Elmore Leonard, the prolific crime novelist whose louche characters, deadpan dialogue and immaculate prose style in novels like “Get Shorty,” “Freaky Deaky,” “Glitz” and “La Brava” secured his status as a modern master of American genre writing, died Tuesday at his home in Bloomfield Village, Mich. He was 87.
His death was announced on his Web site.
To his admiring peers, Mr. Leonard did not merely validate the popular crime thriller; he stripped the form of its worn-out affectations, reinventing it for a new generation and elevating it to a higher literary shelf.
Reviewing “Riding the Rap” for The New York Times Book Review in 1995, Martin Amis cited Mr. Leonard’s “gifts — of ear and eye, of timing and phrasing — that even the most indolent and snobbish masters of the mainstream must vigorously covet.” As the American chapter of PEN noted, when honoring Mr. Leonard with its Lifetime Achievement award in 2009, his books “are not only classics of the crime genre, but some of the best writing of the last half-century.”
Mr. Leonard’s first story was published in Argosy magazine in 1951, and 60 years later he was still turning out a book a year because, he said, “It’s fun.”
It was in that spirit that Mr. Leonard, at 84, took more than a casual interest in the development of one of his short stories, “Fire in the Hole,” for television. “Justified,” as the FX series was called, won a Peabody Award in 2011 in its second season and sent new fans to “Pronto” (1993) and “Riding the Rap” (1995), two novels that feature the series’s hero, Raylan Givens (played by Timothy Olyphant), a federal marshal from Harlan Country, Ky., who presents himself as a good ol’ country boy but is “not as dumb as you’d like to believe.”
Approving of the way the show was working out, Mr. Leonard wrote his 45th novel, “Raylan,” with the television series in mind. Published in 2012, it featured three strong female villains and gave its cowboy hero license to shoot one of them.
Acknowledging his approval of “Justified” was a major concession for Mr. Leonard, who was candidly and comically disdainful of the treatment his books generally received from Hollywood, even commercially successful films like “Get Shorty,” “Be Cool” and “Out of Sight.” His first novel, “The Big Bounce,” was filmed twice, in 1969 and 2004. After seeing the first version, he declared it to be “at least the second-worst movie ever made.” In a much-told anecdote, he said that once he saw the remake, he knew what the worst one was.
In an interview with Doug Stanton for the National Writers Series in Traverse City, Mich., in 2011, Mr. Leonard succinctly explained why “Get Shorty,” the 1995 movie starring John Travolta was a faithful treatment of his novel of the same name, and why its sequel, “Be Cool,” was not. The directive he had given the producers about his clever crooks — “These guys aren’t being funny, so don’t let the other characters laugh at their lines” — was, he said, heeded in the first case and ignored in the second.
Amused and possibly a bit exasperated by frequent requests to expound on his writing techniques, Mr. Leonard drew up “Ten Rules of Writing,” published in The New York Times in 2001. “Try to leave out the parts that readers tend to skip,” “If it sounds like writing, rewrite it” and other gems spoke to Mr. Leonard’s puckish wit; but put into practice, his “rules” do indeed capture the essence of his own spare style.
Mr. Leonard’s narrative voice was crisp, clean and direct. He had no time to waste on superfluous adverbs, adjectives or tricky verb forms, and he had no patience for moody interior monologues or lyrical descriptive passages.
It takes only three words — “Look at me” — for Chili Palmer, the Miami loan shark in “Get Shorty,” to strike terror into the hearts of the deadbeat clients he hounds for late payments. “You never tell the guy what could happen to him,” he explains. “Let him use his imagination, he’ll think of something worse. In other words, don’t talk when you don’t have to.”
When asked about the vivid landscapes in “Hombre,” “Valdez Is Coming” and other western novels and short stories he wrote before turning to urban crime and criminals, Mr. Leonard told an interviewer how he did his “research.”
“I subscribed to Arizona Highways,” he said, “and that was loaded with scenery.”
His death was announced on his Web site.
To his admiring peers, Mr. Leonard did not merely validate the popular crime thriller; he stripped the form of its worn-out affectations, reinventing it for a new generation and elevating it to a higher literary shelf.
Reviewing “Riding the Rap” for The New York Times Book Review in 1995, Martin Amis cited Mr. Leonard’s “gifts — of ear and eye, of timing and phrasing — that even the most indolent and snobbish masters of the mainstream must vigorously covet.” As the American chapter of PEN noted, when honoring Mr. Leonard with its Lifetime Achievement award in 2009, his books “are not only classics of the crime genre, but some of the best writing of the last half-century.”
Mr. Leonard’s first story was published in Argosy magazine in 1951, and 60 years later he was still turning out a book a year because, he said, “It’s fun.”
It was in that spirit that Mr. Leonard, at 84, took more than a casual interest in the development of one of his short stories, “Fire in the Hole,” for television. “Justified,” as the FX series was called, won a Peabody Award in 2011 in its second season and sent new fans to “Pronto” (1993) and “Riding the Rap” (1995), two novels that feature the series’s hero, Raylan Givens (played by Timothy Olyphant), a federal marshal from Harlan Country, Ky., who presents himself as a good ol’ country boy but is “not as dumb as you’d like to believe.”
Approving of the way the show was working out, Mr. Leonard wrote his 45th novel, “Raylan,” with the television series in mind. Published in 2012, it featured three strong female villains and gave its cowboy hero license to shoot one of them.
Acknowledging his approval of “Justified” was a major concession for Mr. Leonard, who was candidly and comically disdainful of the treatment his books generally received from Hollywood, even commercially successful films like “Get Shorty,” “Be Cool” and “Out of Sight.” His first novel, “The Big Bounce,” was filmed twice, in 1969 and 2004. After seeing the first version, he declared it to be “at least the second-worst movie ever made.” In a much-told anecdote, he said that once he saw the remake, he knew what the worst one was.
In an interview with Doug Stanton for the National Writers Series in Traverse City, Mich., in 2011, Mr. Leonard succinctly explained why “Get Shorty,” the 1995 movie starring John Travolta was a faithful treatment of his novel of the same name, and why its sequel, “Be Cool,” was not. The directive he had given the producers about his clever crooks — “These guys aren’t being funny, so don’t let the other characters laugh at their lines” — was, he said, heeded in the first case and ignored in the second.
Amused and possibly a bit exasperated by frequent requests to expound on his writing techniques, Mr. Leonard drew up “Ten Rules of Writing,” published in The New York Times in 2001. “Try to leave out the parts that readers tend to skip,” “If it sounds like writing, rewrite it” and other gems spoke to Mr. Leonard’s puckish wit; but put into practice, his “rules” do indeed capture the essence of his own spare style.
Mr. Leonard’s narrative voice was crisp, clean and direct. He had no time to waste on superfluous adverbs, adjectives or tricky verb forms, and he had no patience for moody interior monologues or lyrical descriptive passages.
It takes only three words — “Look at me” — for Chili Palmer, the Miami loan shark in “Get Shorty,” to strike terror into the hearts of the deadbeat clients he hounds for late payments. “You never tell the guy what could happen to him,” he explains. “Let him use his imagination, he’ll think of something worse. In other words, don’t talk when you don’t have to.”
When asked about the vivid landscapes in “Hombre,” “Valdez Is Coming” and other western novels and short stories he wrote before turning to urban crime and criminals, Mr. Leonard told an interviewer how he did his “research.”
“I subscribed to Arizona Highways,” he said, “and that was loaded with scenery.”