Finally, Why America Loves Elmore Leonard

Some Hitmakers Deserve All the Luck

You know him from Get Shorty, the exciting and sometimes hilarious movie starring John Travolta as Chili Palmer, and Be Cool, the awful sequel.  You might know him as the author of Out of Sight, starring George Clooney and Jennifer Lopez in the best acting of her life.  It is less likely, but you might even know that he wrote Rum Punch, which was the book from which Quentin Tarantino made Jackie Brown.  You know Elmore Leonard as the master of cool, funny, neo-Noir.

I decided to figure out what made Elmore Leonard so popular in America.  During his lifetime, particularly the latter half of his lifetime, he was a hit machine in a way that few writers have ever matched.  His books have sold millions and been turned into dozens of Hollywood films.  And he retains the status of Important American Writer.  How did he do it?  Why do we love him so much?  I had read a lot of his works over the years but not programmatically, and, while I liked his writing kinda pretty well fine okay yeah he’s good, man, he's good, I never understood his massive literary and commercial success.  I found his writing often funny and his characters sometimes vivid, but I mostly found the experience of his books – and the movies made from them – small, tedious, and repetitive.  Even his great strengths were inconsistent.  His dialogue can be pitch-perfect street-smart, accurate, and arresting, but usually it is not.  His plots and character predicaments can be hilarious, but usually they are unfunny when trying to be.  His villains can be terrifying, but you can nearly always draw an inverted curve between his apparent effort to make them so and the net result.  Most of all, it’s like he had one and a half plots and tweaked the setting and decade just enough to warrant a new hardcover.  His work was repetitive, like really repetitive.  Did I say that already?  Well, I’ll probably say it again before I’m through here.

But there is no doubt about it: Elmore Leonard was one of the very few most successful American writers of the last century.  Readers, critics, students, producers, movie stars, and other authors love him.  I set out to learn why and, finally, I think I did.

Before I tell you what I learned, I should explain the dissonance that brought me to research this American legend.  I have to ‘fess up, I guess, as the admission provides the context that both propelled me and allowed me to figure out why we love him so.

It all began with his reputation in Noir.

For both fans and connoisseurs of Noir, Elmore Leonard holds a singular status: he is widely and casually regarded, in tone and prestige, as the mantle-carrying generational successor to the original greats of Chandler, Cain, Hammett, and MacDonald.  No one else seriously competes for this title, and there is a gap in time between him and the rest of the field until the next one, James Ellroy, who was born almost twenty-five years after Leonard. 

I have never understood or agreed with this characterization of Leonard and his work. I have never believed him to be a Noir writer.

Readers of Finally will know my passion for this genre.  I have made Noir the subject of special study for many years now, and I consider it one of the three genuine American art forms.  (The others are jazz and its progeny and the Western, particularly the Western movie.  No doubt readers will have their own lists.)  The starting point in my quest to understand Elmore Leonard’s eminence stemmed from my interest in Noir and my dissonance when encountering his notoriety in the field.  He is not, in my book, a great Noir writer.  His books waver between Noir-adjacent and Noir-distant.  As I considered his enormous reputation as a great American Noir author, I could not see past the dimensions of my initial inquiry and of the conventionally received basis of his fame.  I think I was somehow aware of this, so I undertook to learn what I can share with you now.

Like every actual genre of art, Noir derives power from the observance of rules.  Here they are:

“[A]n incorruptible detective, a man apart, journeys through the visible and invisible miasma of the city, from the upstairs penthouses to the downstairs trash heaps, from the enlightened to the cowered, from the beautiful to the discarded, monomaniacally undeterred in his mission to find the killer himself and whoever else might have put the killer up to the job.”

I am here quoting myself, which is a kind of comical personal shehecheyanu, since it means, at least, and perhaps among other things, that I have lived long enough to do so.  We move on.  We can amplify and explain – all definitions, by definition, benefit from amplification and explanation – by noting that the city itself becomes a character in the best Noir, so “[y]ou need a city that is big enough for the task.  It must have great wealth disparity, cultural diversity and tension, political intrigue, either a core of virtuous ambition encircled by an atmosphere of corruption or the reverse, and enough tantalizing yet uneasy social mobility to make the striving – and the killing that ends it – worth the trouble.  Perhaps most importantly, for the ingredients of the Noir murder mystery to be just right, the city must be undergoing a period of rapid and momentous change.  Social, political, and economic upheaval must be upon it.”  The crime does not strictly have to be a murder, but it should be.  The protagonist does not have be a man but usually is, for both interesting and uninteresting reasons that not everyone will accept, one of which is that part of what makes him special is his emotional and sexual unavailability – he does not give in to his baser libidinous instinct, even in the face of extremely available and alluring temptation. 

The contours of Noir are thus easily distinguishable from those of the other great original American genre of literary fiction, the Western.  Set aside the obvious difference between settings – Noir in the raw city and Western in the rough outdoors.  The Western protagonist is reluctant.  He doesn’t want to fight but then does.  Specifically, he gets up on his hind legs only once a particular kind of line is crossed.  It is not destruction of his own property or an objective sense of right and wrong.  Instead, he is prototypically animated into action by connubial love.  Sometimes it is familial or paternal love, but it’s a short list, and in any case it is love, and he starts killing people when one of his own is murdered.  By contrast, the Noir detective is not reluctant.  He is world-weary but not reluctant.  He is a professional.  He might seek out the case or get assigned the case or otherwise slip into a case he didn’t expect or even want to have, but, while he appears to be and sometimes actually is a cynical man of action, he is not a begrudging one. 

Then there is the question of love.  For the Noir detective, love is always on his radar but never on his plate.  The Noir hero is, like his Western brother, a man apart.  But he is, while not impervious to love or attraction, famously unavailable to affection or even to seduction. 

His outlook is also different from the Western hero’s.  The Western reader, like the Western hero, understands the Big Sky country to be a place of hope and rebirth, freedom and self-making.  The Western gunman sets out to set things right.  By killing the bad guy, the Western hero removes the disease that has prevented the hard but good life from unfolding in the healthy, clean, and destiny-imbibing way it ought to unfold.  In the Western, vengeance is a disinfectant.  The Noir reader and Noir hero do not share this illusion or disillusion: they know the city to be intrinsically dangerous and its virtue already irretrievably lost.  There is nothing more at stake than this case.  The Noir detective shares his Western brother’s measure of Right and Wrong but bleakly expects and accepts that nothing will change in the city except the outcome of the mystery in front of him.

Enter Elmore Leonard.  His name is now consonant with neo-Noir, but it needn’t be and, finally, shouldn’t.  Leonard started out as a writer of Westerns.  He was a pulp and production line author, churning through story after story and book after book even more prolifically than he did later in what has been deemed his more important Noir phase.  Though readers of fiction will have forgotten this massive Western chapter in his life, film aficionados – the kinds of people who nod or shake their heads in knowing agreement or in wounded dissent when watching Turner Classic Movies hosts Robert Osborne and Ben Mankiewicz dress up factoids as insight – will remember that Leonard wrote the novel and short story that were adapted into the movies Hombre with Paul Newman and 3:10 to Yuma with Glenn Ford (as well as the remake with Christian Bale and Russell “Viggo Mortensen Doesn’t Sell as Many Tickets” Crowe).

At some point, and I have not ascertained why, Leonard moved his attention from the American southwest to the city, and he started on the journey that would take him away from the classic Western and on the path toward Noir.  It was then, in the 1970s, when Leonard was one-third-almost-halfway through his career, that he started to hit his stride.  His novels from this period include a handful that are neck deep in grimy ambition, in the city and people of Detroit, in the eyes-open recreation of unsavory people that just wouldn't be politic today because it’s too accurate, and in all the best-bits dialogue you may already know from his books and movies.

It is in this period that Leonard found what became his signature creative voice, even if he had not yet achieved the kind of “they’ll buy anything I publish” renown.  In quick succession, he first perfected the tempo and speed for which he became famous (Fifty-Two Pickup), added the trainwreck humor (Swag), and then developed both in Unknown Man and the most famous work of this period, Switch.  He was already exhibiting his characteristic repetitiveness in plot, character, setting, and tone.

Then, in the 1980s, Leonard wrote a series of books that probably best represent the fulcrum moment of his career: City Primeval, LaBrava, Glitz, and Freaky Deaky. They chart the author’s path to the apex of his writing success and see him achieve bestseller stardom with Glitz. 

City Primeval is the best of this bunch.  The plot is in the spirit of Dirty Harry, which predates it by about a decade.  America’s cities are in decline and collapse.  Law and order are undermined by crooks whose crafty lawyers are able to get their clients off on “technicalities.”  Etc.  The villain here, Clement Mansell, is a believable crafty and sadistic character, as is the good guy, our hero policeman Raymond Cruz, who was, I think, the best-drawn of Leonard’s protagonists.  The book is often viewed as Noir, but it really isn’t, and its subtitle, “High Noon in Detroit,” is a straight giveaway and one of the more explicit acknowledgments from this period of Leonard’s history as a writer of cowboy Westerns.  It’s almost as if this was Leonard’s final attempt to persuade the critical class that his project was importing the Western into the city rather than trying to update and evolve Noir.  It is not a subtle hint.  But the academy seems not to have taken it. 

By the way, before we leave the subject of urban decay, lawlessness, and Clint Eastwood, I am keen to remind you, as I seek to remind many of my pals these days, that Dirty Harry was about a San Francisco cop.  Back then, when Dirty Harry reached theaters in 1971, San Francisco was an anarchic cesspool, overrun by criminals whose police force could not keep up with their open-air, daytime crimes.  Political activists blocked efforts to capture and imprison the offenders.  Upstanding citizens retreated into their homes and out of the city.  In this absolutely unthinkable, unimaginable, and unrecognizable San Francisco, a rogue detective with a massive gun started blasting away at hardcore gang members.  Americans flocked to the movie theaters to see this satisfying justice, this breaking free of self-destructive leftie intellectual red tape, this restoration of basic law and order without which city life can never quite be marvelous.  Thank G-d this deplorable state of affairs has never, ever, ever returned to San Francisco and that such a movie could never, ever, ever be made today.

LaBrava, first published in 1983, represents an important moment for Leonard, in which he overtly embraces the magnetism of Hollywood.  Noir was making a comeback in the movie business in this period, and I believe this must have influenced his storyboarding.  The plot of LaBrava unfolds in Miami and involves a former Noir starlet with a gift for cozy manipulation, an ex-Secret Service man who thinks he is a photographer, and a nice easy tone that goes down like a mint julep.  It’s almost as if Leonard knew the big bucks were in selling more movie rights or that it was high time to set more of his work in more glamorous settings than Detroit.  We must not begrudge him either instinct.  In writing explicitly for the screen, Leonard was in some serious company, including that of F. Scott Fitzgerald.  What is noteworthy here is that we can almost plot the exact moment in time when Leonard really figured out that Hollywood was a major part of his literary and commercial life. This understanding reached its culmination much later, when he wrote Be Cool, the regrettable sequel to Get Shorty, only after seeing the success of the Get Shorty movie adaptation.  It seems to me that Leonard may have just surrendered to his reputation as a neo-Noir guy, supplying enough breadcrumbs to affirm it, in order to accelerate his already stunning commercial speed.

Glitz gives us a preview of both the Sopranos & Leonard’s own Get Shorty period.  Atlantic City, wise guys, molls, the guy behind the guy, accents – it’s all here.  The bad man, Teddy Magyk, is sometimes chalked up as Leonard’s most spooky villian.  I don’t agree.  I think Mansell from City Primeval is far more terrifying.  As for Freaky Deaky: it is not worth finishing.  Having read almost a dozen Leonard novels in a row, I found that he had discovered his recipe and had simply committed to it.  Finally, it dulled. 

As I set aside Freaky Deaky, I felt that the conclusion that had been bubbling up in my head was no longer up for debate.

Reaching back in time, before his entry into city life, one clearly perceives that Leonard had mostly found his formula – minus the broad humor and the streetwise argot – when he was still a writer of pulp Westerns.  That, finally, was the answer: Elmore Leonard was not – was never – a writer of Noir.  He wrote Westerns.  He might have plucked up the cowboys and deposited them in the city.  He might have placed his set pieces in darkened parking lots instead of shadowy canyons.  But his big move was to transpose the Western into the American city.  It was not to contemporize Noir.  His good guys were almost never emotionally unavailable.  On the contrary, they usually rescued and won the girl.  His cities were not more than movieland backdrops; they were not characters in the play, intrinsically tied to the action through news, geography, or even weather.  His heroes were almost never men apart; they had lives, complications, relationships, enemies, frequent collaborators, and, very importantly, ambitions.  And Elmore Leonard’s outlook was not bleak.  His books could be animated by terrible villainies or accidents, and even the city quarters in which these accidents transpired were themselves often horribly dilapidated, but those were exceptional undercurrents, episodes, and corners of an otherwise vibrant and hopeful world.  In the end, by Leonard, the good guy nearly always wins, evil dies or retreats, and tomorrow returns to its rightful status as more promising than today.

Americans eat that up.  And rightly so.  We are a hopeful people.  We want our best to triumph over evil.  We want the good day to dawn.  Here, finally, was the key to his success.  In addition to being a good and clever writer; in addition to his sharp hearing and brave reflection – perhaps none of his books could have been published today, as, among other things, he routinely featured black characters who spoke in frankly ghetto patois, and he would doubtless be pilloried as racist and as culturally appropriating; in addition to the half-intricate plotwork and man-caught-in-a-maze absurdist complication; in addition to all of these ingredients – which are heady and powerful but not even close to approaching the outer boundaries of unique – Elmore Leonard loved a happy, golden sunset ending.  Even in the mire of the city, a hero rises, slays the villain, rescues the damsel, and then rests in the knowledge that he has won and that the world is better for it.  Hope flourishes again.  What an American idea.  Nothing is ever so bleak as the other fellow would have you believe.  Even in the utter urban blight of the 1970s and 1980s, hope and heroism can and do rise and prevail.

To love Elmore Leonard and to understand the love for him, it is not and was never necessary to mistake him for a practitioner of Noir.  I think it is time for the academy to re-understand him.  Leonard borrowed some of Noir’s techniques and treats and thereby beguiled the critics, but he made these conceits his own and turned them into mere ammunition for his brace of well-practiced six shooters.  He cracked the code of a new subgenre, one particular to himself, the hardboiled, comedic, city-borne Western.  And then he kept writing that book over and over and over again.  Once he figured out what he was doing, he was probably either having too much fun or selling too many copies to stop churning them out.

And so what.  You gotta love it.  G-d bless this great Western novelist and the America that made and admired him.  Some hitmakers get, and, finally, deserve, all the luck.