his career for decades after. "He was something, he was a show," Leonard says. "He had Michael [Siegel, now of Michael Siegel Associates] working for him. About two years before he died I said, 'Why don't you let Michael handle me?' He was 92 and Michael was 29, see. Swanny was starting to lose it and Michael was young and sharp. He's my 'manager,' as far as being technically correct. He's my manager so that he can get into producing films. He got Andrew Wylie involved primarily for ferreting sales."
Andrew Wylie of The Wylie Agency has been working with Siegel for several years now on Leonard's literary deals. To do so, Wylie tells PW, "I said to Siegel, 'I would like to audition for you and Dutch by writing a case study of what I think should be done.' Part of what was described in the study was the advantage of getting Dutch under one house." At the time of the study, Leonard was at three houses: Delacorte, Warner and Morrow. "Morrow bought out the Warner position," Wylie explains. "Then we hired Chip Kidd to create a uniform design to be used by both Morrow and Delacorte, a look that was hipper than the mass-market look that was in place. They were selling books to baggy-suited mid-range executives at airports, and Leonard is too hip and young for them." Both publishers adopted Kidd's design, and then HarperCollins/Morrow bought out the Delacorte backlist.
Cathy Hemmings, president of the HarperCollins General Books Group, says that "Andrew orchestrated the deal," and she's delighted that he did. "We feel privileged to have Elmore Leonard back with us and to secure his entire backlist. He's America's premier crime fiction writer, crime fiction with humor. Have you read Tishomingo Blues?" she asks. "It's hilarious. My father loved it, which I thought was a good sign. He's a great reader, and he hates everything."
Tishomingo Blues is the first of the two new books with Harper (the second, Leonard says, will be a collection of short stories). The tale of an aging high diver, Dennis Lenahan, who gets mixed up with the Dixie mafia and with mobsters from Detroit who are moving in on the southern drug trade, the novel is one of Leonard's most stylish, with several unforgettable characters, especially Robert Taylor, the ultra-cool black drug dealer who makes a bid for Dennis's soul just as legendary blues singer Robert Johnson, whose music Robert adores, reputedly bartered his soul for talent just down the road within the novel's deep Mississippi setting. There's an affecting love match between Dennis and a neglected housewife he finds baking a "Naughty Child Pie" at a Civil War re-enactment; this full-dress replay of a local battle backdrops the story's climax and offers Leonard plenty of room for biting social commentary, comedy of manners for the gun-and-shades set.
We ask Leonard about the novel's origin.
"Well, I always begin with characters in a setting," says the author, who on an average day writes eight hours, producing four or five pages of copy. "I think I was still writing Pagan Babies when I thought of a high diver. And I thought the high diver would be good because he's a guy who lives on the edge. So my researcher, who I've had for 25 years, and I went down to Panama City, Florida, and talked to high divers."
And what's the appeal of working with a character like Robert Taylor?
"I can make him talk. That's the main thing. And I like that kind of character. I like to watch him showing off in his quiet, cool way. All the characters have to be able to talk, at least on some level. Because I'm going to use them for moving the story, in the dialogue." Leonard says he doesn't see his characters clearly, "but once in a while I'll see Harry Dean Stanton. I'll see a supporting actress. Or Steve Buscemi. I never see stars because my people aren't stars."
Leonard takes us to the small office where he keeps his archives. On a high shelf sit his two Edgars, one for best novel for LaBrava (1983), the other the Grandmaster Award he received in 1992. Other shelves hold various editions of his books, mass market, trade and hard. Leonard rummages in a corner and digs out a stack of magazines from the 1950s. He plops them on a table. This room, we realize, isn't a showcase, but a storehouse. Leonard treats the trophies of his success without fuss; yet his pride and amusement shine through as he points out his contributions to Dime Western and Argosy and the Saturday Evening Post.
We ask him how he feels about the passing of the years, about aging. He answers immediately, as he does all our questions. "I think it's fascinating to see yourself changing. I don't think of myself as having changed. I think I play tennis as well, or run or do anything, but it isn't true. And I find myself being more careful going down stairs. I'm more careful driving. It seems instinctive that with age you become aware of this, that you'd better be a little more careful. As far as my desire to write, it's as strong as ever, if not stronger."
Christine comes into the room. The furnace is leaking some sort of grease, she says. Leonard talks with her, then goes downstairs to the cellar; we tag along. The writer and his wife crouch to look at some grease slicks on the floor. The repairman is on his way, Christine announces. Leonard shrugs—nothing to get worked up about—then leads the way back upstairs.
Winding up our visit, we ask Leonard what he thinks of his life to date. "It's been fun," he says. "I've been very, very lucky too. I've made a lot of money and I'm doing exactly what I want to do. I write for myself. My publisher likes my work. That's it. The movies, I don't worry whether it's going to be a good movie or not. Whatever happens. I don't think of it as fatalism at all, I think of it as simply accepting what is. I think I probably get this out of AA, 25 years next month."
There is in Leonard's writing a certain compassion, an embracing of humanity in all its rawness, an openness and sereneness of vision. These qualities seem to exist in Leonard the man, too, no doubt nurtured during his years in AA and now manifest in the casual dignity and warmth with which he sees us to the door and shakes our hand goodbye. As we get into our car and pull out of the driveway, Leonard stands at the front door to see us off, a small figure in front of a big house, polite and attentive, very cool.
"Dutch in Detroit" launches The Innovators, a feature series in which PW will explore the work and lives of influential literary innovators of our time. Next up: Jean Auel, whose fifth novel in the Earth's Children series, The Shelters of Stone, pubs on 4/30.
