Elmore Leonard an implausibly modest doyen of American crime fiction

Elmore Leonard

On a tidy, leather-bound desk in the drawing-room of a gracious suburban house in Bloomville Village, Michigan, stands a neat pile of yellow lined paper. Having reached the 300-page mark, one of the world's great crime writers has to decide "who shoots whom" in the closing chapters of his next novel.

Elmore Leonard, once called "the Dickens of Detroit", is a man who has been writing stylish pulp fiction since before Quentin Tarantino was born. "Who shoots whom" is a pretty crucial point in his stories, peopled as they are by sleazeball hustlers, halfwitted hitmen, lowlifes out to make a buck any-old-how, cops ground down by the daily grime, and most of them familiar with, if not always packing, a Beretta or a Glock.

Yet, after 39 novels, many of which have been turned into movies, including the latest star vehicle, Be Cool, as well as Get Shorty, Out of Sight and Jackie Brown (the last directed by Tarantino, whose association with the writer began as a teenager, when he stole one of Leonard's novels from a bookshop), he still claims not to know what's going to happen when he puts pen to paper.

"It's much more fun not to know," he says. "And then to make things up on the spot. I haven't outlined in 30 years or more. When you're plotting, you don't know who the people are, you don't know if they're going to be quirky or odd. So you just have to wait and see how they come out. And get them to talk, that's the main thing."

Fortunately, when I meet Leonard he has decided who's going to shoot whom. So, in his immaculate home, he tells me a tale that belongs not in pristine, polite Bloomville Village, but in the cheap world of the 30s gangster. This is how The Hot Kid is going to end.

"The two are sitting at a table with the woman they're holding, and here's 'the Blackbird', who is a professional killer from Canada, and this guy called Richie Nicks. He's a bigmouth who wants to rob a bank in every state except Alaska, and he's done about nine."

Why not Alaska? I ask. "Well, it's just too cold, heh heh. He probably doesn't know why it's a state. They're talking about a guy they've read about who weighs 1100lb [500kg] and has to go to the bathroom in the tub and things like that. And Richie Nicks is driving them nuts, the way he's talking, and he's chewing bubble gum, and he blows a big bubble, and the Blackbird takes out his automatic and he shoots him right through the bubble."

Leonard talks just as he writes. Everyday details are raised from banality by their realistic placing in extraordinary situations. His gunmen discuss news stories, clothes and cars, hairstyles, and food (the last a trick that Tarantino famously borrowed for the discussion about burgers in Pulp Fiction). Sentences are generally short and snappy, and if they're not, they pile up in the haphazard way that they do in normal speech, not in a grandiose maze of sub-clauses.

"If it sounds like writing, I rewrite," he says. "If proper usage gets in the way, it may have to go. I can't allow what we learnt in English composition to disrupt the sound and rhythm of the narrative."

That intravenous directness has gained Leonard a cult following and led Martin Amis to describe this lean, drily spoken 79-year-old as "a literary genius".

Born in 1925, Leonard's early years were in Dallas, Oklahoma City and Memphis, before his family moved to Detroit when he was 9. The "desperadoes" of the time, Bonnie and Clyde and Pretty Boy Floyd, captured his imagination.

After reading English at university and war service in the Navy, he became a copywriter for Chevrolet's advertising department. He found the job unfulfilling and rose at 5am to write fiction, based on Westerns rather than crime. Married in 1949 to his first wife, Beverly, with whom he had five children, Leonard began to sell stories to magazines at 2c a word, and gave up the day job as soon as he could.

Hollywood was swift to pick up on his spare, dialogue-driven work, with 3:10 to Yuma appearing in 1957, and The Tall T, starring Randolph Scott, in the same year. Sixteen others were to follow. By the 1960s, however, he reckoned that the market for Westerns had dried up.

"I got into crime because I knew it could sell. And that's my purpose, to write as well as I can and to sell and make money."

Leonard is given to making remarks like this, downplaying his achievements and tapping into the image of the pulp author typing away to earn the dollars for his next pack of smokes.

"I'm never sure of what my theme is," he says. "I have to wait for Scott Frank, the screenwriter who's done two of mine, to read the book. Then he reads it again, and then he tells me what the theme is."

When I ask him at what age he had pitched his first children's book, A Coyote's in the House, which has just been published, he replies: "I thought children of 12, or even 10, because I probably write at a 5th- or 6th-grade level anyway. Hemingway wrote on a 6th-grade level.

He was my main influence in the 40s and 50s, because he made it look easy. But then you try to copy him, and you find you can get the sound, but you can't get into that spare style. That takes some doing."

There is great skill to writing as Leonard does. And he works by strict rules, which can be found on his website: "Easy on the Adverbs, Exclamation Points and Especially Hooptedoodle" (the last a term for extraneous descriptive passages coined by Steinbeck). Rule 3 reads: "Never use a verb other than 'said' to carry dialogue". "You don't laugh a line of dialogue," he explains, "you say it." ...

Leonard always strives for invisibility as an author, which is why he warns against "hooptedoodle".

"I write what I can write."

Writing what he can write has brought Leonard this large house. He smokes, doesn't drink and stays at home with his third wife, Christine, whom he met in 1993 after the death of his second wife.

Leonard's writing has also involved him in a curious relationship with film - semi-symbiotic, because his stories are so in demand for script treatments, and semi-parasitical, because he thinks that most of the treatments that have reached the big screen are no good.

He regards the 1969 version of The Big Bounce, starring Ryan O'Neal, as "the second worst movie ever made". The more recent version, with Owen Wilson and Morgan Freeman, receives an even harsher verdict. Of the 1969 version, he says: "There must be a movie that's worse than this one, but I don't know what it is. Well, now I know! It's the remake. Heh heh heh."

The most successful version of one of Leonard's books was Get Shorty in 1995, with John Travolta, Danny DeVito and Gene Hackman. At the premiere, the then head of MGM studios, Frank Mancuso Jr, asked Leonard if he could write a sequel. The result, Be Cool, opens in New Zealand next week. Travolta's renaissance as a leading man, however, slowed the project down.

"It was three years after we sent him the manuscript, and he still hadn't read it."

Leonard's on safer ground when he mentions his favourite actors. In Maximum Bob, two characters remark of another: "Doesn't he look like Harry Dean Stanton?" Leonard admits that he was trying to get Stanton cast if the novel was made into a film.

And in A Coyote's in the House, he actually includes Stanton in the story. "He's the least likely looking actor," says Leonard, "but he never misses his line. "

You're drawn to him on screen, I say, because he's almost an absence. He agrees. And for Elmore Leonard, the "invisible" author whose characters live through him and are set free by him, there would be no greater compliment.

"I don't judge in my books," he says. "I don't have to have the antagonist get shot or the protagonist win. It's just how it comes out. I'm just telling a story."

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