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ELMORE LEONARD IS THE MANA Nice Long Talk with the Best Crime Novelist Ever(Page 3 of 3)
I think most serious writing is boring. But one time I was on Charlie Rose with Martin Amis— Amis has been a big champion of your work. Yeah. And Amis was waiting. I was on first. Charlie said, “What are you doing here with Martin Amis?” I said, “Well, we’re friends and he’s interviewed me in front of 1,000 people. I should have been interviewing him, but I wouldn’t know what to ask him.” As a literary writer, he’s using his voice all the way through because he has all the words and he knows how to put them together. But that doesn’t appeal to me. I like the characters. I’m in the characters’ heads all the time. I agree with you that serious writing can be boring. I guess that’s kind of a dumb statement— But I don’t take it at face value. I know what you mean. There’s not much that I can read in my genre either. They’re all the same. They have a favorite character, a lead character, who runs through all the books. I couldn’t do that. I started to do it at one time. I was going to do a series based in Detroit Homicide. My publisher liked the idea. And so, in City Primeval, Lieutenant Raymond Cruz is in Squad 7. Then, in the next book, I do Raymond Cruz again. My agent said, “You’ve got to change this guy’s name, because they bought one—but what if they don’t like this one? Then we can’t sell it to anybody else because they own Raymond Cruz.” So I changed his name to Brian Heard in the second one. And that was it for the homicide cops. It’s such a commitment for a writer to do a series like that, like the Bourne books or all the Pelecanos books with recurring characters. It’s like a relationship. I was corresponding with John D. MacDonald and he was on his 28th Travis McGee book. He said, “I don’t think I can do another one.” “I’m starting to hate this fucking guy.” As it turned out, he didn’t have to. He went to one of the big hospitals in the north to have a bypass and he didn’t come out. He had a cosmic reprieve from Travis McGee. There’s a funny part in Road Dogs where Lou tells Jack Foley, “The publishing business isn’t about writing. It’s about selling books.” Well… [laughs] it is. It took me nearly 30 years to get on the Times list. I was getting good reviews but then—which book was it—maybe Unknown Man #89 was reviewed in the Sunday Times book-review section and it was like the guy had just discovered me. But I’d been writing for 30 years. That’s ridiculous. I have a lot of fans, there’s no question about that, but I don’t have a million fans, like James Patterson. Who doesn’t even write his own books… He always has that help. He probably thinks up part of the plot, and yet his name is on there, and he gets all the credit and he gets all the money. If his first printing is a million, then he gets, what? Five million dollars? Something like that. Let’s be realistic, though. You have a lot of very dedicated fans. If it’s the kind of writing that’s meant for a certain reader, they can’t just read one Elmore Leonard book and then stop. Yeah. You’ve said a lot of times that your first big inspiration was Hemingway. For Whom the Bell Tolls. I used to open up that one up anywhere before I started to write. I looked at it as a Western in Spain in the mountains with horses and guns. But he did lack a sense of humor. It’s true. Hemingway is not known for his laughs. And I was dying to say dry things. Then I found Richard Bissell— The Pajama Game, right? Exactly. 7 1/2 Cents was his book that became Pajama Game. But the ones that he set on the Mississippi River, where he was a pilot, those are what taught me a lot. They weren’t trying to be funny, but they were. They were about uneducated people on a towboat, and they just said funny things. Got into discussions about things that were ridiculous, almost. There’s a line, might be in the opening of one of his books. It’s in a hotel room early in the morning and the guy’s looking out the window and the girl on the bed rolls over and looks at him and she says, “What in the world are you looking at?” And he says, “St. Louis, Missouri.” I thought that was a great line! It is. I don’t know why. It’s really good. It’s the “Missouri,” I think, maybe, that makes it. It’s similar to the line that comes up a couple of times in Out of Sight from Three Days of the Condor—that kind of pithy bedroom talk. Oh yeah. Uh-huh. Detroit has been a big part of your life. You’ve lived there since you were young and you’ve set many of your books there. What is it like for you to witness its decline? There’s so much unemployment there, and the car industry is dying. When I was doing car ads, I was reading car magazines. It wasn’t what I was interested in, but I read them because of my job. There were always complaints in these magazines that Detroit wasn’t keeping up. They were still making these big boats, you know? And finally it caught up with them. I was writing Chevrolet ads, but I was driving a Fiat. When was this? In the 50s. It was 1961 when I left the agency. But then we bought a house and my profit sharing, which was like $11,500, was enough, I felt, to live on for at least six months and write a book— But then you bought a house and there goes that. Yeah. So I started doing a lot of freelance stuff. I wrote a bunch of history and geography movies for Encyclopædia Britannica. Like educational films for schools? Yeah. I wonder if I saw any of those in elementary school. They were definitely still showing us film strips from the 60s when I was in school in the early 80s. Could you just crank those out? First I would have to talk to an authority on the subject. That was always fun. I did things like the settlement of the Mississippi Valley, the French and Indian War… Did any of that stuff ever lead to ideas for stories? No. [laughs] I just want to talk a little bit about other writers. You’re the top of the crime genre. Who do you think is carrying on the tradition for a younger generation? I like Pelecanos and I like Dennis Lehane. He wrote a blurb for Road Dogs. I was surprised—I didn’t know he was that into it. How could he not be? A few years back I was the guest of honor at Bouchercon, which is a big assembly of mystery and crime writers. There were hundreds of writers there, but I only knew two of their names. I don’t write or read mysteries. Do you pay much attention to your reviews? I read one recently where the woman who was writing said, “Well, he uses all of these F-words.” It’s not you, it’s your characters. I don’t, but they do! She thought that Road Dogs was the same old thing, like she always knew what was going to happen. Well, if she did, she knew more than I did. When I got to the part where [major character name] is shot—everybody is surprised by it… I didn’t see it coming in quite that way. But wait, do you want me to leave that detail out of the interview? Do you care if big plot points are spoiled for potential readers? No. I don’t know. It’s more about how I tell it or how I write it. It’s not the fact of it. I don’t know how you might couch it without just saying he’s shot. In the chest. From a Walther with a silencer across a table at point-blank range? [laughs] Yeah. You got a really good review in the New York Times for this one. Janet Maslin. That was a beauty. Great review. You mentioned how Lehane blurbed your new book. That reminded me of how you blurbed some of the books of Charles Willeford, one of the best and most underappreciated crime novelists. Do you have any memories of him? He died shortly after I met him. In fact, the day I met him, which was down in the Florida Keys at some kind of a meeting, he had a portable dialysis machine, and he’s drinking whiskey and smoking and having a time. But have you read The Friends of Eddie Coyle by George Higgins? I haven’t. Should I? I think it’s the best crime book ever written. It takes place in Boston. They’re in and out of Massachusetts prisons. The main character is a guy who sells guns. He always has to come up with fresh guns for these guys who rob banks. And how they rob banks is they take the manager of the bank out of his house early in the morning. They break in and the guy comes down to breakfast and they’re sitting there. A good plan. Higgins’s dialogue was great. Very, very good. He wrote three books like that and then he got into monologues. His books would run for pages and pages of someone talking. What did you think of that? I didn’t care for it. Was Higgins an underappreciated writer too, like Willeford? Yeah. Absolutely. And nowadays I don’t think George Pelecanos has ever been on a list in the Times. I don’t remember seeing him. I would have thought he would have been by now. He should be. Cormac McCarthy—of course he’s on the list now—but he wasn’t for a long time. So do you like his writing? Yeah, sure! I do too, but it seems like in a lot of ways he’s the opposite of what you write and talk about liking. His language is usually very dense and artful rather than terse and direct. Like in Blood Meridian, for example. Blood Meridian is one I still haven’t read and I don’t know why. You definitely should! I have a question here that I have to ask for my father-in-law. You’re his favorite writer. He calls you “the man.” He was in love with Karen Sisco and wants to know if she’s ever coming back. I don’t know if she will. She’s mentioned in Road Dogs. I was thinking of bringing her back at one point and I wrote the first chapter of a book where she has left the US Marshals service and was working for her dad, who is a private investigator. She’s in a bar and she’s waiting for her dad to meet her. She’s in South Florida. And she starts talking to a guy and she just has this feeling that this guy is a wanted offender. Just something about him, you know? And she ends up shooting him. Ha! I sent it to my agent in Hollywood, who said, “Yeah it works, it’s fine. But why don’t you think of something else that you haven’t done before, with none of your characters?” So I got into the piracy book. I bet my father-in-law would like to strangle that agent. I noticed while we’ve been talking that you smoke Virginia Slims. That’s what your character Dawn Navarro smoked too. Yeah. And that’s what the girl in Mister Paradise smoked. She was smoking Virginia Slims and then I started. The women in your books are always great. A lot of your dialogue between men and women reminds me of stuff like Tracy and Hepburn. There’s that part in Road Dogs where Dawn is trying to get Jack to tell her something. She thinks she has him under hypnosis. He goes along with it. Then he turns his head and lets her know he hasn’t been hypnotized and she says, “Well, aren’t you a tricky motherfucker?” See all articles by this contributor
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