When Elmore Leonard died in 2013, he was the undisputed king of crime fiction. Writers and celebrities like Walker Percy, Nora Ephron, Clint Eastwood, Donald Fagen, Stephen King, Martin Amis, Ann Beattie, and George F. Will celebrated his novels. His best-selling novels—full of double-crosses, dirty-dealing, uptight stooges, smooth antiheroes, plot twists, and deadpan dialogue—inspired some of the coolest shows and films of the past 30 years. Indeed, cool is the quality most commonly attributed to Leonard. C.M. Kushins knew that when he called his new biography, timed to commemorate the centennial of the novelist’s birth, Cooler Than Cool.
Leonard would have liked that title. He specialized in cool characters. Hombre (1961), one of his early novels, features a likable henchman who “was ready, but could still be relaxed about it and not sit stiff in the saddle or with his shoulders hunched.” Or, as Boyd Crowder (Walton Goggins) puts it in an episode of Justified, the television series based on a Leonard story: “You wanna make a livin’ in [crime], you gotta know your ABCs: Always Be Cool.”
But as Kushins’s biography makes clear, Leonard’s own coolness didn’t come easy. The man worked his tail off.
Elmore John Leonard Jr. was born in New Orleans in 1925. His interest in criminals began early: In a childhood picture, he posed like Bonnie Parker. His dad’s job with General Motors meant the family moved around before settling for a spell in Detroit when the boy was nine. A good athlete in high school, Leonard’s baseball teammates dubbed him “Dutch” after Emil “Dutch” Leonard, an all-star pitcher for the Washington Senators. His interest in literature began developing then, too; he especially admired For Whom the Bell Tolls and would eventually model his dialogue on what he read in Hemingway’s. After high school, Leonard served in the Pacific during World War II with the Naval Construction Battalions, better known as the Seabees. He had time to read widely and drink excessively. Once home, he enrolled in the University of Detroit and entered student writing contests.
Leonard’s plan after graduation was to work for his father’s new General Motors dealership in New Mexico; those plans changed when his father died during Leonard’s junior year. Instead, Dutch found work at an advertising firm in Detroit and married Beverly Cline, whom he’d started dating the year before. Suddenly a married man with a full-time job, he finished his college degree by taking night classes. He also joined a creative writing group and resolved to start selling his fiction. He sold his first story in 1951, when he was 25.
Most of Leonard’s early works were Westerns, and he landed them in both low- and high-end publications—the pulps and the slicks. (It’s true: The man who wrote the novel Quentin Tarantino turned into Jackie Brown also wrote Pulp Fiction.) His agent in these early years, Marguerite Harper, is one of this book’s heroes. She hustled to sell his stories and gave him sound advice. She told him to move away from Westerns because the market was dying; to keep his day job because writing was an unreliable living; to incorporate more of the sharp dialogue that would eventually make him famous. Harper helped him land more than a dozen stories in 1952 and 1953, publish his first novel also in ’53, and sell his first movie rights two years later. Leonard published four novels before the decade was over.
This early success grew from the ambitious routine Leonard maintained for years. Waking up at 5 a.m., writing for two hours. No coffee until he’d written a couple of pages. Stopping at 7 to get ready for the day and help Beverly with the kids (they had five). Sneaking in some writing at the office. Religious devotion was an important part of that discipline. Educated at Jesuit schools, Leonard received Communion daily, prayed the rosary and novenas, participated in Eucharistic adoration, taught religious education, and even wrote the script for a priest-recruitment video.
In 1961, Leonard quit his advertising firm to become a full-time novelist, but financial pressures forced him to do other work for several years. When he finally devoted himself to fiction later that decade, he moseyed off the Western ranch and strutted into more modern settings. In the early 1970s he began writing the kind of novel for which he is best known today: contemporary crime fiction, often set in Detroit. That was an eventful decade for personal reasons, too. His marriage to Beverly, strained by his excessive drinking and an affair with a woman they played doubles tennis with, ended in 1977. He married his mistress, Joan Shepard, in 1979; their marriage lasted until her death in 1993. (He married his third wife, Christine Kent, eight months later.) He also relaxed his religious observance, though some later novels include Catholic themes.
Leonard’s career hit its stride in the mid-80s. LaBrava (1983) won the Mystery Writers of America’s Edgar Award. His 23rd novel, Glitz (1985), topped the bestseller list. He enjoyed a remarkable run that continued well into the next decade, highlighted by Freaky Deaky (1988), Get Shorty (1990), Maximum Bob (1991), and Rum Punch (1992).
Leonard was a Hollywood favorite long before his novels enjoyed mainstream success. His first big-screen hit came with the adaptation of Hombre (1967), starring Paul Newman. But for every great adaptation—Barry Sonnenfeld’s Get Shorty (1995), Steven Soderbergh’s Out of Sight (1998), or the FX series Justified (2010–2015)—there were duds like Burt Reynolds’s Stick (1985), the television series Maximum Bob (1998) and Karen Sisco (2003), plus both stabs at The Big Bounce (1969 and 2004). The stories behind these adaptations, as well as ones that were never produced, are as circuitous as one of the switch-backing trails Leonard’s cowboys rode. You may know that Get Shorty was based on Leonard’s frustrations working with Dustin Hoffman to adapt LaBrava; you may have a harder time believing that Danny DeVito was originally supposed to play a character other than Shorty.
Kushins delights in guiding readers through Leonard’s process: his notebooks, day planners, character files, and letters to agents. We see how the novelist arrived at various titles, character names, and plotlines. How he juggled multiple book and film projects at once, how he developed new techniques and elements, like the use of multiple points of view to depict a scene and the appearance of independent female characters. We see false starts, scrapped ideas, recycled settings, and the origins of recurring characters like Raylan Givens. We even learn what kind of paper and pens he preferred. (He wrote longhand, then transcribed every few pages to the typewriter. His daughter would type the final manuscripts.) Leonard conducted extensive research about countless topics—19th-century firearms, 20th-century homicide departments, high-diving, the Spanish-American War, stigmata—and eventually employed a full-time researcher, Greg Sutter. Considering Leonard wrote 45 novels, Kushins’s copious accounts of each work’s composition can become tedious, but Dutch of all people would understand if you skipped the books that don’t interest you.
Kushins acknowledges that this book is a “loving portrait,” and the biographer’s admiration stems from a formative experience he had with Leonard when he was young. Perhaps this admiration is why Kushins is occasionally too diplomatic. We learn that Leonard’s divorce from his third wife, Christine, was difficult, but catch only a glimpse of his frustration when Leonard mentions in a letter negotiations “to assure that her life of leisure continues.” There’s a story there waiting to be told. Kushins also omits that after Leonard’s death, Christine sued her late ex-husband’s company, trust, and one of his children for selling his papers without her knowledge. Things were so bad, her obituary doesn’t mention their marriage.
Kushins is similarly protective of Leonard’s writing. Even when he says a work got mixed reviews, he only quotes the praise. He refrains from offering his own opinion on any of the novels. Perhaps he was trying to be objective, but it would have been reasonable for him to say, for example, that a chapter excerpt from a late novel-in-progress shows none of the author’s skill with dialogue or characterization, so it’s probably a good thing the novel remains unpublished.
Even with these flaws, Cooler Than Cool is an impressive biography that reveals the hard work and hustle that made Elmore Leonard the coolest cat in crime fiction.
Cooler Than Cool: The Life and Work of Elmore Leonard
by C.M. Kushins
Mariner Books, 512 pp., $32
Christopher J. Scalia is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and author, most recently, of 13 Novels Conservatives Will Love (but Probably Haven’t Read).
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