Leonard didn’t win a boatload of awards and I don’t think
he was ever regarded as a great literary figure. Nor do I think he wanted to be. What he did was write stories that hooked you
at the start, held you thru the middle, and gave you a satisfying ending. He was the master of crisp, realistic dialog
that always rang true. And he wrote the
best damned characters in the English language, bar none. That’s why he was a writer’s writer, the guy
all us fiction writers wanted to be.
That’s why Stephen King called him The Great American Writer.
Leonard’s career started in the 50s with westerns. He responsible for one of the best known
western films (Hombre) and one of the all-around best westerns of all time
(Three-ten to Yuma.) His misbegotten
people just trying to make it, combined with his dialog tells their hearts,
made the transition to crime fiction so natural, that many of his works seem to
fall into both camps.
Leonard gave us more than 50 great novels, at least 19 of which went to the
screen. As such he is responsible for kicking
off a lot of Hollywood careers including those of Roy Scheider (52 Pick-Up,) Burt
Reynolds (Stick,) and Charles Bronson (Mr. Majestyk.) And there is no doubt that he saved John
Travolta’s career when it was on life support with Get Shorty.
A healthy stack of Leonard short stories have also become
films or television shows. One of his
short stories, “Fire in the Hole,” has offered Timothy Oliphant the role of his
career on the TVshow Justified.
I feel a more personal loss than many today, not because
of the great entertainment we will miss in the future, but because of all that
I learned from the master’s work. I
learned all I know about creating characters that readers will care about by
studying Leonard’s stories. I learned
the importance of both common and unique traits, of small mannerisms and
emotional variety, and of terse, telling comments. I learned how to put feeling into description
and how to hold a point of view.
And I learned one other thing: that a good writer can go
whole chapters without using a single adverb.
You can search a long time without find a word that ends with “ly” in
any of Leonard’s book. Short, direct
sentences driven by active verbs give his writing more life than almost any
other author. I’ve avoided adverbs in
this piece in his honor.
I don’t know if Elmore Leonard is riding the range now
like a ghost rider in the sky, but I would bet that the angels are begging him every
day to tell them a story, because his stories always told you what it was like
to be human.
So long to my greatest mentor. Elmore, I’m still trying to walk in your
footsteps.
