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Elmore Leonard
The world's coolest crime writer has an uncanny ear for
wry dialogue and a deep belief in lives with second acts.

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By Sean Elder

"Chili Palmer's a talker," Nick said. "That's what he does, he talks. You should've hit him in the mouth." -- From "Be Cool"

Sept. 28, 1999 | Everyone in Hollywood loves Elmore Leonard, at least that's what they all say. Ever since the critical and commercial success of Barry Sonnenfeld's 1995 adaptation of Leonard's bestseller "Get Shorty," and the critical success, at least, of two other Leonard films (1997's "Jackie Brown" and 1998's "Out of Sight"), actors, producers and directors have all been taking the stand. I love Dutch, they say, using the nickname his friends all use. Read all his books -- all 35 of them. And given the addictive quality of Leonard's tight, seamless prose and the page-turning pull of his crime stories (he wrote westerns early in his career), some of them may even be telling the truth.

Seldom mentioned is the fact that all but a handful of his books have been optioned for the screen and that most of those that have been adapted have been awful. Setting the tone, Warner Bros. made a movie of "The Big Bounce" (1970) based on the author's first crime novel and starring that beefcake of a bygone era, Ryan O'Neal. In a 1997 interview in Good Housekeeping, Leonard recalled going to see it in a theater at the time. "About 15 minutes or so into it, the woman sitting in front of me turned to her husband and said, 'This is the worst picture I ever saw.' And I agreed with her wholeheartedly and all three of us got up and left."

"Elmore has this ability to write books that seem like treatments for movies," producer Walter Mirisch ("The Magnificent Seven," "West Side Story") said of Leonard. "That's why he's so popular here." But until "Get Shorty," most film versions of Leonard's books were curiously free of the very characters that inhabit his stories, as if someone had dropped a neutron bomb on them, leaving only the trappings. Scott Frank -- who wrote the scripts for "Get Shorty" and "Out of Sight" and is working on the film adaptation of "Be Cool," the sequel to "Get Shorty" -- thinks he knows what the problem is. "Oftentimes, with his books, people misunderstand where the gold lies," Frank told the Los Angeles Times. "And what they do is keep the plot and jettison all the textural things -- the characters, the dialogue -- all that goes. And the plot -- even he'll tell you it's insignificant. You have to start with those characters and that may mean reinventing some of the plot."

You want to reduce it to a sound bite ("It's the characters, stupid") or invoke some old Hitchcock business about the MacGuffin, but it's a little more complicated than that. Leonard's characters are mostly involved in crime or law enforcement, but there is very little that's black-and-white about them. The people on the side of the law (cops, judges, lawyers) are frequently dirty themselves while his criminals (those who aren't outright idiots, sociopaths or drug addicts) are often quite complicated. He has brought matters of conscience to genre fiction, putting questions of race on the front burner in his westerns, and has written more authentic female heroines in his crime books than any other contemporary male author I can think of, regardless of genre. And though dark currents run through Leonard's books, his touch is light, often comic, and the pop culture references are smarter than those made by most writers half his age.

The people in his books are always talking, it seems. "Are you coming on to me, Elaine?" Chili asks a movie producer pal of his in "Be Cool," to which she replies, "I'm making conversation."

"When did we ever have to do that? We can talk nonstop any time we want." And so it is for most of Leonard's characters: They tell jokes, they tell stories, they talk shit, often of a professional nature. "I sort of let my characters audition for me," he has said. "I listen to them and let them do all the talking." Though Leonard did a lot of reporting early on -- hanging out at a homicide squad room in Detroit for "City Primeval" (1980), for instance -- and now employs a full-time researcher, he does not repeat or mimic what people say. "The main thing with my dialogue is the rhythm of it -- the way people talk, not especially what they say." The magic of what he does, the part many writers wish they could mimic, is that he makes you care about the characters he creates before you even realize it. It is a talent born of character, yes, but also of work and frustration, of sobriety and loss. The love scenes in his books almost always work; they remind you what it's like to fall in love. And when bad things happen to good people, when characters you've come to grow fond of are killed, often before your very eyes, it seems shocking and unfair. Just like in real life.

Next page | A belief in second chances and second acts, Fitzgerald be damned