Elmore Leonard American Literature Analysis
The oddity of Leonard’s finally being “discovered” by critics and a wide reading public with Glitz, his twenty-third novel, has attracted puzzled comments from most reviewers and from Leonard himself and probably has no simple explanation. The novel immediately before Glitz, LaBrava, had sold only twenty thousand copies by the time that Glitz had sold two hundred thousand and spent sixteen weeks on the New York Times best-seller list, yet there seems to be no clear difference in the style, tone, or quality of the two books.
While careful students of Leonard’s work have noted a greater degree of fine detail and texture in his work since the 1980’s, the broad similarities between his later books and the best work of the 1970’s, beginning with Fifty-two Pickup, are far more striking than any minor differences. As the critic Peter Prescott put it, “the margin of difference between Leonard’s better and lesser works would admit, with difficulty, a butterfly’s wing.” Leonard attributes his change of style at the time of Fifty-two Pickup to his reading of George V. Higgins’s The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1972), from which he learned valuable lessons about the use of point of view and dialogue, the handling of which were to become his stylistic trademark.
Part of the explanation for his sudden success with Glitz was the publisher’s decision to promote the novel more aggressively by spending more money and, perhaps oddly, by saying as little as possible about it in the advertising. Earlier advertising campaigns had made the mistake of comparing Leonard to earlier crime writers who had elevated the genre to the level of serious literature, including Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and Ross Macdonald. Readers who expected similar work must have been frequently disappointed, because, apart from the high quality of his work, Leonard has almost nothing in common with these predecessors. In particular, he scrupulously avoided using the sort of colorful metaphors and similes that are typically thought to characterize good writing; as Leonard himself says, “If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.”
The great difference between Leonard’s style and that of his forebears may be the best explanation for his long wait for success: Readers needed a long time to get used to his unique approach to crime fiction and to accept it on its own terms. Earlier writers of “hard-boiled” detective fiction had almost universally relied on first-person narratives, related from the point of view of a continuing character who is the protagonist for all the novels in a series. While Hammett, the originator of the hard-boiled genre, switched characters from book to book and sometimes relied on an objective, “camera-eye” point of view, Chandler’s Philip Marlowe and Macdonald’s Lew Archer always told their own stories through a series of books, establishing a formula followed by innumerable later writers. Leonard, on the other hand, seldom uses a character in more than one or two books.
The reader’s expectations about crime novels are further compounded by Leonard’s characteristic practice of relying on multiple points of view, perhaps his most distinctive and original stylistic contribution to the field. Rather than having the protagonist tell the reader the story as a consistent first-person narrative, Leonard typically shifts point of view from one character to another. In many of the novels, the reader is not sure until well into the book who the main character will eventually be, because so many characters’ viewpoints are rendered. In Maximum Bob , Leonard goes so far as to include a scene written from the point of view of an alligator. Leonard never speaks...
(This entire section contains 3472 words.)
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in his own voice in his later books, delegating all the narrating to one or another of his usually numerous cast of characters. One critic has remarked that “Leonard is a skilled ventriloquist whose own lips never move.”
The technique of rapidly shifting points of view seems at first to have more in common with the difficult experimental literature of William Faulkner and Virginia Woolf than with traditional popular fiction, and such an approach could certainly become confusing in the hands of another writer. Leonard, however, always manages to get the reader just the information needed to follow the story. He accomplishes this, in part, through a heavy reliance on dialogue, always couched in each character’s individualized mannerisms of speech and presented in short, dramatic scenes. Usually, he ends each scene with a punch line or unexpected twist for closure. He eschews entirely the typical novelist’s use of blocks of narrative exposition.
Another interesting effect of the use of multiple points of view is that the reader is privy to the thoughts of virtually every character, hero and villain alike, and therefore quickly knows much more about the story than any one of the characters in the book ever could. The result is that Leonard’s novels are not, in fact, mysteries in the traditional sense: the reader knows exactly who has committed every crime, and in fact usually witnesses them from the criminals’ viewpoints. Leonard’s practice of giving the criminal’s point of view equal time creates yet another problem for some readers, who can be disturbed by his ability to render the thoughts and feelings of the most depraved characters accurately and even sympathetically. That this intimate association with evil characters never becomes oppressive for the reader results from Leonard’s gift of making a sort of deadpan satire come through the realistic dialogue; few of his characters intend to be funny, but the reader finds humor in unexpected places.
City Primeval: High Noon in Detroit
First published: 1980
Type of work: Novel
Homicide detective Raymond Cruz relies on both conventional and unorthodox methods to bring psychotic killer Clement Mansell to justice.
City Primeval is widely regarded as the first book of Leonard’s strongest period. As the allusion to the classic 1952 Western film High Noon in the subtitle suggests, the novel marks a conscious adaptation of the characters and themes of Leonard’s earlier Westerns to the modern urban settings of his later crime novels. The book’s protagonist, Detroit homicide detective Raymond Cruz, is a Texan of Mexican descent who thus has the background appropriate to a Western hero. Leonard describes Cruz’s relationship with Clement Mansell, the book’s villain, in terms of classic Westerns: “No—more like High Noon. Gunfight at the O.K. Corral. You have to go back a hundred years and out west to find an analogy. But there it is.” References to Westerns are scattered throughout the book, which opens with a dinner conversation between Cruz and a reporter who accuses him of trying to emulate Wyatt Earp, Clint Eastwood, and John Wayne. It closes, appropriately, with an old-fashioned showdown between Cruz and Mansell.
This frontier imagery is integrated into a thoroughly realistic context that reveals Leonard’s recent in-depth study of the daily operations of the Detroit police department. Particularly well-handled are a series of interrogation scenes in which the detectives use subtle techniques of misdirection to gain information from uncooperative suspects, who never realize how much they have given away. As in most of Leonard’s novels, the difference between the good and bad characters is not strictly a matter of following or breaking the law; the players on both sides operate very near the border between right and wrong, with their ends differing much more than the means used to achieve them.
Mansell has, in fact, found the legal system to be in some ways his best ally; he has been freed from earlier murder charges on legal technicalities. Cruz, on the other hand, is forced to work outside the law, tampering with evidence and eventually forcing a confrontation in which he kills Mansell under circumstances that are ethically, and perhaps legally, suspect. As Mansell says to Cruz in the final scene, “Me and you are on different sides, but we’re alike in a lot of ways,” an observation that typifies the similarity, and even sympathy, that usually exists between antagonist and protagonist in Leonard’s work. Mansell’s point of view is relied on just as much as that of Cruz or of Sandy Stanton, Mansell’s girlfriend, and the reader consequently acquires a degree of familiarity with and understanding of a totally amoral character that is unusual in popular fiction.
Glitz
First published: 1985
Type of work: Novel
Miami police detective Vincent Mora pursues—and is pursued by—psychopathic killer Teddy Magyk from Puerto Rico to Atlantic City and back.
Glitz was Leonard’s first best seller. The book represents an artistic success as well, epitomizing the author’s mature style with a complex plot, memorable characters, and crisp dialogue. While most of his earlier crime novels had been set in Detroit, the later novels range more freely, and the action in Glitz shifts from Miami to Puerto Rico to Atlantic City, all depicted with his usual meticulous accuracy. Before visiting Atlantic City, Leonard had his research assistant, Gregg Sutter, collect a series of interviews with casino employees and police and take 180 photographs in a sequence that would give Leonard views of the entire town.
Miami police detective Vincent Mora is a typical Leonard protagonist, as Atlantic City casino operator Jackie Garbo describes him: “I said to myself, this guy’s got nice easy moves, never pushes, he listens and he learns things.” While Leonard’s “heroes” are all capable of violent behavior and are as likely to be criminals as lawmen, they prefer a subtle approach to a problem rather than direct confrontation, and they view violence as a last resort. His amoral antagonists, however, invariably consider violent solutions first. The antagonist in Glitz is Teddy Magyk, who had been arrested by Mora for first-degree sexual battery several years earlier and now, after seven and a half years in prison, is intent on revenge. He lures Mora to Atlantic City by killing a friend of his there, and Mora, on leave recovering from an injury, works unofficially with the local police to capture Magyk. This unofficial capacity enables him to work outside the rules, as do all Leonard’s main characters. The relatively simple main plot is filled out with a number of subplots involving local mobsters and drug dealers who are loosely affiliated with the city’s casino industry.
As in all of Leonard’s novels, however, the interest of the book lies not in the plot but in the brilliantly drawn characters and tightly crafted individual scenes. Leonard has remarked that “I’m not a good narrative writer. I put all my energies into my characters and let my characters carry it.” Typical of his style is a scene in which Nancy Donovan unexpectedly turns the tables on her husband, Tommy, who owns a casino, and his manager, Jackie Garbo, establishing that she is the one in control of them and their business. Leonard first wrote the scene primarily from Nancy’s point of view, found that it did not work, and then rewrote it from the viewpoint of Garbo, who can observe, after a careless remark by Tommy, “Mistake. Jackie knew it immediately; he saw Nancy’s expression tighten just a little, a hairline crack in the facade.” Such an observation would be dramatically impossible for Nancy or Tommy to make, and another writer might have merely included it in third-person authorial narration. Leonard’s meticulous attention to such supporting characters and his care to make every detail, every word, fit their personalities makes even his minor characters memorable and fully developed.
Killshot
First published: 1989
Type of work: Novel
A working-class couple become witnesses to an extortion scheme and find themselves the targets of the two killers, against whom they are expected to testify.
Leonard continues to work new variations on his own formula in Killshot, this time by focusing on a typical working-class married couple, Wayne and Carmen Colson, rather than on his more typical characters who live near the fringes of law enforcement and crime. The book begins with chapters from the points of view of Armand Degas, a professional killer, and then Richie Nix, an armed robber and ex-convict. The reader is thus able to learn about these characters from the inside as they meet and develop a plan to extort money from the Detroit real-estate agency where Carmen works. Wayne drives the men away by force, temporarily disrupting their plan but also turning himself and his wife into eyewitnesses and, therefore, targets to be eliminated by the two criminals.
The genesis of the book, which Leonard had originally planned to revolve around Wayne, exemplifies the way in which his books are driven by the development of his characters rather than by any preconceived ideas about plot or structure. He begins not with a plot but with a set of characters. He decides first on the right names for characters, then works out the details of their background and, especially, the way they talk. Once he has created a set of interesting characters, he improvises a situation that puts them into conflict and lets them dictate the action to him as it goes along, seldom knowing himself what will happen more than a scene or two ahead or how the book will end. This improvisational approach also accounts for the fact that so many of his best characters are minor ones who develop unexpectedly as he writes. As Leonard explained in an interview about Killshot, “I started with a husband and wife who get involved in the Federal Witness Protection program. He’s an ironworker, and he was going to be the main character—he’s a very macho kind of guy. . . . She takes over; she becomes the main character and I was very glad to see it happen.”
The Colsons are eventually put in a witness protection program and relocated to Cape Girardeau, Missouri, a location carefully researched and depicted in Leonard’s usual manner. Carmen finds herself in nearly as much danger there from Ferris Britton, the deputy marshal in charge of their case, as she had been from Degas and Nix. The couple eventually discover, as do most of Leonard’s characters, that the legal system is an inadequate defense against the evil that surrounds them, and they are forced to take matters into their own hands. The book ends in typical fashion with a dramatic armed confrontation among Carmen, Degas, and Nix back in Detroit.
Get Shorty
First published: 1990
Type of work: Novel
Chili Palmer, a loan collector for the Miami mob, follows a runaway debtor to Las Vegas and Los Angeles and works his way into the film business.
Leonard drew upon his personal experiences with the film industry for Get Shorty, including modeling Michael Weir, the actor whose short height and large talent and ego provide the title, on Dustin Hoffman, who had been in line to play the lead in a film version of Leonard’s LaBrava (1983). The novel transplants one of his typical self-reliant tough guys, loan shark Chili Palmer, from the Miami criminal underworld to Hollywood. The plot begins, after a series of deftly handled flashbacks, with Palmer’s assignment to collect a debt from Leo Devoe, a dry cleaner who supposedly died in a plane crash but turns out to have not only avoided the crash but also collected insurance money for his own death. As usual in Leonard’s novels, the plot is simply a mechanism for putting colorful characters into dramatic confrontations with each other, and the dry cleaner and his money belong to a subplot that fades away, without being fully resolved, well before the end of the novel.
While all of his novels incorporate humor, albeit often bleak and ironic, Get Shorty emphasizes comic elements to an unusual degree as Leonard highlights the contrasts, and similarities, between the dishonesty and callousness of criminals and those of actors and producers. By the end of the book, Palmer has successfully made the transition from mob enforcer to film producer, with the implication that the differences are not profound. Among the running jokes are the characters’ discussions of writing and film adaptations as they try to develop a screenplay based upon the ongoing events of the novel itself. Their comments range from insights of which the author himself would approve—as when loan shark-turned-screenwriter Palmer explains, “I don’t think of a plot and then put characters in it. I start with different characters and see where they take me”—to satire of Hollywood’s dismissive attitudes toward writers, exemplified by Bo Catlett, another criminal who is convinced that anyone can do it. “You asking me,” Catlett said, “do I know how to write down words on a piece of paper? That’s what you do, man, you put down one word after the other as it comes in your head. It isn’t like having to learn how to play the piano, like you have to learn notes.”
Leonard’s novels seldom fuss over neat closure and the tidying up of loose ends, often leaving plot lines and the fates of significant characters unresolved, another of his practices slyly mocked by the closing sentence of Get Shorty: “endings, man, they weren’t as easy as they looked.” In this instance, the open-ended structure clears the way for a sequel, this time satirizing the music industry, with many of the same characters, including protagonist Palmer, in Be Cool.
Out of Sight
First published: 1996
Type of work: Novel
Career bank robber Jack Foley’s chance encounter with U.S. Marshal Karen Sisco during his prison escape leads to romantic complications.
In Out of Sight, the trademark gritty realism of Elmore Leonard’s oeuvre is blended with a romance between criminal Jack Foley and U.S. Marshal Karen Sisco. The novel’s opening is widely acknowledged to rank among Leonard’s best, as he takes the reader through a daring prison break, modeled on a real escape from that same prison in 1995. As is his practice, the point of view shifts among three different characters in the first three chapters, as the same scene is viewed from three different angles.
The opening sentence of the novel, “Foley had never seen a prison where you could walk right up to the fence without getting shot,” immediately locates the reader both psychologically—within Foley’s consciousness, attitudes, and experience—and physically—just inside the fence of a medium-security Florida prison. The second chapter begins as Sisco pulls up to the parking area just outside that same fence, looking at the same point from the other side, both literally—outside the prison versus inside—and figuratively—cop versus criminal. As she sits in her car, the headlights from a car pulling into the row behind her hit her rearview mirror. The opening of chapter 3, “Buddy saw the mirror flash and blond hair in his headlights, a woman in the blue Chevy Caprice parked right in front of him,” takes the reader inside that second car as it introduces a third major character, Orren “Buddy” Bragg, a former partner of Foley who has arrived to help him escape. The escape itself is thus rendered in great visual depth, as the reader sees Buddy see Sisco see Foley as he emerges from a tunnel by the fence. Such detailed multiple visualizations are especially common in Leonard’s later novels, which can resemble screenplays in their rapid cuts from character to character and their close specification of the precise angles and fields of vision from which characters view scenes.
After the successful prison break, the plot takes all these characters to Detroit, where the suspense intensifies as the relatively gentle and sympathetic Foley and Buddy are thrown into an uneasy alliance with a set of violent sociopaths seeking to rob a wealthy financier. Critic James Devlin notes the symbolism of the settings in the novel, as the sunny Florida setting of the opening scenes gives way to the dark and cold of the Detroit scenes. Brutal scenes of rape and murder alternate uneasily with scenes sketching the developing love story between the criminal and the cop pursuing him. For some critics, the conventional story of love at first sight, complete with a film-friendly “meet cute” when Foley and Sisco are locked in the trunk of a getaway car, is a rare misstep by Leonard that ultimately breaks the book into two incompatible halves, one a screwball romantic comedy and the other an usually violent portrait of depravity and urban violence. Although not a hit at the box office, the motion picture adaptation starring George Clooney and Jennifer Lopez earned high praise from film critics such as Roger Ebert for its success in translating “the texture of the pacing and dialogue” and the large cast of colorful characters to the screen.