Elmore Leonard: RIP For A Modern Master Of Crime Fiction

Elmore Leonard said he wanted to keep himself invisible while writing a book. He succeeded by creating rough-around-the-edges characters who lived in the seamy shadows, a comfortable distance from polite, law abiding society. Elmore died on August 20. I needed to say goodbye.

My favorite crime fiction writer of all time left the building on August 20, 2013. I couldn't say exactly why I kept stocking up on Elmore Leonard's books at yard sales and book fairs but I knew he understood that every word counted and he had a keen ear for dialogue. Once I read "Pagan Babies" I was hooked.

He began writing in the 1950s, had over forty books and countless short stories for magazines to his credit. His books inspired several Hollywood films. When I read "Elmore Leonard's Ten Rules of Writing," I understood why he was the measuring stick by which I rated other authors.  He practiced what he preached.

Leonard's indelibly etched characters came to life through dialogue, not sparkly or predictable, but talk that telegraphed who they were and how they got that way. Leonard's stories were set where he felt his characters belonged: Miami Beach (Pronto); Kentucky coal country (Raylan: A Novel); Oklahoma (The Hot Kid); South Florida/Atlantic City (Glitz); Rwanda/Detroit (Pagan Babies). He populated his stories with characters who illuminated the edgy culture around them. You'd never catch Elmore telling you something, but for page after page of dialogue and just the right amount of detail, he'd show you.

The New York Times sent me to the dictionary with this sentence in its obituary. "Elmore Leonard, the prolific crime novelist whose louche characters, deadpan dialogue and immaculate prose style in novels like “Get Shorty,” “Freaky Deaky” and “Glitz” established him as a modern master of American genre writing, died on Tuesday at his home in Bloomfield Township, Mich."

Leonard wouldn't be caught dead using the word, but louche (disreputable or sordid in a rakish or appealing way) describes some of my favorite characters: Jack Foley (Road Dogs); Raylan Givens (Raylan: A Novel); Terry Dunn (Pagan Babies) were indeed louche.

Mike Lupica of the New York Daily News once said, "The only thing better than reading Elmore Leonard is re-reading him."  Leonard fans would agree.

A few of my favorites
The Hot Kid set inTulsa and Okmulgee,Oklahoma;  Kansas City, KS
Raylan: A Novel set in Kentucky coal mine territory
When The Women Come Out To Dance (short stories)
Glitz set in South Florida, Atlantic City
Pronto set in Miami Beach
Pagan Babies set in Rwanda/Detroit Terry Dunn
Gunsights set in 1880s Arizona territory
Road Dogs set in Venice Beach, CA

A trio of obituaries:

http://lynchfuneraldirectors.com/death_notice.aspx?Operation=preview&noticeid=3446
http://www.cnn.com/2013/08/20/showbiz/elmore-leonard-obit
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/aug/20/elmore-leonard

A brief clip proving there was a bit of the louche character in Leonard himself.

Elmore Leonard's Ten Rules of Writing

Editor's note: Elmore Leonard gave the Detroit Free Press permission to post his rules for writing on November 6, 2010.

These are rules I've picked up along the way to help me remain invisible when I'm writing a book, to help me show rather than tell what's taking place in the story. If you have a facility for language and imagery and the sound of your voice pleases you, invisibility is not what you are after, and you can skip the rules. Still, you might look them over.


1. Never open a book with weather.
If it's only to create atmosphere, and not a character's reaction to the weather, you don't want to go on too long. The reader is apt to leaf ahead looking for people. There are exceptions. If you happen to be Barry Lopez, who has more ways to describe ice and snow than an Eskimo, you can do all the weather reporting you want.

2. Avoid prologues.
They can be annoying, especially a prologue following an introduction that comes after a foreword. But these are ordinarily found in nonfiction. A prologue in a novel is backstory, and you can drop it in anywhere you want. There is a prologue in John Steinbeck's "Sweet Thursday," but it's O.K. because a character in the book makes the point of what my rules are all about. He says: "I like a lot of talk in a book and I don't like to have nobody tell me what the guy that's talking looks like. I want to figure out what he looks like from the way he talks. . . . figure out what the guy's thinking from what he says. I like some description but not too much of that. . . . Sometimes I want a book to break loose with a bunch of hooptedoodle. . . . Spin up some pretty words maybe or sing a little song with language. That's nice. But I wish it was set aside so I don't have to read it. I don't want hooptedoodle to get mixed up with the story."

3. Never use a verb other than "said" to carry dialogue.
The line of dialogue belongs to the character; the verb is the writer sticking his nose in. But said is far less intrusive than grumbled, gasped, cautioned, lied. I once noticed Mary McCarthy ending a line of dialogue with "she asseverated," and had to stop reading to get the dictionary.

4. Never use an adverb to modify the verb "said" . . .
. . . he admonished gravely. To use an adverb this way (or almost any way) is a mortal sin. The writer is now exposing himself in earnest, using a word that distracts and can interrupt the rhythm of the exchange. I have a character in one of my books tell how she used to write historical romances "full of rape and adverbs."

5. Keep your exclamation points under control.
You are allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose. If you have the knack of playing with exclaimers the way Tom Wolfe does, you can throw them in by the handful.

6. Never use the words "suddenly" or "all hell broke loose."
This rule doesn't require an explanation. I have noticed that writers who use "suddenly" tend to exercise less control in the application of exclamation points.

7. Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly.
Once you start spelling words in dialogue phonetically and loading the page with apostrophes, you won't be able to stop. Notice the way Annie Proulx captures the flavor of Wyoming voices in her book of short stories "Close Range."

8. Avoid detailed descriptions of characters.
Which Steinbeck covered. In Ernest Hemingway's "Hills Like White Elephants" what do the "American and the girl with him" look like? "She had taken off her hat and put it on the table." That's the only reference to a physical description in the story, and yet we see the couple and know them by their tones of voice, with not one adverb in sight.

9. Don't go into great detail describing places and things.
Unless you're Margaret Atwood and can paint scenes with language or write landscapes in the style of Jim Harrison. But even if you're good at it, you don't want descriptions that bring the action, the flow of the story, to a standstill.

And finally:

10. Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.
A rule that came to mind in 1983. Think of what you skip reading a novel: thick paragraphs of prose you can see have too many words in them. What the writer is doing, he's writing, perpetrating hooptedoodle, perhaps taking another shot at the weather, or has gone into the character's head, and the reader either knows what the guy's thinking or doesn't care. I'll bet you don't skip dialogue.

My most important rule is one that sums up the 10.

If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.

Or, if proper usage gets in the way, it may have to go. I can't allow what we learned in English composition to disrupt the sound and rhythm of the narrative. It's my attempt to remain invisible, not distract the reader from the story with obvious writing. (Joseph Conrad said something about words getting in the way of what you want to say.)

If I write in scenes and always from the point of view of a particular character -- the one whose view best brings the scene to life -- I'm able to concentrate on the voices of the characters telling you who they are and how they feel about what they see and what's going on, and I'm nowhere in sight.

What Steinbeck did in "Sweet Thursday" was title his chapters as an indication, though obscure, of what they cover. "Whom the Gods Love They Drive Nuts" is one, "Lousy Wednesday" another. The third chapter is titled "Hooptedoodle 1" and the 38th chapter "Hooptedoodle 2" as warnings to the reader, as if Steinbeck is saying: "Here's where you'll see me taking flights of fancy with my writing, and it won't get in the way of the story. Skip them if you want."

"Sweet Thursday" came out in 1954, when I was just beginning to be published, and I've never forgotten that prologue.

Did I read the hooptedoodle chapters? Every word.

Detroit Free Press

 

Comments

[Richard Dowall]

Thanks for the Elmore Leonard article. He is one of my favorite writers (Lee Child finishes a close second), especially his early/first cowboy novels.

[Paul A. Tamburello, Jr aka pt at large]

We're on same wave length. While I read Elmore Leonard in print, I mostly get Lee Child's Jack Reacher series on audiotapes with Dick Hill reading them. Third on my list is Michael Connelly, author of such books as Lincoln Lawyer, which I also loved as an audio book, gives me good reason to drive a few hundred miles!

[Marianne Bouchaud]

Hello Paul,

We also paid tribute to this wonderful writer - re-re-re-reading the collection we have at home.
I did not know "louche" was also used in English …least in that sense ( louche in French can be : une louche = a ladle (noun) , il louche = he is cross-eyed (verb loucher), il est louche or c'est louche = as in your quotation (adj) but without the appealing aspect though. Nowadays, in slang used by youth = chelou).

[Paul A. Tamburello, Jr. aka pt at large]

Bonjour Marianne,
How grand that we share the love of Elmore Leonard! Leave it to a writer in the New York Times to use the word 'louche'. The definition i found with "in an appealing or rakish way" seemed to fit, maybe a more American definition, qui sait?

[Susan Sullivan]

Oh Thank you Paul. Elmore Leonard was my absolute favorite. I'm sure I will find some new books I missed or will just reread whatever I come across.. Also Steinbeck's Sweet Thursday and Cannery Row were my Dad and friends most fav's and I loved them too. They named their wives Hazel # 1 and Hazel #2 after one of the rather slow witted characters(in jest) . I must reread those also.

[Paul A. Tamburello, Jr aka pt at large]

After Leonard mentioned Sweet Thursday, I'm on the lookout for it. This post certainly resonated with lots of Elmore Leonard fans.

[Neal Skorka]

This is great, Paul. I just added EL to my reading list.

[Paul A. Tamburello, Jr aka pt at large]

His website lists all his books, Neal http://www.elmoreleonard.com
Let me know what you think.