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BOOK REVIEW: ‘Elmore Leonard: Four Novels of the 1980s’

The Washington Times
Joseph C. Goulden

Library of America is performing a stellar service to the legions of readers who admire the crime-thriller writer Elmore Leonard (and include me in those ranks). At hand is the second volume of a planned trilogy that brings back four of the master’s best novels. And they vividly display Leonard’s talent for sparkling stories — ranging from an elaborate scam involving an aging movie star to the search for an assassin in glitzy Atlantic City. Leonard, who died in 2013, created a legacy that surpasses even such masters as Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler.

Read more.

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Justifed finale panel from ATX Television Festival in Austin, TX

If you are a Justified fan, you must listen to this podcast. Esquire’s Andy Langer chats with writer/creator Graham Yost, writer/producers Dave Andron and Fred Golan, director Jon Avnett, and co-star Nick Searcy (“Art Mullen”) about ending the brilliant FX series based upon the Elmore Leonard story. Recorded June 6, 2015 at ATX

Listen to podcast.

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Watch: 10-Minute Video Essay Explores Quentin Tarantino’s Masterful Character Building

The Playlist
Nicholas Laskin
It may be true that Quentin Tarantino is in love with his own dialogue. Make that shamelessly, deliriously, high-school-stalker in love. But hey, if you were the twisted junk-culture poet who created characters as iconic as Mr. Pink, Vincent Vega, Jackie Brown, and Colonel Hans Landa, then you’d feel pretty good about yourself too.

READ MORE: 17 Copycat Films Spawned By Quentin Tarantino’s ‘Pulp Fiction’

Read the rest.

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Cops and Robbers - Margaret Atwood’s 2002 Review of Tishomingo Blues

The New York Review of Books
Margaret Atwood

Tishomingo Blues is Elmore Leonard’s thirty-seventh novel. At that number you’d think he’d be flagging, but no, the maestro is in top form. If, like Graham Greene, he were in the habit of dividing his books into “novels” and “entertainments”—with, for instance, Pagan Babies and Cuba Libre in the former list, and Glitz, Get Shorty, and Be Cool in the latter—this one might fall on the “entertainment” side; but, as with Greene, those that might be consigned to the “entertainment” section are not necessarily of poorer quality.

Read the Rest.

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In ‘Hombre’ and ‘Kid Blue,’ the Antiheroes Wear Stetsons and Ride Tall on a Rebellion Frontier

The New York Times
J. Hoberman

You might say that civic duty demanded that the biggest male stars be at least part-time cowboys. Some, notably Steve McQueen and Clint Eastwood, got their start as TV westerners. Elvis Presley made his screen debut in a western; serious actors like Marlon Brando and Dustin Hoffman saddled up at least once. For Paul Newman, it was almost a steady gig.

Newman played a range of western heroes (and antiheroes): Billy the Kid in “The Left Handed Gun” (1958); a cynical contemporary cowboy in “Hud” (1963); an ambiguous bad guy in “The Outrage” (1964); and an outlaw with insouciant charm in “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” (1969). His most complex performance, however, was as the unsmiling, bitter title character in “Hombre” (1967), newly released on Blu-ray by Twilight Time.

Read the rest.

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John Mulholland & Richard Zampella Filming Elmore Leonard Documentary Interviews in Detroit

PRWeb

Elmore Leonard’s life, his works, his place in the American literary pantheon, is the subject of this new documentary from Writer/Director John Mulholland & Producer Richard Zampella. The documentary film explores how he started, why he wrote what he did and how he arrived at his lean, terse, minimalist trademark.

Read more:

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Sad Day

Hard to believe, let alone accept, that Dutch has been gone two years! His spirit and great work lives on.

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Crime fiction writers read and discuss work at ‘Noir at the Bar’ event in Durham

The Herald Sun
Cliff Bellamy

“I wouldn’t be writing if it were not for Elmore Leonard, He’s the godfather of all of us.”- David Terrenoire

DURHAM —There is no smoke in the air at 106 Main, a downtown bar, and a visitor would have to imagine the scene filmed in black and white. On a recent Thursday evening, over drinks, patrons listened to writers read and discuss their stories that follow in the tradition of writers like Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, and movies like “Double Indemnity.”

Seven writers participated in this third installment of “Noir at the Bar,” an occasional gathering of crime-fiction writers that local writer and filmmaker Eryk Pruitt has organized.

Read the rest.

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‘Justified: The Complete Series’ on Blu-ray on October 13.

High-Def Digest
Tom Landy

For six electrifying seasons, no crime series proved more combustible than the Peabody Award-winning Justified. At the explosive center of the action, Western-style, Stetson-wearing, gun-slinging U.S. Marshal Raylan Givens (Timothy Olyphant) confronts murder, drugs, bank heists, mobsters, crime families, corrupt politicians and even his own tumultuous past – and never backs down. His ultimate adversary is the cunning, complex outlaw Boyd Crowder (Walton Goggins), but the real wild card is Ava Crowder (Joelle Carter), the mysterious woman torn between the two men and both sides of the law. From creator Graham Yost and based on legendary author Elmore Leonard’s crime novella “Fire in the Hole,” it all leads to a perfectly unexpected final showdown.

The 18-disc Blu-ray set will have all extras included on the previous releases, plus many new features: That’s a Wrap Gag Reel, Three All-New Featurettes; Writers’ Room Tour with Graham Yost; Leaving Harlan Alive: Making the Final Season; Harlan Revisited: Favorite Moments; In Elmore’s Words - featuring actors, who worked with Elmore Leonard, reading select passages from some of his most well-known pieces of work; as well as a Justified Flask and a Commemorative Disc Book all in collectible packaging.

 

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Four Novels of the 1980s Now Available

Copies have just arrived in the LOA warehouse! Order your copy today (15% off, free shipping) from the LOA Web Store for immediate delivery, and from Amazon.  Available in bookstores September 1.

The 1980s was the decade when Elmore Leonard came into his own as the most popular and critically acclaimed crime writer in America. The four novels collected here show him at the top of his game. Each in its own way displays his unique ear for the jazzy cadences of American speech, his ability to create extraordinary characters on both sides of the law, and his genius for exhilaratingly unpredictable stories that slide on a dime from hard-edged menace to unexpected comedy.

For three months in 1978, Leonard shadowed detectives from Detroit’s homicide squad for a profile commissioned by The Detroit News. From that experience came the inspiration for City Primeval, perhaps his greatest Detroit novel, a modern-day showdown between a lawman and an outlaw filled with echoes of the Westerns that were Leonard’s early specialty. (This volume presents, as a special feature, “Impressions of Murder,” the brilliant piece Leonard wrote for The Detroit News Sunday Magazine.) LaBrava moves the action to a steamy, seamy Miami, as a Secret Service agent turned photographer finds himself embroiled in a scheme involving a long-forgotten, but still alluring, film noir actress. Old-time movie lore, local Florida history, and the intricacies of a complex extortion plot are interwoven in one of Leonard’s richest and most entertaining works.

Glitz, the novel that marked Leonard’s breakthrough as a best-selling author, plunges into the casually corrupt world of Atlantic City casinos—“an old seaside resort being done over in Las Vegas plastic”—populated by small-time hoods and hustlers. A police detective looking into the death of a cocktail waitress finds himself following the twisted trail of the unforgettable Teddy Magyk, perhaps Leonard’s most indelibly chilling bad guy. Freaky Deaky, one of the author’s own favorites, returns to Detroit for a carnivalesque ’60s flashback in which festering grudges left over from counterculture days are churned up in a brew of blackmail, bombs, and sex.

This volume, the second in The Library of America’s Elmore Leonard edition, contains a newly researched chronology of Leonard’s life, drawing on materials in his personal archive, and detailed annotations, which include early drafts of passages from City Primeval and LaBrava, and an account by editor Gregg Sutter of the research that went into the writing of these novels.

Detroit native Gregg Sutter first met Elmore Leonard in 1979 and began working for him in 1981. He is currently at work on a biography of Leonard, from his unique perspective as his full-time researcher for more than thirty years.

Also check out:  Elmore Leonard: Four Novels of the 1970s: Fifty-Two Pickup / Swag / Unknown Man: (Library of America #255).

 

 

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