ELMORE LEONARD RODE INTO town (London, England) this week, and for a moment the whole world went back half a century. Suddenly it was the 1950s again and cowboys were big. Night after night you had fresh imports such as Wagon Train and Bonanza in the prime-time slots. There was Rawhide, with a promising young Clint Eastwood. Frankie Laine and Marty Robbins were in the hit parade.
The reason for the flashback was the imminent publication of Leonard’s The Complete Western Stories, a ranch-sized volume that rounds up all his tales from those early days for the first time. That, and his having won the Crime Writers’ Association Cartier Diamond Dagger for 2006, which he picked up at the Savoy Hotel on Wednesday night.
The author of these plain-dealing little classics is 80. This makes him a genuine old-timer, but it is not a role he fancies. He is trim and restless and his jeans would fit a snake-hipped dude a quarter of his age. He has five middle-aged children, 12 grands and two great-grands. One of his sons is embarking upon a writing career of his own. This is weird and circular as he is doing so from the world of advertising — exactly the move that Leonard himself made at half that age.
He does talk about the past, which is just as well, given that it is such a big one. But he is also eager to note, as any writer would be, that Tom Cruise is considering starring in a remake of the 1957 movie based on his story 3.10 to Yuma. The word is that it will be directed by James Mangold, who made the Johnny Cash biopic Walk the Line last year.
The western stories aren’t a patch on what came later, but they do show how Leonard was already quite ruthlessly eliminating anything standing in the way of the story. It is prose that cuts to the chase and prefigures the style of his great crime novels such as Rum Punch, Maximum Bob, Get Shorty and Hombre. Those and many more of nearly 40 books made him one of the most desired sources of crime plots in late 20th-century Hollywood.
Because he has lived in and written about the place for most of his working life, he is known as the Dickens of Detroit. But this is seriously awry — Leonard could no more devote 500 words to describing a face than he could pass for a Cockney.
“It’s just alliteration,” he says. “What would they have called me if I had lived in Boston?” Balzac, presumably. “I guess.”
His model remains Hemingway, who used to say that if his stuff read easy it was because it was written hard. It is the same thing with Leonard. Rewriting is at the heart of the operation. It takes at least four pages to get a single one that is clean. He writes in longhand, then types it on a typewriter. In this respect he is defiantly unevolved.
“When I started to write,” he says, “I just used a typewriter and crossed out lines with Xs. It took for ever and it didn’t look good. These days people say to me, ‘Can you e-mail that to me?’ and I say ‘No, I can’t.’ Also, I don’t have an answering machine because I always answer the phone. I am the answering service. I mean, how many really important calls am I going to get in the course of a day? My publisher or agent maybe, but it’s nothing that can’t be held over till the next day.”
He probably gets fewer calls than in the days when he was also writing screenplays of his books. He talks with spent exasperation about the “highways and corporate indecision” that dog the screenwriter’s life.
He recalls working on the dire Joe Kidd at Universal in 1972, handing pages of script to Eastwood and the director John Sturges at five in the afternoon, with Eastwood saying that surely he should have his gun out when he was facing John Saxon, who had armed men behind him, and Leonard trying to explain that the character was not a gunfighter.
The key to Leonard’s success has been an ability to write in a way that makes his stories natural for the screen. That and his readiness to retool his production line for crime the moment that the market for western fiction showed signs of decline. He was both obsessive and ordered from the start, working at his typewriter from five to seven in the morning before going to write advertising blurbs for Chevrolet. In 1960 he took $11,500 from a profit share and turned to full-time writing.
Once he had allied his economy of style with thoroughness of research, there was no stopping him. Crime pays because, as he puts it: “The stories have a beginning and an end, and the readers can be satisfied.
“With serious fiction you never know where it is going to go, you’re not sure what it’s about and, more than anything else, it’s the writer’s story. Him telling it, with his language. Now, I don’t have their language, so it’s always told from the characters’ point of view. I try to keep out of it. I don’t want the reader to be aware of me. The words I use are the ones the character would use. I want to do more showing than telling.”
Martin Amis is a huge fan. Leonard would reciprocate but has difficulty finishing the books. “I just don’t have that number of words in my head,” he explains.
His second wife, who died of cancer in 1993, read his day’s work and made suggestions, usually if she felt something had gone amiss with a woman character’s behaviour. “If she didn’t say anything, then I knew there was a problem . . . I make it all up pretty much as I go along, wait for the good things to happen, wait for the characters to let me know. I’m pretty sure who’s going to win. My manuscripts are about 350 pages, and by the time I have done the first 100 I know who everyone is — provided they are all talking to me. Towards 300, I’m thinking ‘How is this going to end?’ and ‘Who is still alive’!” He was devastated when his wife died, couldn’t wait to get married again; and did so the same year. His third wife is Christine who looked after the garden at his home in Bloomfield village, 15 miles from Detroit.
He tells it just like something from his books, full of information, dates, details, everything moving effortlessly forward. It is easy to see now why he dismisses backstory as a detail for executives to argue over.
“She had a peaked cap, and she was playing music on her Walkman. I would talk to her about books and movies, never flowers. Finally one day in June, it was the 19th, I called her up for a date. We got married on August 19. I was going to do a big book tour, of the US, Europe, West Canada, Australia and New Zealand. I said ‘D’you want to go with me?’ She said ‘What as’?” In his conversation, as in his writing, he is up for laughs, conceding that this is enough to set him apart from Hemingway. But there’s a sardonic edge and occasionally something verging on sadness. It shouldn’t come as a surprise; even in the comedy worlds of Get Shorty or Rum Punch (filmed as Jackie Brown), stuff happens.
Detroit stands like an implementation of his worst visions: dozens of children killed each year in drive-by shootings; gunmen hitting the wrong people, the wrong houses because they are out of it on marijuana-filled cigars; the whole place breaking up and turning against itself.
“Once upon a time I used to be able to go into black clubs,” he says, “but that would be dangerous now.”
He reflects that cowboys are a problem, being the most conservative of all sectors. “Trouble is,” he continues, “they are not using their brains for the idea of change. They just like things the way they are now.”
I ask whether this has got worse since the President’s father was in the White House, but he is not talking of that kind of cowboy. He means real ones, the kind he used to write about.
Nothing derails this man. Not even a serious drinking problem, which came to a head in 1977 and played a part in the breakdown of his first marriage. He went to Alcoholics Anonymous, loved the stories and the human drama but had trouble when the meetings went on too long. Men-only ones were OK, he remembers, the mixed ones weren’t so good. He hasn’t been back for 20 years and is still happily teetotal.
As for that other famous literary affliction, writer’s block, forget it. “I don’t believe in it,” he says. And out they tumble, a book a year, with their seriously bad men, their detailed research, for which he has employed an assistant for the past 25 years, and their endorsement of a moral code.
If he makes his life look easy, it is because it has been lived hard.
