Elmore Leonard

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Elmore John Leonard, Jr., was born in New Orleans on October 11, 1925, to Elmore John and Flora Rivé Leonard. His father traveled widely for his job, and the family moved several times before finally settling in Detroit in 1934. Leonard attended the University of Detroit High School, where he earned the nickname “Dutch” as a baseball player (after the Washington Senators pitcher Dutch Leonard). After being rejected by the Marines for his poor vision, he was drafted by the Navy in 1943 and served with the Seabees in New Guinea and the Admiralty Islands. After World War II, he enrolled at the University of Michigan, where he majored in English and philosophy. He married Beverly Cline in 1949, graduated in 1950, and took a job with an advertising agency that same year, first as an office boy and then as an advertising copywriter, specializing in advertisements for Chevrolet trucks.

Leonard had always loved literature, and he began to train himself to be a writer, deciding to begin with Westerns because he enjoyed reading them and believed there was a ready popular market for the genre. He studied Western films, travel magazines, and histories and also the novels of Ernest Hemingway, upon whom he began to model his writing style. He published his first story, “Trail of the Apache,” for which he was paid a thousand dollars, in the December, 1951, issue of Argosy. Within little more than a year, he had published nine more stories and his first novel, The Bounty Hunters (1953). He kept his full-time job during these early years, doing his writing from 5:00 to 7:00 a.m. every morning before work.

By 1961, Leonard had published more than two dozen short stories and four more novels, all Westerns—The Law at Randado (1954), Escape from Five Shadows (1956), Last Stand at Saber River (1959), and Hombre (1961)—and decided to quit his job and become a full-time writer, although he and his wife by then had four children. Ironically, the market for Western writing seemed to have dried up at just that moment; Leonard failed to publish another novel in the following eight years, and he was forced to earn a living as a freelance writer of advertisements and educational films. In 1965, he sold the film rights to Hombre for ten thousand dollars and was again able to devote himself to writing fiction full time.

The resulting novel was completed in 1966 and was rejected by eighty-four publishers within three months. After revision, Leonard finally published his first non-Western novel, The Big Bounce, in 1969. It was made into a film that same year, and most of his novels since have been sold to Hollywood. Leonard then began writing screenplays himself, selling a screenplay of his next novel, The Moonshine War (1969). He also produced two more Westerns, Valdez Is Coming (1970) and Forty Lashes Less One (1972).

A turning point in his career came with Fifty-two Pickup (1974), the novel that firmly established his direction as a writer of contemporary crime fiction. His personal life took a turn as well; his marriage broke up after twenty-five years, and he joined Alcoholics Anonymous. In 1977, he managed to quit drinking, and in 1979 he married his second wife, Joan Shepard. As his personal life recovered, so did his literary fortunes improve, and in the mid-1970’s he rapidly produced a series of novels in which he began to define his own distinctive approach to crime fiction: Mr. Majestyk (1974), a novel based on one of his own screenplays; Swag (1976); The Hunted (1977); and Unknown...

(This entire section contains 1036 words.)

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Man No. 89 (1977). All of these works appear regularly on lists of Leonard’s best books and constitute a distinct middle period of high-quality output. The Switch (1978); his eighth Western, Gunsights (1979); and Gold Coast (1980), the first of his novels set in Florida, are generally considered to represent a brief decline in his writing during a period of transition that was to lead to his best work.

Leonard’s novels had always been notable for their realism, and in 1978 he spent two-and-a-half months observing Detroit police at work in order to research a magazine article. He also hired two research assistants (college friend and private investigator Bill Marshall, who began researching Leonard’s Florida novels in 1977, and then Gregg Sutter, beginning in 1981), helping him to produce the more fully developed and detailed worlds that characterize the work of Leonard’s latest—and strongest—period, beginning with City Primeval: High Noon in Detroit (1980) and continuing through Split Images (1981), Cat Chaser (1982), LaBrava (1983), and Stick (1983). Critical recognition finally came with these novels, and LaBrava earned the Edgar Allan Poe Award from the Mystery Writers of America as the best novel of the year. Leonard’s next novel, Glitz (1985), was his first to reach The New York Times best-seller list, and similar national success followed for all of his subsequent books.

Despite its mixed critical reviews, Get Shorty (1990) turned out to be the breakthrough commercial success that had long eluded Leonard, thanks to a 1995 film adaptation starring John Travolta that opened at number one in U.S. box office its first week. High-profile directors quickly became interested in Leonard’s work: Quentin Tarantino directed Rum Punch (1992), retitled Jackie Brown, in 1997, and Steven Soderbergh directed a film version of Out of Sight (1996) in 1998; the latter was only a moderate commercial success but won the Best Film award from the National Society of Film Critics. Get Shorty was so popular as both book and film that Leonard followed it with a sequel, Be Cool (1999), with the same protagonist; it was made into a film version in 2004 with Travolta reprising his role as Chili Palmer. Maximum Bob (1991) even had a short-lived run as a television comedy series in 1998.

Leonard’s high visibility in Hollywood was accompanied by increasing academic recognition, with the awarding of an honorary doctorate of humane letters from the University of Detroit in 1997 and a volume of the well-respected Twayne United States Authors Series devoted to him in 1999. In addition to writing contemporary crime thrillers, Leonard has occasionally returned to the interest in historical fiction that produced his early Westerns: Cuba Libre (1998) is set during the Spanish-American War, and The Hot Kid (2005) is set in Oklahoma during the 1930’s. Leonard lives in Detroit with his third wife, Christine Kent, and continues to produce roughly a book a year.

Biography

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Leonard has been called a “Dickens from Detroit” because of his remarkable ability to invent a fresh cast of memorable characters for each new book and to depict with realistic detail every nuance of each character’s distinctive voice. Critics have increasingly come to recognize that the apparent ease and naturalness of his style is deceptive and that the authenticity and precision of his depictions of contemporary people and places make him an accomplished and important American novelist.

Biography

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Elmore John Leonard, Jr., was born in New Orleans, Louisiana in 1925. His father, Elmore John Leonard, Sr., was an executive at General Motors and his mother, Florence Amelia (Rive) Leonard, was a housewife. The Leonard family moved frequently because of Leonard’s father’s specialty as a manufacturing plant locator, but in the mid-1930’s they settled in Detroit, Michigan, a city that would become the backdrop of many of Elmore’s crime novels.

Elmore, a Catholic, attended Blessed Sacrament Elementary School and the University of Detroit Jesuit High School, where he picked up the nickname “Dutch,” borrowed from Emil “Dutch” Leonard, then a knuckleball pitcher for the Washington Senators baseball team. Elmore graduated from high school in 1943 and was immediately afterward drafted into the U.S. Navy. He served in the Admiralty Islands of New Guinea with the Seabees during World War II.

After the war, Elmore attended the University of Detroit on the G.I. Bill, majoring in English and philosophy. In 1949, the same year that he married for the first time, to Beverly Cline, he began working for the Campbell-Ewald Advertising Agency in Detroit. Following his graduation in 1950, he continued to work as a copywriter, a job he hated, for the advertising agency, eventually becoming assigned primarily to the prestigious Chevrolet account. His growing family (he would eventually father five children by Beverly) made it difficult for him to pursue his ambition to become a freelance writer, but he began writing Western short stories between 5:00 and 7:00 a.m. each day before going to work. He published his first fiction in 1951: the novelette “Trail of the Apache,” in Argosy magazine. During the ensuing decade, he sold twenty-seven more such stories to pulp magazines and published four Western novels.

After quitting the advertising agency in 1961 to become a freelance writer, for several years Leonard supplemented his fiction income by writing scripts, for one thousand dollars each, for Encyclopædia Britannica educational films. Among the industrial and educational films he authored were Settlement of the Mississippi Valley, Boy of Spain, Frontier Boy, and Julius Caesar. He also wrote the script for The Man Who Has Everything, a recruiting film for the Franciscans. Before he finally became a full-time fiction writer, he ran Elmore Leonard Advertising Company from 1963 to 1966.

Hombre, Leonard’s last Western novel, was published in 1961, and four years later Twentieth Century-Fox purchased the film rights for ten thousand dollars; the resulting film, starring Paul Newman, was released in 1967. During his Western writing period, Leonard also sold Columbia Pictures the film rights to his early story “3:10 to Yuma” (the first film adaptation of which was released in 1957; a remake appeared in 2007) and his novelette “The Captives” (which became the 1957 film The Tall T). Despite these successes, the market for Western fiction was beginning to dry up, perhaps because the genre had been overly exploited by television.

Leonard, in characteristically pragmatic fashion, switched to writing crime fiction. This was the turning point in his career, for he had never felt entirely at ease with Westerns, and he made the transition effortlessly. His first non-Western novels, The Big Bounce and The Moonshine War, were published in 1969; Warner Bros. bought the film rights to the former, and Leonard wrote a screenplay adaptation (his first) of the latter and sold it. A few years later, in 1972, Joe Kidd, a film of his first original screenplay, was released. Thus began Leonard’s long relationship with the film industry.

In 1974, after twenty years of heavy drinking, Leonard joined Alcoholics Anonymous. In 1977 he and his wife divorced, and he remarried to Joan Shephard in 1979; she died of cancer in January, 1993. He married his third wife later that year, French teacher Christine Kent, who is twenty-four years younger than Leonard. The couple has since made their home in Bloomfield Hills, a northern suburb of Detroit.

From the 1980’s onward, Leonard’s novels have received widespread critical praise, and he has been described as “the best American writer of crime fiction alive.” When LaBrava won the Mystery Writers of America Edgar Allan Poe Award in 1984, his reputation as a major crime writer was secured, though he says he writes “novels, not mysteries.” He has also been a popular success. In 1985, Glitz made The New York Times best-seller list, and Warner Books two years later published a first printing of 250,000 copies of Bandits in a one-million-dollar deal. A year later, Leonard received three million dollars for Freaky Deaky. Film rights purchases continued to be a regular occurrence with Leonard novels, as 1995’s Get Shorty was a success, and the 1998 film of Out of Sight was hailed as one of the year’s best.