Looking forward to Elmore Leonard's Latest
Master of Mystery, Most Gifted Writer of DIalogue Pens Another
It was 1983 and the headline in The New York Times said it all: After writing 23 Novels, Elmore Leonard has been discovered.
The headline ran over a profile of the prolific author that marked the occasion of his then-just-off-the-presses LaBrava, a mystery set in south Florida. While Leonard had been writing astoundingly well-crafted short stories and novels for some thirty years by that point, LaBrava represented a breakthrough.
It was the story of an ex-secret service agent turned private investigator, Joseph LaBrava, who finds himself in the middle of extortion and murder in South Florida. It was a pitch perfect performance that thrust Leonard from the very good but not widely known to the excellent and very well known.
Really Good Books, Pitch Perfect Dialogue
Leonard, who is known as a writer of mysteries — Get Shorty, Rum Punch, Maximum Bob — and westerns — his short story 3:10 to Yuma was twice made into a movie — he is so much more. As he himself said, he doesn’t so much as writer mysteries as write books. Really good books.
Whether writing westerns or mysteries, Leonard has certain traits that make his novels almost unmistakable from those of other writers; most notably his mastery of dialogue, his ability to deliver seemingly pitch-perfect conversations.
While not every work by him is a masterpiece — some have a plot that doesn’t quite to do it — there is not a line of dialogue in his books that rings false.
From Be Cool, his pretty good sequel to the really wonderful Get Shorty, a detective talking about the burdens of working a case when protagonist Chili Palmer is involved:
'My wife wants to know how come I'm putting in so much overtime lately. I told her 'cause Chili Palmer's making a movie.'
A hippie in Freaky Deaky:
“'You know I suffer from anti-acrophobia, fear of not being high.”
And from his short story, When the Women Come Out to Dance, we meet a former stripper named Ginger explaining her life as the wife of a Pakistani plastic surgeon:
“Once in a while he has some of his ragtop buddies over for cocktails. Now you see these guys in their Nehru outfits and hear them chattering away in Urdu. I walk in, 'Ah, Mrs. Mahmood,' in that semi-British singsongy way they speak, 'what a lovely sight you are to my eyes this evening.' Wondering if I'm the same chick he used to watch strip.'
In the Company of Chandler, Hemingway
Leonard, who has been compared to Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett but thinks of himself more in the John O’Hara and Hemingway mold, has earned his reputation by crafting novel after novel filled with characters who leap off the page, sprouting dialogue as they move through scenes in plots that twist and turn without ever veering off into preposterousness.
The irony is that as fabulous as Leonard’s books are, with pretty much three exceptions — Out of Sight, Get Shorty and Rum Punch — they’ve made subpar movies.
Leonard’s books are so richly drawn that, more often than they not, they strangely lose something when put on the big screen. It’s as if writers, directors and actors believe that Leonard had already done the hard work and they forget to bring their A game, thus disrespecting the book.
Eagerly Awaited
As a result, people wait for new books by Leonard with a lot more anticipation than they wait for the movies based on his books.
Which explains why there is already tremendous excitement building for Road Dogs (Harper Collins, May 2009, ISBN 9780061733147), Leonard’s newest novel.
It has the appearance of a greatest hits piece with Jack Foley from Out of Sight, Cundo Rey from LaBrava and Dawn Navarro from Riding the Rap.
A typical Leonard novel is great. A greatest hits Leonard novel? One can only imagine. It goes on sale May 15th.
Elmore Leonard's Latest Novel
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