Esquire
March 31, 2005, 11:00 PM
What I’ve Learned: Elmore Leonard (Writer, 79, Detroit)
By Cal Fussman

Bad guys are not bad guys twenty-four hours a day.

I like homicide detectives. They wear hats. They wear hats so that other law-enforcement people will know they’re homicide.

As a little kid, I wanted to play with a knife and my mother wouldn’t let me. I cried and she gave me a rubber one. I said, “Mom, a rubber knife just doesn’t do it.”

I’ve been married three times. During the first one, I had a love affair. Then I divorced, and Joan and I were married. She died in ‘93, and I felt I had to get married again. Quickly. I like being married. Just then, the French-speaking landscaper showed up. Christine is twenty-four years younger than me. We started talking and that was it. I remember saying to a friend, “I’m thinking of marriage again, but Joan’s been dead for only six months. Don’t you think I should wait a year?” He said, “What are you, Sicilian?”

The best thing about my kids is the fact that I can count on them. I knew they’d understand when I married somebody their age.

You do appreciate sex more as you age. The simple fact is there will be fewer and fewer situations.

My material looks like a movie. Then when the studio gets into it, they find out it’s not quite as simple as it looks.

The convicts who write me assume I’ve done time.

A line of dialogue is not clear enough if you need to explain how it’s said.

Once, I came back from Hollywood in the early seventies throwing up blood. My doctor said, “We’re going to have to do an exploratory operation.” He said, “Acute gastritis? That’s something you see with skid-row bums.” I was drinking heavily.

Alcohol never prevented me from writing. But when I quit—on January 24, 1977, at 9:30 a.m.—my fiction got better.

I was brought up Catholic. I don’t go to receive the sacrament anymore. But it’s important to me to go through this little drill about what my purpose is before I get out of bed every morning.

God’s will is not necessarily something bad that happens to you. You can become a millionaire, and that’s God’s will. You have to look at it this way: What are you doing to deserve God’s will?

I tried to enlist in the Marines when I was seventeen, but they wouldn’t let me in because of my left eye. It was probably a good thing. I would’ve been shipped off to Iwo Jima, I’m sure. I’d have been pushing up that flag…or daisies.

I don’t have a computer, so I don’t have to contend with e-mail. I do have—what do you call it, when you send printed messages over the phone? . . . A fax, yeah, that’s it. I do have one of those.

A pen connects you to the paper. It definitely matters.

When you meet somebody who bores you, you have to put up with him until he leaves. But when you meet a boring character, you turn the page.

A good editor is someone who knows what your problem is.

I gave a talk in Florida and became friends with a judge who invited me to his home. He showed me his gardens and orchids. Then he showed me some photos. One was of a guy with a butcher knife in his head. Another was of a car that had been buried underground with a cadaver in it. After they pulled the car up, they had to park it behind an airplane with the propellers going just to blow all the corruption out. He also showed me a photograph of a dead chicken that had been sexually violated.

Don’t be surprised at anything untoward that you come across.

There’s a scene in my next book in which a character who’s been traveling around with this girl leaves her in a motel room and goes out to see some buddies. The next morning, he comes back and he’s hungover. Terribly hungover. And he says, “I can’t believe what we did with those chickens last night.” And that’s all he says. She wonders what they were doing with those chickens—but it’s left to the imagination.

I’ve written forty novels. I don’t know why, but my favorite is Freaky Deaky.

We’ve raised money for charities by having people bid to get their names in one of my novels. A diminutive curator at the Detroit Institute of Arts won one auction. His name is Elliot Wilhelm. So I used his name for the 260-pound gay Samoan in Be Cool. It’s the character played by the Rock in the movie. At first I didn’t hear from the real Elliot Wilhelm. But I came to find out that he loved the idea.

If an adverb became a character in one of my books, I’d have it shot. Immediately.

The Meaning of Life: Wit, Wisdom, and Wonder from 65 Extraordinary People (Hearst Books, $20), a compendium of classic What I’ve Learned interviews, is available wherever books are sold.