Often when we talk about crime fiction we talk about the men, but I think the women in Elmore Leonard novels are terrific - layered and very real. I find a lot of fiction has women as too perfect, with very few flaws, or else too much the femme fatale without any vulnerabilities.

Certainly Karen Sisco is a good character, but I’m wondering, what other women in Elmore Leonard’s books do you like?

In the 70’s, Kathy Werbelow, a Detroit Free Press reviewer said that Elmore’s male characters, and therefore by association, Elmore, wrote women with the sensitivity of Mickey Spiillane.  It’s true of a lot of male writers back then who wised up and stopped being quite so sexist and started seriously developig their female characters.  Elmore didn’t exactly agree with Kathy but he realized that if he were perceived as chauvinistic by critics like her, he might want to take another look at his stuff, and he did.

In the 80s, Elmore realized tha he could write women pretty much the same as men, changing only the “business.”  The results are seen in some of his best books that have strong female lead charactes like Carmen in Killshot, Kathy Baker in Maximum Bob, Jackie Burke in Rum Punch, Karen Sisco in Out of Sight and Debbie Dewey in Pagan Babies.

Up in Honey’s Room is so tipped toward the femal lead, Honey Deal, that Elmore jockingly calls it “chick lit.”

So now I’m looking forward to Elmore Leonard chick lit?!?

Well, I’ve been re-reading a lot of that seventies stuff, and I think the female characters may not all be “strong” (though some of them are very strong, especially given the situations they’re in) but they are very real. That’s really what inspired my post. I think if people took another look at those books they’d see how they really capture the time.

When I first read Swag it was the first time I came across characters in a book who were exactly like people I knew. Not armed robbers, maybe, but the attitudes and the way they spoke. Frank Ryan has a little speech in that book about, “the Pussy” that’s probably offensive to some people, but the men and women at that party - the junior executives and the stewardesses - were very real to me. Denise (or Lee) in Unknown Man #89 is certainly a well-developed character.

Some critics may not have liked those women characters, but they were a lot like the women I knew.

But yeah, Carmen’s a hoot.

I think sometimes, the author offers a cowboy twist on that old standard, the duel. Several of the previously published stories contained here are Westerns, a genre in which Leonard specialized before turning to crime fiction. “Hurrah for Capt. Early,” set in Sweetmary, Arizona, in 1898, finds two men—ex-U.S. soldier and Spanish-American veteran Bo Catlett, and a cowboy ranch rider named Macon—facing off in the middle of La Salle Street with an unconventional choice of weaponry.

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