Elmore Leonard is Detroit’s original white rapper; he’s been talking the talk for 50 years. He lives some way beyond Eminem’s 8 Mile, in a suburban neo-Georgian mansion. Before I’ve sat down in his study, from which he looks out on his snow-covered tennis court and his swimming pool, he’s telling me the opening to his thirty-eighth novel.

‘Two women,’ he says. ‘Chloe is a call girl, very expensive. She’s persuaded Kelly, a Victoria’s Secret model, to come with her to visit this 84-year-old guy, an ex-lawyer who is paying her $5,000 a week to be his girlfriend. Chloe usually gets more, but this is a kind of sabbatical. When the old guy dies, he is going to leave her a lot of money, not in his will, but through this middle man, Montez Taylor. Montez is his walking around guy. Montez and Kelly go upstairs to watch a porno movie and two guys burst in to the house and shoot dead the old man and Chloe. So Montez is in a fix to get his share of the money; he hits on the idea of Kelly pretending she is her dead friend.’

He sits back and smiles a little. In his fiction, Leonard has been famously happy to let his characters, an addictive mix of chancers and cops and psychos, do his speaking for him. He adopts something of the same strategy in person. His desk, where he works from nine till six, producing four pages a day, one novel a year, is set out with neat little piles of paper. One pile is a series of witness statements from the Detroit homicide department, his raw material. Another is the draft of his novel. Ask him questions and he frequently answers by reading sections from his notebook, or chunks from his typescript. He says he loves to live with his characters continually in his head, feels his way into their voices the whole time, and you can’t help but believe him.

In recent books, Leonard, dubbed the Dickens of Detroit by Time magazine, has tended to relocate from his most familiar beat. He has made excursions to 1990s Rwanda (Pagan Babies) and 1890s Havana (Cuba Libre), and inhabited the voices of Nicaraguan Contras (Bandits) and the Hollywood mafia (Get Shorty and Be Cool). He says he feels a little relieved to be returning to home turf. ‘I told my son that I’m back writing the Detroit cop stuff,’ he says. ‘He tells me I’ve been doing it my whole life. I say, I know, but I’m still trying to get it right.’

Elmore Leonard was born in New Orleans. His father, an executive at General Motors, brought the family to Detroit in 1934 when Leonard was 10, after spells in Dallas and Memphis and Oklahoma. For a crime writer, there could be no more appropriate place to have settled. ‘This has always been a very violent city,’ he says. ‘People have always shot each other to settle an argument. Last year, there were 26 children killed just in drive-bys; many of these were guys getting the wrong house. The gangbangers, they like brandy, Remy, and they smoke blunts, which are cigars with marijuana inside, so they are often out of it.’

For as long as Leonard can remember, there have been around 400 murders a year in Detroit, more than the total for London, Paris and Tokyo together. In the Sixties, about 700,000 people moved out of the city to its suburbs. ‘So right now there are maybe just a million people in Detroit itself, and it’s going to hell, you know.’

Leonard learnt his trade slowly. As a boy, he got into popular fiction from his mother’s book-of-the-month club. By the early Fifties, he was reading Steinbeck and John O’Hara. ‘I liked the way both always had a lot of people talking,’ he says, ‘and then I discovered Hemingway. I learnt a lot of my style from him, but he had no sense of humour, so I had to look elsewhere for that.’

He had a day job writing advertising copy for Chevrolet, and a growing family, four kids. He took to getting up at five in the morning every day to write. Initially, it was westerns, because that was the market. He sold his first story in 1951 to a pulp magazine, and many others followed. ‘I had a big book on the West, what they wore, what coffee they drank, all that,’ he remembers. ‘And I subscribed to a magazine called Arizona Highways. As the issues came, I’d write on the cover any stuff I could use: “canyons”, “desert”, “cattle” and so on.’

From the beginning, he wrote fiction with films in mind, and when he started writing novels, the studios took notice. Leonard spent half his childhood in cinemas, and some of the rest relating the stories of films to his schoolfriends. He went to work in Hollywood for a time in the early Seventies; his lasting memory is of ‘highways and corporate indecision’. Thirty-five of Leonard’s books have been either optioned as movies or filmed.

Some of the films weren’t bad, Paul Newman’s Hombre for example, but many were awful. His crime novels are not comedies, but they are often hilarious; it took Hollywood a long time to work that out. The lowest point was probably Stick, Burt Reynolds’s directorial debut. ‘Going in,’ he says, ‘you know the chances are it won’t be made. And if it is made, it will be no good. You know that. So if it turns out to be good, it’s like a miracle.’ The first miracle for Leonard was Barry Sonnenfeld’s Get Shorty, with John Travolta and Danny DeVito, the second was Quentin Tarantino’s Jackie Brown (based on his novel, Rum Punch).

Simply because he’s had successes, he says, it doesn’t make dealing with Hollywood any easier. Coming out of the premiere of Get Shorty, the producer asked him to write a sequel, so he did, Be Cool, the further adventures of Travolta’s character, Chili Palmer, loan shark turned film financer. But because of the success of Get Shorty and Pulp Fiction, he says, ‘the studio was frightened of Travolta’s new fee, 20 million bucks. I said we get a script written, you get it to Travolta with whatever you want to pay him, and if not we’ll get Benicio del Toro to do it. Then he won the Oscar, so his price went up. And so we are still waiting.’

What Hollywood loves about Leonard is his extraordinary dialogue and the tightness of his writing. He has distilled his style into 10 rules that should be pinned above every writer’s desk. The rules begin ‘Never open a book with weather’ and end ‘Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip’. Along the way, they include such invaluable advice as the imperative always to resist the temptation to employ, under any circumstances, the words ‘suddenly’ or ‘all hell broke loose’.

These qualities have never better been displayed than in the collection of short stories Leonard has just published, When the Women Come out to Dance. Written over the past 20 years, they make a perfect primer for Leonard’s work, wonderful models of concision and wit and character. The New York Times critic suggested his Christmas wish was that when the likes of ‘Cormac McCarthy, Michael Ondaatje and Toni Morrison, to name but three, looked under their trees, they found that some kind soul had been thoughtful enough to send them a copy of this book’ - in order to teach them how to write.

Leonard enjoys the fact that for a couple of decades now, his fiction has rightly enjoyed this kind of literary status, but he resists any attempt to intellectualise his work. He laughs a little at the occasional earnestness of admirers like Tarantino: ‘I once made the mistake of asking Quentin why he liked Rio Bravo so much,’ he recalls. ‘He just went on and on, opening with, “You know… I didn’t have a father.” I thought, “Uh-oh”.’

Another of his disciples is Martin Amis, who talks of Leonard being ‘perhaps the greatest popular writer of all time’. It is a case of opposites attracting: while Amis can’t bear to let a sentence of his go by without giving it the dazzle of his imprimatur, Leonard says: ‘I don’t want the reader ever to be aware of me writing.’ The pair have become friends, but he confesses never to have got to the end of one of Amis’s books: ‘Too many words.’
He tells me a story of how they were once both on the same talk show. Leonard went on first and when the host, Charlie Rose, brought up the subject of Amis’s admiration, Leonard explained how they were ‘way different writers, you know. Martin is the classic novelist, the omniscient author, and has the language for that. I don’t. I have to let my characters do the work. He has it all.’ When Amis came on, Rose said: ‘Did you hear what Elmore said about you?’ and Amis said: ‘I did. And my heart soared like an eagle…’ Leonard said: ‘See.’

His modesty is allied to a self-assurance. ‘When I like it,’ he says of his writing, ‘then I know it will be good.’ If there are insecurities in his past, they seemed to have disappeared when he stopped drinking in 1977. Even then, he says, he was mostly a pretty sociable drunk. ‘Well, I always had a good time. I’d drunk from high school with fake IDs. And in the navy in the war I drank. My mother said my father used to drink but I don’t ever recall seeing him drunk once.’

When did it become a problem?

‘Well,’ he says, ‘it was possibly always more of a problem than I thought. But finally I was drinking a lot in the morning. A friend had been at AA a while and he took me along. My first wife and I were arguing a lot, and we were with a group who drank, and finally we separated and we were divorced. It was my second wife who really helped me through the most difficult time. I didn’t go to a clinic. I just quit cold turkey.’

Did giving up affect his work?

‘I never relied on alcohol for the writing. And I was able to let go of it. The writing definitely improved: you know, I was waking up in the morning for the first time with a clear head, wanting breakfast.’ He talks of his second wife, Joan, who had been a neighbour, as perhaps the most powerful influence in his life. She died of cancer in 1993. I ask if she was ill a long time, and he explains simply that she had some shortness of breath in December 1992, the first she knew of it, and died on 13 January.

You would imagine that this tragedy would have had some impact on his writing, particularly as his books are full of death, but he says no. ‘I was into a book, of course, can’t remember which one. But death doesn’t frighten me at all. My high-school reunion is getting smaller each year, you know. But no one in the books ever really reflects on it, and I don’t have too many characters who die of natural causes, I guess.’

In April of the same year, he met his current wife, Christine, who came to help work on his garden. He recounts their courtship with the same rhythm he brings to his prose. ‘I would look out the window, and go out and talk to her about movies and books,’ he says. ‘In June, I called her for a date. I hadn’t called anyone for a date in 45 years. So we had a date, and the next week we went to Florida to my house there. I was just going on a book tour, so I said, “Will you come with me?” And she said, “What as?” So: we got married in August.’

Does living with gangsters in his head make him hard to be with?

‘Christine will sometimes say, “I can imagine what character you are working on, some asshole”. But it’s really never hard because I like them all. Even the bad guys; I think of them either as stupid or just playing a role. I like to think what they were like as children - that helps.’

Leonard is interested in the language of crime, not the causes of it. Does he ever worry about glamorising the culture?

‘I try to do it straight,’ he says. ‘I try to write it how it is.’ He picks up one of his interrogation reports: ‘A murder scene. One guy gets another guy to pull over. The first guy says, “Why do you keep driving by here?”, and the second guy says, “What?” And that’s it, enough to shoot him.’

He shows me his notebook, which is full of little observations and fragments of conversation he has overheard. He reads some out: ‘We went down to Yakkety Yaks, a club, to ask the bouncer about getting a titty dancer for a house party. He showed us pictures of pit bulls he was selling.’ Or: ‘Sign in coroner’s office: “Dornell. You will be responsible for the brain bucket, Thursday”.’

He reads through some more, smiles, slowly turns over the pages. ‘Really, I can’t go wrong,’ he says. And then he gets back to work.

· When the Women Come out to Dance is published by Viking, £15.99.

I came across this on the guardian UK website. I searched on the main site and the forum; it doesn’t appear to have been posted before.

Nobody notice this:

Montez and Kelly go upstairs to watch a porno movie ...

In the published book,there’s no mention of this. Was this what Elmore had in mind as a first idea, when interviewed/ questioned? perhaps changed in the early writing of Mr. Paradise? or is it simply a mis-quote?

The published book reads:

“What I’m gonna do, Montez, my numer one, I’m gonna share my ladies with you. I don’t want to show favoritism, so I’m flipping the coin. Heads, Chloe goes upstairs and you have a party on me. Tails, Montez, you get Kelly here. How’s that sound to everybody?”

Jade - 24 November 2008 09:37 AM

Nobody notice this:

Montez and Kelly go upstairs to watch a porno movie ...

In the published book, there’s no mention of this. Was this what Elmore had in mind as a first idea, when interviewed/ questioned? perhaps changed in the early writing of Mr. Paradise? or is it simply a mis-quote?

The published book reads:

“What I’m gonna do, Montez, my numer one, I’m gonna share my ladies with you. I don’t want to show favoritism, so I’m flipping the coin. Heads, Chloe goes upstairs and you have a party on me. Tails, Montez, you get Kelly here. How’s that sound to everybody?”

I have no idea why this has just quoted my own entry.

Very curious….

And, I appear powerless to delete it.

interesting even though its kinda old.. thanks..
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