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ELMORE LEONARD
IS THE MAN

A Nice Long Talk with the
Best Crime Novelist Ever

INTERVIEW BY JESSE PEARSON
PHOTOS BY RICHARD KERN


We won’t waste much time on an intro here because you should already know who this guy is. Let’s just say this: Elmore Leonard, now going on 84 years old, is still cranking out perfectly detailed, thrilling, and hilarious stories of criminals at a pace that’s hard to believe. He writes dialogue so well you’d think it’s transcribed from real conversations, and he knows more about how to craft a living, breathing character out of thin air than God (or any other higher power—more on that later).

We recently sat with him in his hotel room in midtown New York City, where he was taking a short break from the tour to promote Road Dogs, his new novel. It brings together three previously existing Leonard characters—Jack Foley, Cundo Rey, and Dawn Navarro—in typically powder-keg fashion in Venice Beach, California. As with everything he’s done, it’s compulsively readable and 100 percent entertaining.

Vice: I just finished Road Dogs last night. I read it straight through. It took about ten hours.

Elmore Leonard: That’s the way to do it, so that you can remember what’s going on in it.

I really like the way you set up these situations that seem like they’re going to be traditional thriller devices, but then you explode them almost immediately. Like when Jack Foley first arrives in California and meets Dawn Navarro, there’s already been this tension set up of whether they’ll have sex or not.

Right.

And in someone else’s book, that would be stretched out for a long time. But you cut right to the chase and have them in bed together at their first meeting.

I remember my editor, while I was writing the book, said, “I don’t think they should get that serious about each other within a couple of hours.” I told him, “Don’t worry, it will work OK.”

It seemed very real the way you wrote it.

It works in this book because he’s not going to wait until the third date or something to kiss her. He’s just out of prison.

Yeah, he’s not about to wait. And then there’s the character of Danialle, when Jack and Dawn are supposed to be running this con on her. I expected that to be a long, suspenseful thread through the entire book but, bang, a few pages later you have her saying that she knew it was all a hoax and that she didn’t mind.

That character is named Danialle Karmanos because her husband paid $40,000 in an auction for me to use his wife’s name. I’ve been doing that for I don’t know how many books—fund-raising events where they’ll have an auction at different schools: “Do you want to be in my next book?”

Oh, so Danialle Karmanos is named after a real person? That’s funny.

Yeah! Karmanos is a cancer center, a big, big cancer-research and treatment center in Detroit. Her husband wanted to be in the book too, so he got into another auction and only had to pay $5,000 to win. But I gave him a lesser part.

Yeah, that character is a corpse!

He’s dead. [laughs]

Do you let them know what their role in the book is going to be, or do they just find out when it’s released?

I don’t tell anybody anything.

I’ve heard about how you start with characters rather than with plot.

Yeah, well, characters in a situation. Like, Foley is going to get out of prison and so is Cundo Rey, who I used in my book La Brava in the early 80s. I liked Cundo Rey. He was in that older book, but it wasn’t a real starring role. So I wanted to bring him back. I thought I could do a lot with him.

I figured he was dead at the end of La Brava.

I was afraid he was too. I remember looking it up in the book like, “God, I hope he’s alive.” He was shot in the chest three times. But he made it!

I guess so. Do you do character sketches or do you just drop them straight into situations?

Well, these three—Foley, Cundo, and Dawn—I knew. Clooney played Foley in Out of Sight and I was hoping that he would want to do it again, but he hasn’t read it yet.

It seems to me like it’s begging to be a movie.

It is. And so the three characters, I knew them. I didn’t have to worry about dreaming up anything for them outside of just plot. And I don’t put a lot of time in on my plots. I like to make it up as I go along. No outline at all. You’ll meet practically everybody who is going to be in the book in the first 100 pages. And then, for the second act, I have to do a little figuring about fitting in a subplot and what’s going to happen next. In the third act, which I usually get to in my manuscript around page 300—my books are mostly 350 pages or so—I think of the ending.

Literally making it up as you go along. Is that a process you developed over the course of your career, or has it always been that way for you?

I’ve been doing it like that for 30 years.

Does it ever feel like a high-wire act, not knowing where you’re going to go?

No. I don’t worry about it. If it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work. But if I like the characters, I know it’s going to be fine. I’ll know that I’m going to have fun with them, and that’s the main thing. The writing has to be fun or else forget it.

It must be fun for you, since you’re always writing.

I’m writing a book right now. It’s called Djibouti. It has to do with the Somalian pirates.

Wow.

A documentary filmmaker, a woman, 35, starts reading about them in the paper and decides she wants to do a film on them. She has made three films so far that have won awards. Katrina—she lives in New Orleans so she walked out the door and shot Katrina—and she did one on white supremacists called… I forgot what it was called.

So this character in your new book is based on this documentary filmmaker?

No, this is all my character.

She’s a totally fictitious character? The way you’re referring to her, I would have thought she was a real person.

I know. That’s because they become real to me. By the end of the book, I wonder, “What are they doing now?”

That’s great.

So she brings her assistant, who is a 72-year-old six-foot-six black guy who was a seafarer. He’s been around the world 50 times. He’s been through these waters, down through the Red Sea into the Gulf of Aden and the Indian Ocean, around the Horn of Africa—East Africa. That’s where all the pirates are operating. In the book I even have the latest important move that they made on the American ship where they had the captain in that enclosed lifeboat and then the three snipers shot the three pirates—one shot each.

Yeah, that was incredible shooting.

They weren’t that far away. The life raft was on a line to this destroyer. The snipers were in the back of the destroyer and I think they had their rifles somehow in a gyroscope so that they would stay level.

But three head shots from a huge boat bobbing in the sea to a small life raft in the dark… it’s pretty impressive, gyroscope or not.

Three shots and that was it.

I kind of love those pirates.

Well, that’s what she thinks too. She loves them. She has complete sympathy for them because their fishing grounds are being messed up with toxic waste. They also were getting a lot of competition from big companies from China and Japan that were sending fishermen there. So they turned to hijacking ships and asking for a lot of money. Ransom.

And your main character feels for them.

In the very first chapter, she lands in Djibouti. Her assistant is there. He’s already leased a boat for them—a 30-foot trawler. That night, he’s showing her around Djibouti, which is a real mess. They run into a pirate, who is in town to have some fun. He’s got a Mercedes and he takes it for a ride. He’s not just your everyday pirate. He’s got some background and a lot of money. Homes around Somalia. She’s also met another guy on the plane from Paris. He goes around talking to pirates, trying to convince them that this won’t end well.

Trying to talk them out of the path they’ve chosen.

Right. And he’s Saudi… I think he’s Saudi. He went to Oxford and he affects more of a British way. He’s a cool guy. His name is Ari but everyone at school called him Harry. Idris is the name of the pirate leader. And then there are other people involved. There’s a guy called Billy Wynn who’s on a $2 million yacht with a girl that he likes a lot, but he’s giving her a test. They go around the world and if she doesn’t complain or get sick, he might marry her. He’s fun. He’s a little strange.

It’s really interesting how you’re talking about the book that you’re writing now, but it sounds like you’re just telling me about real people that you know. You’re like, “I think he’s a Saudi.”

I’ve been into this book now all this year. Road Dogs I wrote at least a year ago.

Your pace is incredible.

I like to write books, so…

It’s just what you do.

That’s what I do. I don’t take time off in between for any particular reason. I mean, if I do then maybe I’m just thinking of the next one.

A lot of writers will do something like three books in ten years—or even less.

Well, they go out to lunch and all that. They talk about it with their friends.

Instead of working. So one of my favorite scenes in Road Dogs is when Little Jimmy goes to confession. It’s hilarious, with great comedic timing. And then at the end he says, “Anything I did to get God pissed off at me is forgiven,” because he said ten Hail Marys and ten Our Fathers. You were raised Catholic. Does that reflect the way that you feel about it too?

Ten Our Fathers and ten Hail Marys was just—that was just rote. That’s what you usually got! I mean, what could you do that would require a Rosary or something?

Sometimes you kind of want to go in there and see if you can get 20 or something.

[laughs] I don’t know what it would take. I haven’t been to confession in, God, how long… I haven’t been to mass in probably 20 years. But I was in AA, you see. I’m still part of that because it worked. I haven’t had a drink since ’77.

And AA is quasi-religious.

Higher power. That’s what keeps you straight. The higher power isn’t defined necessarily as God, but because I was brought up Catholic, it’s easy for me to do it that way.

Right.

And you go right directly to God in AA. You don’t fool around with the saints.

Do you still attend meetings?

No, I haven’t gone to a meeting in quite a while. The last time I went, the same guys were there and they were all telling the same stories. In my new book, a person who is in AA asks Dara—that’s the documentary filmmaker—if she wants to do a documentary on AA. He tells her that there are these drunkologues where they stand up and tell these harrowing stories. Like the one where the guy all of a sudden realized he was going the wrong way on a turnpike—

I’ve heard that very story more than a couple of times in AA meetings.

[laughs] Sure, I’ll bet you that every group has heard that one. But Dara says, “I don’t think I’m good enough to just have someone telling a story rather than showing it.” She can’t show it. How are you going to shoot the guy going the wrong way?

Dramatic re-creation? Just kidding.

Yeah. Then it’s not a documentary.

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Comments

Anonymous, on Jul 6, 2009 wrote: 84? Jeez. He looks friggin’ amazing! I would have guessed mid-to-upper 60s from the photograph. My grandfather is 84 and much worse off. Stay healthy!
Anonymous, on Jul 6, 2009 wrote: is that some kind of 5-5-5 haiku two comments down?
	doot doot, on Jul 2, 2009 wrote: Homie looks fucking good for 84. Great interview.
Anonymous, on Jul 2, 2009 wrote: hes my friend’s uncle! went to my high school. I pissed next to him. he’s a nice guy.
	gnarwhal, on Jun 30, 2009 wrote: i have resisted his books until now because they usually have really awful cover art but maybe that isn’t his fault. i’ll give him a shot. oh yeah, going to have to block out all memories of j lo in out of sight.
Anonymous, on Jun 26, 2009 wrote: Shows you how to be a good writer, how realistic he treats his charachters. Shows you have to be a little crazy though.
Anonymous, on Jun 25, 2009 wrote: 8 pages on Elmore Leonard. Yes please.
Anonymous, on Jun 22, 2009 wrote: he cant admit he’s in AA. the defeats the purpose of it...I mean, obviously!
Anonymous, on Jun 19, 2009 wrote: Scumnation says ’ he talks shit and hasn’t a clue about writing real scum characters cos he hasn’t come from that lifestyle or even bothered to make friends with real people in order to develop real scum characters’
Anonymous, on Jun 18, 2009 wrote: lady gaga? i wish i could spike your drink with cyanide.
Anonymous, on Jun 17, 2009 wrote: Authors are boring. When is the next Lady Gaga single coming out?
Anonymous, on Jun 17, 2009 wrote: Road Dogs is hilarious. Just finished it. Friend staying with me begged me for it after hearing me laughing out loud.
	whitney, on Jun 17, 2009 wrote: how does james patterson get away with not writing his books?
Anonymous, on Jun 17, 2009 wrote: @anonymous Anonymous, on Jun 17, 2009 wrote: "why is it that writers are generally booze hounds? is it a genetic thing? I like the romantic notion of being a drunk writer in paris but im sire the reality of the whole thing would be way different." it’s because they’re mostly miserable bastards who’d rather open their mouth for a bottle rather than a fellow human being.
Anonymous, on Jun 17, 2009 wrote: the way that he talks about his characters in this interview is amazing. as if they are people that he knows with life and emotion. no wonder his books flow so well.
Anonymous, on Jun 17, 2009 wrote: he takes a good picture.
Anonymous, on Jun 17, 2009 wrote: why is it that writers are generally booze hounds? is it a genetic thing? I like the romantic notion of being a drunk writer in paris but im sire the reality of the whole thing would be way different.
Anonymous, on Jun 17, 2009 wrote: to be this guys researcher would be an awesome job, right today i want you to go and find out all you can about pirates. rad.
	hooohaaa, on Jun 17, 2009 wrote: that has to be one of the whispiest beards that i have ever seen. come on man if you cant make it happen get it off.
Anonymous, on Jun 17, 2009 wrote: he takes inspiration from Hemingway... hmm. I dont really see the similarities
Anonymous, on Jun 17, 2009 wrote: Out of Sight was a pretty bad ass movie... but I’m biased since george clooney was in it. mmm
Anonymous, on Jun 17, 2009 wrote: this guy is a beast! he practically pumps out a new book every year
Anonymous, on Jun 16, 2009 wrote: really good interview, elmore is a legend. he can’t have meant he’s never got any money for all the films that have been made of his books?
Anonymous, on Jun 16, 2009 wrote: this doods an amateur
Anonymous, on Jun 15, 2009 wrote: i won’t lie. i have never heard of mr. leonard before but i do remember that jesse only interviews the best writers (crews, etc) so i will def look into this man.
	joe bananas, on Jun 11, 2009 wrote: im looking forward to reading about some somalian sea shanties! ans fuck is one of the best descriptions for weather ive ever heard.
Anonymous, on Jun 11, 2009 wrote: this was an awesome kingsize interview, felt that it really got into more detail than a lot of previous interviews.
Anonymous, on Jun 10, 2009 wrote: i thought AA was for life. as long as you aren’t drinking i suppose it has done its work.
Anonymous, on Jun 10, 2009 wrote: James Patterson doesnt write his own books?! way to ruin my day vice!!! :[
Anonymous, on Jun 10, 2009 wrote: finally!! a vice interview that has left me completely satisfied... normally they end to quick and I want to know more
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