Meeting the Legendary Author Elmore Leonard

Evvvvvvery once and a while I get to “meet” a celebrity (usually meaning I deliberately bump into them so they’ll say “Watch it” and I can count it as “A conversation with Robin Williams”) but even more rare is when I meet one that I genuinely love their work and career. That happened last night as I attended a special Q and A, and book signing for literary titan, Elmore Leonard, who was at a Barnes and Noble to promote his new book “Raylan.” I sat dead center in the front row, and even got to ask one of the handful of questions permitted at the very end, with Leonard himself saying he thought I was “right.” Well, needless to say, I left feeling about ten inches taller than usual.

For those that may not be familiar with Leonard’s work (or are and don’t know it) here’s a small sample of the 41 novels Leonard has completed: Hombre, Out of Sight, Rum Punch (adapted as Jackie Brown), Get Shorty, Kill Shot (adapted as a really shitty movie but it’s a great, far superior book), La Brava, and several books that introduced the Raylan Givens character now on TV’s Justified. In fact, a little less than half of Leonard’s novels have been adapted for television and movies, and so he fittingly talked as much about show business as the book business…but I guess they’re really the same thing just one of them giving smart people a shot (at least until Vampire novels, and non-fiction smut books took over the publishing industry like kudzu).

The novelist often called “The greatest crime writer ever” talked equally about his entire career and his latest novel “Raylan” which follows U.S. Marshall Raylan Givens in his native Kentucky as he searches for crooks trying to sell organs they steal in drug deals gone bad. [Anyone who, like me, loves the TV show Justified should check out the short story “Fire in the Hole” which is basically the script for Justified’s first episode almost scene for scene.] It’s a testament to how smooth a writer Leonard is that I read the first hundred pages of Raylan while just waiting for the event to start. In fact, one of his “Ten Rules of Writing” (which he touched on last night) is “Don’t write the parts that readers skip anyway.” He recommended not “choking” a page with large blocks of description that don’t advance the plot forward, and especially not putting them in the wrong places that can severely drain the action.

It was great to hear Leonard tell various stories about his long career from not-so-positive experiences dealing with Burt Reynolds and Dustin Hoffman (Hoffman says he is the basis for Danny Devito’s character in Get Shorty) to his career as a Western writer before he got into crime fiction. Indeed, the question I asked was “Raylan Givens seems to be a bridge between your earlier Western books and your more current crime novels. Have you ever thought about going back and doing one last Western like Eastwood did with Unforgiven?” He said that it was probably too late to do another Western as Western’s just aren’t popular anymore, which is definitely true, but I guess I’ll still cross my fingers that he might change his mind.

Leonard was refreshingly blunt about his work experiences last night, and at 86 years old he’s had plenty of them. It struck me that most authors used to be this honest before book publishing became so blandly corporatized and now authors on a book tour act like they’re politicians giving a stump speech. In that regard, Leonard is a man from a different era, and I mean that in the best possible way.