This NYT review is terrific and at the time must have been a huge boost to Elmore, both personally and professionally. There’s only one flaw: The reviewer says, “[A]s in the two previous books, the plotting is remarkably ingenious,” and “Leonard bows to no one in plot construction.”
If the reviewer’d known then what we all know now—that Elmore doesn’t plot, that he creates characters, puts them in situations, let’s them talk, and goes wherever they take him—obviously the idea of masterful plotting, pre-planned action, would not have been included.
But the most interesting thing, and the irony, is that the “plots” that do emerge in his books are ingenious. So ingenious, in fact, that Elmore has the NYT assuming that only meticulous forethought and planning could have brought them into being.
A side note: just as Elmore’s prose gets from point A to point B with nothing extraneous in between, so his thinking as to how to create his prose works in the same way. In life, people meet, interact, speak to each other, and things happen to them. Elmore’s true genius lies in his understanding that believable fiction should come about in precisely the same way. And to hell with what the scholars, experts, critics, or other famous writers think.