Elmore Leonard

Leonard was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, the son of Flora Amelia (née Rive) and Elmore John Leonard, Sr.[1] Because his father worked as a site locator for General Motors, the family moved frequently for several years. In 1934, the family settled in Detroit.

He graduated from the University of Detroit Jesuit High School in 1943 and, after being rejected for the Marines for weak eyesight, immediately joined the Navy, where he served with the Seabees for three years in the South Pacific (gaining the nickname "Dutch", after pitcher Dutch Leonard).[2] Enrolling at the University of Detroit in 1946, he pursued writing more seriously, entering his work in short story contests and submitting it to magazines for publication. He graduated in 1950[3] with a bachelor's degree in English and philosophy. A year before he graduated, he got a job as a copy writer with Campbell-Ewald Advertising Agency, a position he kept for several years, writing on the side.[3]

Leonard received his first break in the fiction market during the 1950s, regularly publishing pulp Western novels. He had his first success in 1951 when Argosy published the short story "Trail of the Apaches."[4]^:29 During the 1950s and early 1960s, he continued writing Westerns, publishing more than 30 short stories. He wrote his first novel, The Bounty Hunters, in 1953 and followed this with four other novels. His western novels had already begun to show his fondness for culturally diverse outsiders and underdogs. He often developed his characters through dialogue, each defined by means of his speech. For many of his stories he favored Arizona and New Mexico settings.[5] Five of his westerns were turned into major movies before 1972: The Tall T (Randolph Scott), 3:10 to Yuma (Glenn Ford), Hombre (Paul Newman), Valdez Is Coming (Burt Lancaster), and Joe Kidd (Clint Eastwood).

In 1969 his first crime story titled The Big Bounce was published by Gold Medal Books. Leonard was different from the well-known names writing in this genre, such as Raymond Chandler or any of the other famous noir writers – no melodrama and pessimism, but more interested in his characters and in realistic dialogue. The stories were often located in Detroit, but apart from his favorite setting he also liked to use South Florida as a setting. La Brava, a novel set there published 1983, was also the occasion for a New York Times review, in which Leonard moved from mystery suspense short story writer to novelist.[6] His next book, an Atlantic City gambling story published in 1985 and titled Glitz, was his breakout in the crime genre. It spent 16 weeks on The New York Times Bestseller list. Other crime novels that followed were all best sellers, as well.[7][8] In his review of Glitz, Stephen King placed him in the same company as John MacDonald, Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, but Leonard felt more influenced by Ernest Hemingway and John Steinbeck.[9] Leonard believed that his books during the 1980s were becoming more humorous and that he was developing a style that was more free and easy. His own favorites were the Dixie Mafia story Tishomingo Blues from 2002 and Freaky Deaky from 1988 about ex-hippie criminals.[10] There are some of his characters in parts of different novels like Hollywood mobster Chili Palmer, bank robber Jack Foley or the two U. S. Marshals Carl Webster and Raylan Givens.[11][12] His crime books were published amongst others by Fawcett Publications, Bantam Books and Dell Publishing. In the 1980s his publisher was Arbor House, later also William Morrow & Company as an imprint of HarperCollins. There are different reprints from his novels, so in the 2000s from Weidenfeld & Nicolson. At the time of his death his novels had sold tens of millions of copies.[13]

Among film adaptations of his work are Jackie Brown (starring Pam Grier, directed by Quentin Tarantino) which is a "homage to the author’s trademark rhythm and pace";[13] Get Shorty (1995, John Travolta and Gene Hackman); Out of Sight (1998, George Clooney and Jennifer Lopez, directed by Steven Soderbergh) and the television series Justified.[14] Nearly thirty movies were made from Leonard's novels, but for some critics his special style worked only in print.[15]

He married Beverly Clare Cline in 1949, and they had five children together—two daughters and three sons[16]—before divorcing in 1977. His second marriage in 1979, to Joan Leanne Lancaster (aka Joan Shepard), ended with her death in 1993. Later that same year, he married Christine Kent and they divorced in 2012.[17][18]

Leonard spent the last years of his life with his family in Oakland County, Michigan. He suffered a stroke on July 29, 2013. Initial reports stated that Leonard was recovering [19] but on August 20, 2013, Leonard died at his home in the Detroit suburb of Bloomfield Hills of stroke complications.[20] He was 87 years old.[17] Leonard is survived by his five children, 13 grandchildren and six great-grandchildren.[18]

Leonard's grandson is Alex Leonard, drummer in the Detroit band Protomartyr.[21]

Commended by critics for his gritty realism and strong dialogue, Leonard sometimes took liberties with grammar in the interest of speeding the story along.[22] In his essay "Elmore Leonard's Ten Rules of Writing" he said: "My most important rule is one that sums up the 10: If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it." He also hinted: "I try to leave out the parts that readers tend to skip."[22]

Elmore Leonard has been called "the Dickens of Detroit" because of his intimate portraits of people from that city, though he said, "If I lived in Buffalo, I'd write about Buffalo."[4]^{: 90} His favorite epithet was one given by Britain's New Musical Express: "the poet laureate of wild assholes with revolvers".[23] His ear for dialogue has been praised by writers such as Saul Bellow, Martin Amis, and Stephen King. "Your prose makes Raymond Chandler look clumsy," Amis told Leonard at a Writers Guild event in Beverly Hills in 1998.[24] Stephen King has called him "the great American writer."[25] According to Charles Rzepka of Boston University, Leonard's mastery of free indirect discourse, a third-person narrative technique that gives the illusion of immediate access to a character's thoughts, "is unsurpassed in our time, and among the surest of all time, even if we include Jane Austen, Gustave Flaubert, and Hemingway in the mix." [26]

Leonard often cited Ernest Hemingway as perhaps his single most important influence, but at the same time criticized Hemingway for his lack of humor and for taking himself too seriously.[27] Still, it was Leonard's affection for Hemingway, as well as George V. Higgins, that led him to will his personal papers to the University of South Carolina, where many of Hemingway's and Higgins' papers are archived. Leonard's papers reside at the university's Irvin Department of Rare Books and Special Collections.[28][29][30]

Leonard in turn had a very strong influence on a generation of crime writers that followed him. His obituary in USA Today named George Pelecanos, Michael Connelly, Dennis Lehane, and Laura Lippman.[31]

• 1984 Edgar Award for Best Mystery Novel of 1983 for La Brava.
• 1992 Grand Master Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Mystery Writers of America[32]
• 2008 F. Scott Fitzgerald Literary Award for outstanding achievement in American literature; received during the 13th Annual F. Scott Fitzgerald Literary Conference held at Montgomery College in Rockville, Maryland, United States.[33] The F. Scott Fitzgerald American Literature award which is given annually in Rockville Maryland, the city where Fitzgerald, his wife, and his daughter are buried, as part of the F. Scott Fitzgerald Literary Festival.
• 2010 Peabody Award, FX's Justified [34]
• 2012 National Book Award, Medal for Distinguished Contribution[35]

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• Official website
• Elmore Leonard on IMDb
• Elmore Leonard at Find a Grave
• Elmore Leonard at Curlie
• The Economist: 31 August 2013 Obituary Elmore Leonard, crime-fiction writer, died on August 20, aged 87
• Elmore Leonard's career
• Elmore Leonard on fantasticfiction.com
• Elmore Leonard Archive at the University of South Carolina Irvin Department of Rare Books and Special Collections.