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The 1980s was the decade when Elmore Leonard came into his own as the most popular and critically acclaimed crime writer in America. The four novels collected here show him at the top of his game. Each in its own way displays his unique ear for the jazzy cadences of American speech, his ability to create extraordinary characters on both sides of the law, and his genius for exhilaratingly unpredictable stories that slide on a dime from hard-edged menace to unexpected comedy.

For three months in 1978, Leonard shadowed detectives from Detroit’s homicide squad for a profile commissioned by The Detroit News. From that experience came the inspiration for City Primeval, perhaps his greatest Detroit novel, a modern-day showdown between a lawman and an outlaw filled with echoes of the Westerns that were Leonard’s early specialty. (This volume presents, as a special feature, “Impressions of Murder,” the brilliant piece Leonard wrote for The Detroit News Sunday Magazine.) LaBrava moves the action to a steamy, seamy Miami, as a Secret Service agent turned photographer finds himself embroiled in a scheme involving a long-forgotten, but still alluring, film noir actress. Old-time movie lore, local Florida history, and the intricacies of a complex extortion plot are interwoven in one of Leonard’s richest and most entertaining works.

Glitz, the novel that marked Leonard’s breakthrough as a best-selling author, plunges into the casually corrupt world of Atlantic City casinos—“an old seaside resort being done over in Las Vegas plastic”—populated by small-time hoods and hustlers. A police detective looking into the death of a cocktail waitress finds himself following the twisted trail of the unforgettable Teddy Magyk, perhaps Leonard’s most indelibly chilling bad guy. Freaky Deaky, one of the author’s own favorites, returns to Detroit for a carnivalesque ’60s flashback in which festering grudges left over from counterculture days are churned up in a brew of blackmail, bombs, and sex.

This volume, the second in The Library of America’s Elmore Leonard edition, contains a newly researched chronology of Leonard’s life, drawing on materials in his personal archive, and detailed annotations, which include early drafts of passages from City Primeval and LaBrava, and an account by editor Gregg Sutter of the research that went into the writing of these novels.

Detroit native Gregg Sutter first met Elmore Leonard in 1979 and began working for him in 1981. He is currently at work on a biography of Leonard, from his unique perspective as his full-time researcher for more than thirty years.

Also check out: Elmore Leonard: Four Novels of the 1970s: Fifty-Two Pickup / Swag / Unknown Man: (Library of America #255).