You ever notice that Elmore almost never has characters answer questions directly? I don’t mean be evasive—most of his characters are anything but—but rather having characters answer with words that move the story or conversation forward.

Say someone says something like, “you want coffee?” Elmore’s character will say “black, two sugars,” instead of, “that’d be good,” or “sure.” Your average writer, or even your above average writer, would have had the character say “sure,” then the other one say, “how do you want it?” then getting the answer “black, two sugars” (or, more likely, black with two sugars, using that extra word which slows things down and sounds like how people write, not how they speak).  Doing it the Elmore way keeps things tight, moves the book along briskly.

Which is another reason his books feel seamless, imparting the feeling of a long, downhill bobsled run. The non-Elmore way has a stop/start quality to it.

Here’s an example from LaBrava:

Frannie: “Is she the one, dark hair, middle-aged, she came out of the hotel this evening with you and Mr. Zola? We were in the van, we’d just pulled up.”
LaBrava: “We went out to dinner…”

Any other writer would have had LaBrava say “yes” to the question, then had him elaborate. Elmore’s genius is in skipping that part and making the “yes” implicit in what the character does say.

Anyone else have other examples?

This is something that’s got a lot more refined with the later books. Pretty much all of The Hot Kid has this kind of dialogue.

Elmore never uses exclamation marks!

LOL!  I hesitate to use exclamation points here for fear of being looked down upon by the Elmore purists.  But we’re not snobs here, and by golly, you just need to use ‘em once in a while.

Right?!

I just finished reading a book that was all the author sticking his nose in, and jumping from inside one characte’s head to another—it was terrible. The book was translated from French to English, so I hope that was part of the problem. But another big problem was the way it plodded forward, following a direct timeline, one event after the other - really whether it was interesting or, I felt, required at all.

It got me thinking. Another genius thing Elmore does is this overlapping of scenes. A scene will play itself out, then he’ll go back to before it started and approach it from another character’s point of view. Gives the reader some ‘inside’ information and fills everything out.

Works for me.

One thing I dig, when he changes scenes it’s like watching a film.  The scene plays out like you’re looking over one character’s shoulder, there’s a space between characters and then you’re on the other side of the room, looking over another character’s shoulder.

Maybe that comes from Mr. Leonard’s work with screenplays, but I find his books to be quite visual even though he’s not huge on visual descriptions.