Detroit: 138 Square Miles
Foreword by Elmore Leonard

The way it used to work in crime movies: the boss wants a rival taken out and tells one of his guys to “Call Detroit,” the place to get a shooter. The reference quite likely influenced by Detroit’s Purple Gang, notorious gunmen looking for work once Prohibition was repealed.

What Detroit became, cars now rolling off assembly lines, was a rowdy, workingman’s shot and a beer town. It offered few cultural pretentions besides some of its architecture

Buy Detroit: 138 Square MIles at The Elmore Leonard Bookstore

and the Detroit Institute of Arts. During the war, Detroit was known as “The arsenal of Democracy,” turning out bombers and tanks, all types of combat materiel. By the war’s end, Detroit was a city of nearly two million people hopping streetcars to shop downtown—no malls in sight yet—while auto plants were working three shifts a day to supply the entire country with new cars.

It lasted until foreign models began to creep ashore.

Our car industry ignored them, holding to the belief Americans preferred big American automobiles, not those toy Japanese models. What do you do, wind them up? Executives who worked in the GM building spoke the name General Motors with reverential tone, my father one of them.

By this time 700,000 working people had left town for ranch homes in the suburbs, ones they could afford, and Detroit, its population down by half, was no longer “The Car Capital of the World.”

Ten years ago Julia Reyes Taubman came out of the East, New York and Washington DC, not enthralled with the prospect of living here; and yet the lack of order and expectation seemed, well, interesting, maybe somewhat exciting. It was like living on the edge of a changing civilization with an undefined future. At first it was the ruins of industry that caught her eye: the old Packard plant where ceilings resembled stalactites, the roof a forest of green. Julia began photographing the city as a hobby. It would soon become her vocation, her passion.

She focuses on scenes that offer little or no hope, buildings that appear war-damaged, bombed out, but with a positive feeling of history about them. We view the Michigan Central station, its architecture striking but gone to hell and we wonder if it can be restored. Or is it too late?

There are aerials of empty blocks in the middle of the city gone to overgrown fields; the cemetery still there, no one going anywhere.

How did the Boblo boat get so old? It doesn’t seem that long ago we were dancing to live music on a Boblo cruise down the Detroit River. But it was 65 years ago when we had our girlfriends on the dance floor doing the delfoy. Was it Nancy that evening?

Belle Isle still looks pretty good, though no canoes in the lagoons now or horses on the riding trails. We played Detroit Federation baseball on a diamond with a grass infield in 1939. My family came to Detroit five years before that and I’ve lived here three-quarters of a century with no intention of leaving—even though I was born in New Orleans and the Big Easy is still the Big Easy, despite Katrina. The reason I’m still here must lie in Julia’s pictures. I’ve watched the city deteriorate. I know the factories, the neighborhoods, but Julia’s work shows more than what I remember. Maybe that old machinery isn’t as ugly as I thought.  She thinks the buildings need to be preserved and appreciated they way they are, not restored.

Some neighborhoods where she shot, Julia had to have police protection. See if you can pick them out.

I told her she should write a tag line for each shot. It doesn’t have to be descriptive, you had fun doing this, say what you want. Like, “Could you imagine taking a shower in here?” But you’ll do better than that.

She’s thorough, she covers what she’s shooting until she gets what she wants you to feel.

In Julia’s composition there is beauty in despair, and sometimes a glimmer of hope. We see life and death in Detroit, nothing Chamber of Commerce inspired, but more real than any other reality show. If what happened in Detroit is a crime, Julia’s book is the crime story.

—Elmore Leonard

Sunday, November 20, 2011

New On Sale Date for RAYLAN - January 17, 2012

Pre-Order at the Elmore Leonard Bookstore.

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Saturday, November 19, 2011

Elmore Featured on Author Learning Center

Bloomington, IND (PRWEB) November 18, 2011

Author Learning Center, the premier online author education resource for writers engaged in any stage of the story development or book marketing process, today announced famed crime fiction and suspense thriller novelist Elmore Leonard will be featured on the site in a series of informative video interviews.

In Leonard’s first interview with the Author Learning Center, titled, “Schedule and Process,” he recounts that in his youth, he would wake up early every morning to write before work and not allow himself his first sip of coffee until he had started. He uses these types of anecdotes to express the importance of having a plan and a process when writing, and notes that he still maintains a schedule to this day. Other video interviews with Leonard will discuss writing style and technique as well as story development and structure. To watch the video, click here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=26MJtwjeA5A
Having written a very large body of work, including novels, short stories, essays, and screenplays, Leonard brings a wide range of experience to the Author Learning Center. Known for his style and use of dialogue to drive his stories, Leonard has always approached writing in his own unique way—“If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.”

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Shopping malls’ greatest movie moments - Jackie Brown

Adam Tschorn
Los Angeles Times

Shopping centers have always been about more than shopping. Before the rise of Internet-based social interaction, malls were a workplace, gathering place and pop culture petri dish for the better part of two generations. That made them the perfect backdrops for the kinds of films that filled the ‘80s and ‘90s — for the most part geographically ambiguous, lost-in-the-crowd tales of teen angst, budding (or imploding) romance, the everyman chafing under the yoke of social hierarchy and the bullies that come with it. In short, the mall setting was a grown-up version of the childhood playground — and, perhaps most important, a place that would look fairly familiar to everyone.

Del Amo Fashion Center

Its food court made a cameo in 1983’s “Valley Girls,” and it served as the backdrop to Billy Bob Thornton’s 2003 mall-robbing, Father-Christmas-as-con-man movie “Bad Santa.” But the most high-profile role for the sprawling Torrance shopping center — once the largest indoor mall in the world — was in the 1997 Quentin Tarantino film “Jackie Brown,” an adaptation of Elmore Leonard’s novel “Rum Punch.”

When the movie director changed the book’s Miami locale to the South Bay, he set several key scenes in the Del Amo Fashion Center and others in the parking lot outside.

Del Amo Fashion Center, 3525 Carson St., Torrance

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Thursday, November 17, 2011

Tuesday, Jan. 17, 7:30 pm: Elmore Leonard, Timothy Olyphant and Graham Yost -SOLD OUT

Writer’s Bloc LA

Tickets, $20 available ONLY through Brown Paper Tickets. Click on the link to brownpapertickets.com

Writers Bloc, with thanks to the Paley Center for Media in Beverly Hills, invites you to a special, exclusive evening with Elmore Leonard. Author of over 40 novels, each one more wonderful than the last, Elmore Leonard tells stories like few other American authors. His plotlines include the most varied subjects: civil war reenactments, high divers, pirates, gentlemen bank robbers, Hollywood producers, escaped prisoners of war, to name only a few. Some of his novels have become terrific movies—Get Shorty, Out of Sight, Jackie Brown, 3:10 To Yuma. And one of his short stories, Fire in the Hole, turned into an equally terrific television series on FX called Justified. Timothy Olyphant stars as Raylan Givens, a US Marshall stuck in Kentucky, whose aim is second to none. He tracks down meth sellers, neo-Nazis and other assorted bad guys, and it’s all in a day’s work. We can’t imagine a better tv series, and Elmore Leonard wrote the story behind it.

In a rare Los Angeles appearance, Elmore Leonard will visit Writers Bloc, accompanied by Timothy Olyphant and Graham Yost, co-creator of Justified. Elmore’s new novel, Raylan, is another gem of a story, centered around a nurse and an ex-con who steal kidneys—and sell the body parts back to their victims. He includes coed bank robbers, a nasty Kentucky coal mining mess, and a complex protagonist.  It’s vintage Leonard—funny, riveting, surprising and entirely fun. Elmore Leonard is now 86, and is, as far as we are concerned, an American literary icon.

Writers Bloc has a limited number of seats for this great opportunity to hear Elmore Leonard chat about his remarkable, seemingly infinite range of ideas, alongside Timothy Olyphant and Graham Yost from Justified. If you appreciate Elmore’s literary range and wonderful novels, take advantage of this special appearance with Writers Bloc at the lovely Paley Center. As if Timothy Olyphant needs introduction, fans of Deadwood will remember him as Sheriff Seth Bullock.  Graham Yost earned critical acclaim for his writing on Band of Brothers and The Pacific.

Tickets, $20 available ONLY through Brown Paper Tickets. Click on the link to brownpapertickets.com

Parking is free at the Paley Center for Media, 465 N. Beverly Drive.

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Sunday, November 13, 2011

January is Raylan Month!

January is all Raylan.  First on January 3, the two Raylan novels, Pronto and Riding the Rap are released in trade paperback, as well as his Raylan novella, Fire in the Hole which is the collection, Fire in the Hole and Other Stories, which was formerly published as When the Women Come Out to Dance.

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Saturday, November 12, 2011

Fall Trade Releases 2011

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Thursday, November 10, 2011

Detroit 138 Square Miles by Julie Reyes Taubman

Pre-order from The Elmore Leonard Bookstore

Over the past six years, documentary photographer and architectural historian Julia Reyes Taubman has taken more than 30,000 photographs across the sprawled terrain of Detroit, ambitiously mapping out a comprehensive survey of a major American city. Photographing on the ground, in the buildings and by air and water, Reyes Taubman believes that when buildings and landscape are manipulated by nature and time they become more visually compelling than almost any architectural intervention. Reyes Taubman is not pessimistic, however: “It is not a disgrace but a privilege and an obligation to listen to the stories only ruins can tell,” she writes in regard to this project. “They tell us a lot about who we were, what we once valued most, and perhaps where we may be going.” As Reyes Taubman scrutinizes this 138-square-mile metropolis in transition, she pays particular attention to the scale and the solidity of the buildings that characterized the former “Motor City” at the height of its industrial wealth and power. More than a photographic saturation job of a single city, Detroit: 138 Square Miles provides contextual perspective in an extended caption section in which Reyes Taubman collaborated with University of Michigan professors Robert Fishman and Michael McCullough to emphasize the social imperatives driving her documentation. An essay by native Detroiter and bestselling author Elmore Leonard addresses the social and cultural significance of the post-industrial condition of this metropolis.

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Tuesday, November 08, 2011

Fighting the pirates - Elmore Leonard Style

Gulf Daily News
By HERBERT GRIMES

In his most recent thriller, Djibouti, Elmore Leonard poses a pressing question raised at the recent Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in Perth. The drama of Leonard’s Djibouti turns on a terrible explosion after an attack by pirates on a cargo ship which is carrying liquefied natural gas. Concerned about the same thing, David Cameron has now suggested that British ships should be permitted to carry armed guards.

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Sunday, November 06, 2011

Facebook Conversion

In the next day or so, I’m converting Elmore’s Facebook Profile Page to a Fan Page.  The previous Fan Page I set up will be replaced by the new one.  I learned you have to choose one or the other, so I’m going with the Fan Page.
The reason for this change is simple.  Facebook profile pages are meant for individuals who want to interact with their Facebook Friends, to poke and prod and chit and chat.  Pages, on the other hand, are designed for organizations, businesses, brands, and public figures like Elmore who want to get their latest news updates to fans. 

Facebook Profile Pages have a limit of 5000 Facebook Friends.  As of today, I have anotherI 1000 Facebook Friend requests that I have not been able to honor.  When we convert the Elmore Leonard Profile Page to a Facebook Page, Facebook will add all of Elmore’s Facebook Friends and Subscribers as Fans who “Like” the new Page. There is no limit on how many Likes or Fans that you can have.  All Facebook Friends converted to Fans will continue to get updates in their newsfeed just as before.

There are advantages to this move.  It allows us to create cool, exclusive content using the power of Facebook apps.  And, everybody logged into Facebook will be able to see the Elmore Leonard Fan Page.

I’ll be working closely with Elmore’s publisher to make the Elmore Leonard Fan Page, along with elmoreleonard.com the only places to get all the latest Elmore Leonard news.

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Monday, October 31, 2011

Four New Trade Paperbacks on November 18

Pre-Order them from The Elmore Leonard Bookstore.

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Sunday, October 30, 2011

Perhaps it’s the Horny Goatweed…

Huddersfield Daily Examiner

Drop dead gorgeous blonde documentary film maker Dara Barr and her 72-year-old black 6ft 6ins assistant Xavier LeBo, who has a penchant for Horny Goatweed, are in Djibouti to make a movie about Somali pirates. They base themselves in the seedy port, where the pirate leaders spend their cash, and also travel to the village harbours from where they sail the high seas with apparent impunity. 

An Oxford educated Arab middle man, a smooth pirate chief and an al Quieda ter-rorist are all involved, while a champagne swilling American billionaire keeps watch on proceedings from his luxury yacht with his stunning fiance, who is along for the Lauren Bacall-style quips.

This is a romp rather than a thriller with Leonard in fine form. Perhaps it’s the Horny Goatweed.

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