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Tuesday, May 22, 2012
Guilty pleasures without guilt.
A CRITIC AT LARGE
Easy Writers
Guilty pleasures without guilt.
by Arthur Krystal
Read more in The New Yorker
The doyen of thriller writers, however, continues to be the Detroit-based novelist Elmore Leonard. Leonard began publishing in the nineteen-fifties and since then has produced at least one novel every two years. Hollywood discovered him before the book critics did (“3:10 to Yuma,” “Hombre,” and “Valdez Is Coming” were all adapted for the screen), but in short order Leonard’s cut- to-the-chase dialogue, intelligently spare narrative, tight-lipped heroes, and offbeat villains had reviewers tripping over their own superlatives. In 1995, Martin Amis dubbed him “a literary genius who writes re-readable thrillers,” and who “possesses gifts of ear and eye, of timing and phrasing-that even the most indolent and snobbish masters of the mainstream must vigorously covet” It seems we have reached a point when Robert Graves’s words about Shakespeare can be applied to Leonard: the remarkable thing about him is that he is “really very good, in spite of all the people who say he is very good.” Does this sound like a guilty pleasure?
