At the age of 75, Elmore Leonard remains the undisputed king of the crime novel. In a lively interview with the Deseret News from his home in Detroit, Leonard, who has written 36 novels, chatted easily about the work he loves.
Famous for his natural, conversational dialogue, Leonard said, "Never use another word other than 'said.' Never use an adverb to describe the verb 'said.' If the reader doesn't know how he has said it, you haven't described the characters enough. Adverbs distract from the story, and metaphors can stop a story cold."
These are just a few of the rules Leonard imposes on himself. Another is to "leave out passages the reader tends to skip. This is the passage you had the most trouble with, but you forced it to work."
That's why, to Leonard, writing is "write and rewrite."
Typically, he writes daily from 10 a.m.-6 p.m. "I don't mind being alone. The day goes so fast I can't believe it. I look at the clock and see it's 3 o'clock, and I think, 'Good, I have three more hours.' That's the kind of job to have. Certain scenes flow and others kind of creep along. When they creep too slowly, I go back and jazz it up a bit."
Leonard does his first draft with a ballpoint pen, then he types it in and revises it. "When I get about 300 pages — I begin to look at the options to end it. When I finally decide on one, I aim for that, then sometimes I have to go back and insert an extra scene to make the ending work. I think of it as a mural. I paint a scene and then I add color."
Leonard says he knows he can't write in "the omniscient author style," like Saul Bellow does, using his own language to tell the story. Neither could Ernest Hemingway. Determined to let his "characters carry the story," Leonard admits to having been influenced by John O'Hara and Richard Bissell.
"Bissell wrote stories about the Mississippi River. He wrote 'Seven-and-a-Half Cents,' the book that became the musical, 'The Pajama Game.' He was a very natural, easy writer. I loved his characters and his dialogue."
Readers sometimes tell him they can "hear" his voice in the books, but "honestly," he says, "I try to keep my nose out of it. I do get inside each character, and each has a different voice. I don't ever want the reader to be aware of me writing. I'm in it. I'm everybody. The attitude is mine. I present characters but I don't judge them — I have fun with them."
Actually, Leonard started out almost 50 years ago writing Westerns, because he liked Western movies and the magazine market was huge. This was how he learned to write. Then, the market for Westerns dried up at the same time Leonard tired of writing them. But it was the 1961 novel "Hombre," made into a movie with Paul Newman, that made a writing star out of Leonard, who found that "in crime you can concentrate on the bad guys, who are a lot more fun."
Besides the time he has spent in the homicide division of the Detroit Police Department, it is his life experience and his habit of talking to people that gives him the ultimate feel for good dialogue. He thinks he has improved his dialogue for women "by concentrating on it. The more I get into contemporary stories, the more the woman takes it away from the guy I thought was the main character. More often than not, the woman is smarter than the guy."
Leonard recalls a black-tie affair where the woman seated next to him was unattached. "She said she was divorced and told me why. Her ex-husband was a control freak. 'He told me how to dress, how to do my makeup.' I gave that background to Debbie Dewey in 'Pagan Babies.' I ask questions. People love to talk to you, including cops and inmates.
"I got a letter from one inmate who said he had converted several fellow inmates away from Sidney Sheldon to reading my stuff — and most of them were heroin sellers. He said, 'You haven't caught on yet with the crack and cocaine crowd, because they're younger and less educated.' "
Leonard accepts the implication — that his style has a certain intellectual appeal. One convict paid him a compliment "by wanting to know if I were black or had done time."
The author says, "You have to be careful with slang — it's here today and then it's gone. There are some words, like 'cool,' that are thrown in easily. I had a line in my last novel, 'Be Cool' — it was, 'You can let me off at the corner's cool.' It works because you don't expect it."
Although some of his titles are more famous than others — "Fifty-Two Pickup," "Touch," "The Big Bounce," "Cuba Libre" — his personal favorite is "Freaky Deaky." But Leonard admits, "They're all the same sort of book. There are scenes in all of them I like a lot."
On the other hand, Leonard never plans a book. He invents characters, develops them and goes from there. "I just write and make it up as I go along. The plot develops according to what they do. Once I have a character firmly in mind, he kind of leads the way.
"Mutt, for instance, in 'Pagan Babies' — I wanted to give Randy a bodyguard. My researcher said, 'Make him a vicious street guy.' But what does he sound like? What if he's just kind of a hick, fairly dumb — but things seem to work out for him? I ended up with a good character."
But, for Leonard, it's terribly important to come up with a name first. "I created a guy once named Matisse, from New Orleans, but it just didn't work. I changed his name to Delaney, and it suddenly worked. Matisse vs. a guy named Delaney. Think about it. It makes a difference."
Asked if he is the kind of guy who always has a great one-liner on social occasions, Leonard says, "No. When I need a one-liner, I don't have to have it right away. I might have months to pop it in."
Leonard's next book already has a title — "Tishomingo Blues," set in Tishomingo, Miss. The title is the name of a 1918 jazz number by Spencer Williams. Some of the story will take place in Tunica, the gambling capitol of Mississippi. The main character will be "an amusement park high diver who dives off an 80-foot ladder into eight or nine feet of water. He's a show-off, he lives on the edge, he looks at girls when he's on the ladder. He's the star, doing something no one else has the nerve to do."
How far along is he on this book?
"I'm on page eight."
E-mail: dennis@desnews.com