The Importance of Settings - Detroit and South Florida

Setting is so important to an Elmore Leonard novel. Not as important as character and dialog, but close. Arizona was the location for his Westerns; then, when switching to contemporary crime, he set his stories in Detroit. Slowly his stories began to migrate to South Florida. Elmore and family have visited South Florida since 1950. He bought his mother a small motel in Pompano Beach in 1969. It was only natural that he started setting stories in Florida. The first was Gold Coast in 1980, then a string in the Eighties and Nineties, Out of Sight (1995) being the most recent. “Florida is a natural place to find the kind of characters that interest ” he says.