Elmore Leonard, 1925–2013

Elmore Leonard rarely bothered to plot out his acclaimed crime novels in advance. “I develop characters, and I’m not sure where they’re going until I get to know them,” he once said. If a minor character started to sparkle, Leonard would give up the reins and let him lead the story. “If I’m curious enough to turn the pages,” he said, “I figure it’ll have the same effect on readers.”

It almost always did, said the Los Angeles Times. Leonard’s “tales of con men, hustlers, and killers” made him the most acclaimed crime novelist of his generation and “one of Hollywood’s favorite storytellers.” Such characters as Florida loan shark Chili Palmer in Get Shorty, played on screen by John Travolta, and laconic Kentucky lawman Raylan Givens, the center of the television series Justified, bear the inimitable stamp of what British novelist Martin Amis called Leonard’s enviable gifts “of ear and eye, of timing, and of phrasing.”

Born in New Orleans, Leonard lived in several Southern states before his family finally settled in Detroit in 1934, said The Detroit News. After doing a stint in the Navy and earning a degree from the University of Detroit, he took a job writing advertising copy, but his passion was writing fiction. He honed his craft by getting up every day at 5 a.m. and putting in two hours before work, not even allowing himself to heat the water for coffee until he’d made a start of it. With that “ferocious work ethic,” he produced first Westerns for pulp magazines, and later 45 novels, each of them written out longhand on unlined legal pads he ordered by the thousands.

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Leonard wasn’t always happy with how Hollywood treated his novels, said USA Today. He liked Quentin Tarantino’s Jackie Brown, based on his novel Rum Punch, and Steven Soderbergh’s Out of Sight. But he once said that the 1969 version of his first crime novel, The Big Bounce, was the second worst film he’d ever seen, and later proclaimed the 2004 remake the worst. The screenwriters of those treatments likely violated Leonard’s widely cited 10 rules for writers, which he summed up with one cardinal tenet: “Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.”