The Dickens of Detroit
He was born Elmore John Leonard on October 11, 1925 in New Orleans. Forty-five novels later he would be known as one of the greatest and most prolific American writers of modern fiction.
His early life was spent on the move, as his father, a General Motors dealership location scout, moved his family throughout the South. The family settled in Detroit in 1934 when Elmore was nine years old. He would call Detroit home for the rest of his life. When asked why he didn’t live in Los Angeles, he would say, “Why would I want to live there? Everything I need is here.”
As a boy, he was drawn to the stories of outlaws playing out in newspapers across the country in the 1930s. A photo of a young Elmore taken in Memphis with his mother and sister Margaret shows him with one foot on the running board of a car as he points a pistol gangster-style at the camera. He was influenced and inspired by the likes of Bonnie and Clyde, John Dillinger and Pretty Boy Floyd. In fifth grade, Elmore wrote his first piece of fiction, a play based on one of his favorite books, All Quiet on the Western Front.
In high school, he earned the nickname “Dutch,” after the Washington Senators knuckleballer Emil “Dutch” Leonard. As for growing up with the name Elmore he has said, “It makes you tough.”
In 1943, Elmore graduated from the University of Detroit High School. He wanted to be a Marine but a bad eye prevented him from joining. He was then drafted and assigned to the Seabees, a battalion of the United States Navy, where he served for little more than a year in the South Pacific. When he returned home, Elmore got on a ship that went through the canal to Virginia, where it was decommissioned. All told, Elmore served 30 months in the Navy. With “Dutch” tattooed on his bicep, Leonard says he returned from the Navy a man.
Elmore enrolled at the University of Detroit in ‘46, majoring in English and Philosophy. Three years later, he married Beverly Cline and went to work at Campbell-Ewald, an advertising agency in Detroit, writing ads for Chevrolet. He got up at five each morning to work on fiction, forcing himself to write a clean page before he turned the water on for coffee.
Hard work paid off in the early 1950s when he sold Western short stories to Argosy and pulp magazines like Dime Western and Zane Grey Magazine. He was paid two cents a word. Elmore chose Westerns because he liked cowboy and Indian movies, and he wanted to sell his stories to Hollywood. By the end of the 1950s, Elmore had written five Western novels and thirty short stories, two of which sold to the movies: 3:10 to Yuma and The Tall T. Leonard was now becoming known in Hollywood.
Influenced by the spare prose of Ernest Hemingway, Elmore would open up For Whom the Bell Tolls before he started to write and studied it for inspiration. That book taught him how to write. He thought of it as a Western set in Spain, in the mountains with horses and guns. But Elmore eventually realized Hemingway didn’t share his sense of humor. He discovered Richard Bissell, author of A Stretch on the River and High Water, stories with characters whose humor came naturally and with ease.
In 1961 Elmore quit his job at the ad agency to write full time. But with a wife and kids to support, he was forced to take on freelance writing jobs. After a five-year break from writing fiction, Elmore’s first non-Western, The Big Bounce, was published. Elmore’s Hollywood agent, the legendary H.N. Swanson, said, “Kiddo, I’m going to make you rich.”
It didn’t happen overnight but Elmore began selling his work to Hollywood on a regular basis. 52 Pickup appeared in 1974, the first of many novels set in his hometown of Detroit. And around this time, Elmore read the The Friends of Eddie Coyle by George V. Higgins. It had a big influence on him. Higgins showed Elmore how to “loosen up” and “get into scenes quicker.”
Elmore was on a roll. In the 1970s and early 1980s, he was writing a novel a year, and sometimes two, as his reputation and readership grew. These classics include: Swag, Unknown Man No. 89, The Switch, Gunsights, City Primeval, Gold Coast, Split Images, Cat Chaser, Stick and LaBrava.
In 1984, LaBrava was given the Edgar award for best novel by the Mystery Writers of America. The following year, he made the New York Times bestseller list – a first for Elmore. He was now on the cover of Newsweek and being hailed as “the greatest living crime writer.”
His newfound fame only grew as he continued to write one bestseller after another: Freaky Deaky, Killshot, Maximum Bob and Get Shorty, which was made into a hit movie in 1995. Quentin Tarantino’s Jackie Brown, based on Elmore’s Rum Punch, came out in 1997, followed by Steven Soderbergh’s Out of Sight in 1998. Elmore was easily the hottest writer in America.
He kept doing what he loved most: writing stories. And the books kept coming: Cuba Libre, Be Cool, Pagan Babies, Tishomingo Blues, the children’s book, A Coyote’s in the House and Mr. Paradise.
In 2005, at the age of 80, Elmore wrote his fortieth novel, The Hot Kid, followed by Up in Honey’s Room in 2006. That year Elmore received the prestigious Cartier’s Diamond Dagger Award in England, and the Raymond Chandler Award at the Noir Festival in Courmayeur, Italy. In 2008, Elmore was honored with the F. Scott Fitzgerald Award and the Lifetime Achievement Award from PEN USA in 2009.
The awards were nice but Elmore had more work to do. In 2009, Road Dogs, a sequel of sorts to Out of Sight, was released to rave reviews. Few writers in America have matched Elmore’s popularity with critical literary acclaim. And there was still more to come: Djibouti appeared in 2010 and Raylan, his 45th novel, was incorporated into the third season of the hit TV show, Justified, based on Elmore’s novella, Fire in the Hole.
That same year, Time magazine dubbed Elmore “The Dickens of Detroit.” After hearing that, Elmore said, “What would they call me if I lived in Boston or Chicago?” He received the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters by the National Book Foundation in 2012.
“The Great American Writer,” as Stephen King called him, was at work on his next novel, Blue Dreams, when he suffered a stroke at the age of 87. Elmore passed away at home, near his writing desk, in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan on August 20, 2013.
He leaves behind five children – Jane, Peter, Christopher, Bill and Katy, thirteen grandchildren, six great grandchildren, and avid readers around the world.
10 Rules
- Never open a book with weather.
- Avoid prologues.
- Never use a verb other than “said” to carry dialogue.
- Never use an adverb to modify the verb “said” . . . he admonished gravely.
- Keep your exclamation points under control. You are allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose.
- Never use the words “suddenly” or “all hell broke loose.”
- Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly.
- Avoid detailed descriptions of characters.
- Don't go into great detail describing places and things.
- Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.
- “My most important rule is one that sums up the ten. If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.”