In 2001, The New York Times published an essay by Elmore Leonard in which the celebrated crime author outlined his 10 golden rules of writing. For the casual reader, it may have been an interesting article; for the aspiring writer, it should have been expert advice; and for the Leonard aficionado, it would have been a recognizable rubric, a tried-and-tested set of instructions that the so-called Dickens of Detroit had worked his magic from for 60 years.
Leonard’s 10 commandments ranged from the semi-comic (“Never open a book with weather”) to the deadly serious (“Never use an adverb to modify the verb ‘said’”; to do so was, for Leonard, “a mortal sin”). Simplicity was key—any “hooptedoodle,” quoting John Steinbeck, meaning distracting digressions or flights of fancy, should be avoided.
The author said these rules helped him stay “invisible” when writing a book. But while he succeeded in allowing his characters to speak and act naturally and not be overshadowed by what he called “obvious writing,” Leonard, who died in 2013 at the age of 87, was never invisible to the point that he concealed his identity. To put it another way, we are never in any doubt that we are reading an Elmore Leonard novel. His fingerprints are present in every book, from his naturalistic dialogue to his hooptedoodle-free prose.
Born in New Orleans but growing up in Detroit, Leonard read a lot, including Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, which he later claimed was “the novel that would eventually get me started as a writer.” First, however, came several character-forming stages: military service in the navy during World War II, study at the University of Detroit, and then work as a copywriter for an advertising agency in Detroit. Before going to the office, he would get up at five every morning and write Western fiction for two hours—a routine he maintained for much of his creative life. His first short story, “Trail of the Apache,” appeared in Argosy magazine in 1951, and his debut novel, The Bounty Hunters, was published two years later. Leonard settled into a groove, producing successive stories about the Wild West for both niche pulps and mainstream “slicks.” Several of his Westerns were adapted into films, including Hombre (1967), starring Paul Newman, and Joe Kidd (1972), starring Clint Eastwood.
In 1969, Leonard first ventured into the genre that would define his career—contemporary crime. With The Big Bounce, he laid down a template of sorts for his future books, with a sympathetic main character who dabbles on the wrong side of the law (in this case breaking and entering) and eventually finds himself out of his depth in murky situations and with shady characters, chief among them the duplicitous temptress Nancy.
The Big Bounce also heralded the arrival of a different type of crime novel. Leonard’s brand of noir has little in the way of high-octane thrills or high-wire suspense. There are no clues to sift through or mysteries to solve, and few surprise twists and turns. Fiendish schemes and machinations are laid bare. Characters are, for the most part, open books. And the proceedings are infused with moral complexity: the supposed good guys bend or break the law to settle scores, get rich, or stay alive.
Leonard may have dispensed with some of the traditional tropes of crime fiction but he ensured his novels gripped and entertained in other ways. Like all good crime writers, he knew the most effective way to snare a reader was with a compelling opener. “Avoid prologues,” was one of his rules of writing, and so he cut straight to the chase.
In the first chapter of Raylan (2012), the eponymous marshal finds Angel Arenas, a key player in the marijuana trade, barely alive in a bathtub and with staples clamping wounds on his body. Freaky Deaky (1988) gets underway with Booker, a “super-dude twice convicted felon,” being instructed by a voice on the phone to sit down, only to learn he has primed a bomb in his chair. When the bomb-disposal team arrives, they discover 10 sticks of dynamite under Booker but can’t locate a fuse. What ensues is a frantic, and indeed comic, countdown.
Leonard’s regular use of humor lightens his drama. There are breezy rhymes (Nancy, in The Big Bounce, is “itchy-bitchy”; Ordell, in The Switch [1978], describes his wheels as “The tan van for the tan man”) and puns: in Swag (1976), Frank J. Ryan and Ernest Stickley Jr. agree to be “frank and earnest.” There are streaks of pitch-black comedy as crimes are botched, and there is comedy derived from absurdity, such as this backstory in City Primeval (1980): “One time Clement was run over by a train and lived. It was a thirty-three-car Chesapeake & Ohio freight train with two engines and a caboose.”
Clement is just one of many memorable creations. Leonard’s casts teem with con men and hit men, road dogs and jailbirds, crooked judges and rogue agents, plus all manner of gangsters, hucksters, scamsters, and, above all, robbers. Most are recidivists beyond reform. Jack Foley, the “gentleman bank robber” in Out of Sight (1996), explains to a prison guard: “Myself, it’s not so much I’m violent as habitual, liable to pick up on the outside where I left off.”
There is a moment in The Hot Kid (2005) when lawman Carl Webster is asked how many people he has killed. The question flummoxes him. “They were wanted criminals and fugitives,” he replies. “You say ‘people,’ I think of innocent people, not mad-dog ex-convicts and murderers.” Leonard, however, regarded his criminals as people. “The main thing I set out to do is tell the point of view of the antagonist as much as the good guy,” he said. “And that’s the big difference between the way I write and the way most mysteries are written.”
Perhaps even more so than his vividly rendered characters, Leonard’s keen ear for dialogue puts him in a league of his own. “Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip,” reads his 10th rule of writing. “I’ll bet you don’t skip dialogue,” he adds. We don’t skip Leonard’s dialogue. Many of his characters speak “with a soft urban-south accent that had wise-guy overtones, decades of street-corner styles blended and delivered, right or wrong, with casual authority.” Words are misspelled (“I think we’d of heard”), apostrophes come and go (“for Christ sake”; “I been shootin shrimpers, gettin ’em to act up”), and single syllables are emphasized (“Responsibility?”; “How it happened?”). This authentic styling allows us to even put a face to Moselle, whose disembodied voice warns the soon-to-be bomb-blasted Booker at the start of Freaky Deaky: “I’m suppose to tell you that when you get up, honey, what’s left of your ass is gonna go clear through the ceiling.”
Leonard didn’t get it right with every book. Perhaps the biggest criticism to level against him is his portrayal of women. A few female characters emerge as wily operators who have the last laugh by outwitting unsuspecting men. However, the majority were browbeaten “broads” or background eye candy. (Rosen in The Hunted notices a woman and admires “her thin legs, her high can, and her sensible breasts.”) As Leonard once put it, “My lead and my antagonist in all my books are still boys playing guns.”
But Leonard hit far more often than he missed, and his finest work is up there with the best American crime novels. His tales—fast-paced, wryly observed, and character-led—capture the humanity hidden in the mean streets of Detroit or Miami. Again and again, page after page, we are dazzled by prose that has verve and swagger.
To mark the centenary of Leonard’s birth, we could watch the better film adaptations of his books: Get Shorty, Out of Sight, and Quentin Tarantino’s Jackie Brown (based on Leonard’s 1992 novel, Rum Punch). We could also read two new books published this year—C. M. Kushins’s authoritative and insightful biography and Leonard’s resurfaced “lost novella,” Picket Line. Ultimately, though, we should return to those masterful novels in order to be mesmerized by that singular voice. “If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it,” was Leonard’s most important rule. He still sounds like no other.
Malcolm Forbes is an Edinburgh-based writer
