After Jackie Brown and Get Shorty he’s hot in Hollywood and hailed as a literary genius by writers like Amis and Bellow. But few realise that the king of crime fiction thinks most filmed versions of his novels have been junk. Lawrence Donegan reports
In the Squad Seven room at 1300 Beaubein beats the dark heart of American crime. The fifth-floor office in downtown Detroit, with its battered green metal desks and wooden school chairs, is where the city’s “whodunnit?” murders are investigated. “All we start with is a body,” drawls Monica Childs, a hard-boiled homicide detective in a yolk-coloured trouser suit.
Across the desk, a weary-looking male detective is flicking through a pile of Polaroids. “Look at this fuckin’ freak,” he says, holding up a picture of a 127kg male murder suspect dressed in a black leather mini-skirt and a red cashmere sweater with two medium-sized coconuts stuffed down the front. “Is that supposed to be a fuckin’ disguise?”
The two cops are competing for attention. Childs points at two white cardboard boxes over by the office computer. “That’s part of the Purple Gang files [the Purple Gang was a Mafia mob which terrorised Detroit in the Forties and Fifties]. The smaller box is Rico Jones’s. He killed five people, four of ’em children. Jumped out the window of the interrogation room next door.” Did he die? “Walks better than you. Went feet first. That’s when we knew he was trying to escape. Head first? Now that would’ve been suicide.”
Fans of Elmore Leonard will recognise such a scene: the undercurrent of violence, the humour, the hip dialogue. The Detroit-based crime writer spent three months hanging out in the Squad Seven room in 1979 on assignment for the Detroit News. The resulting piece, “Impressions of Murder”, is a brilliant expos of police methods and attitudes and of the mayhem that earned Detroit the title of America’s capital of crime.
The piece provided Leonard with the raw material for his 1980 novel, City Primeval: High Noon in Detroit, the story of a detective, Raymond Cruz, who sets out to nail a psychopath called Clement Mansell for the murder of a crooked Motown judge. It is his best novel to date. Like all of his books, it is written in “scenes”, each told from the point-of-view of the different characters. No one is ever “telling”, they are always “doing”. There is no message, no explaining and no metaphysics. The dialogue is ligature tight and alternates between brutal and funny.
City Primeval revolves around Mansell’s efforts to steal a bag of money from a rich Albanian boyfriend of a girl he’s screwing but – another feature of Leonard’s novels – the plot is only called upon in the most dire of narrative emergencies. The fact is, no one reads Leonard’s books for the plots. You read them because they make you laugh, because they describe a world of psychos, drug-crazed sickos, loan sharks, bent judges, and go-go dancers that you’d like to visit (but only in the comfort of your armchair), because the good guys are flawed and the bad guys have redeeming qualities.
“I think he is an excellent writer. He makes everything so real. Areas, locations, crimes. He ain’t exaggerating, y’know,” says Childs. “The only problem is he doesn’t really ever have women detectives in his books.” With that last statement, she gains entry to a very exclusive club: those who have a critical word to say about Elmore Leonard. By contrast, the list of his admirers stretches across all of American society, including the Nobel laureate Saul Bellow who is said to have several Leonards on his shelf.
Time magazine has described him as the “Dickens of Detroit”, suggesting that he is perhaps the closest there is to a “national writer of America”. (This in a country which can boast Bellow, John Updike, Norman Mailer and Ford Madox Ford.) Martin Amis, when he was writing brilliant journalism rather than pastiche Elmore Leonard novels, once described the American as “a literary genius who writes re-readable thrillers”.
Meanwhile, the librarian at a prison in Connecticut wrote to Leonard that “while you ain’t caught on with the crack and cocaine heads, you have got a following amongst the heroin crowd”. And in a Florida university there is a gentleman professor writing a book about the “patterns of imagery” in his books.
Leonard affects indifference at all this attention – “Patterns of imagery? What’s he talking about?” – but friends say he is quietly and rightly thrilled.
Last and most lucratively, Hollywood loves Elmore Leonard. To date, he has written 35 novels. All but two have either been bought outright, optioned or turned into a movie. Out of Sight, a $60-million film starring George Clooney of his last but one book, is released in the United States this month. ABC Television is about to begin showing a 10- part series of Maximum Bob, based on Leonard’s novel about a skirt-chasing Florida judge. Quentin Tarantino has already made Jackie Brown (based on Rum Punch) and has bought the rights to three more Leonard books. The Coen Brothers are currently writing the screenplay of Cuba Libre, Leonard’s new novel set in the Spanish- American war of the last century.
“Elmore has this ability to write books that seem like treatments for movies,” says Walter Mirisch, legendary producer of The Magnificent Seven and West Side Story and the proud possessor of the film rights for Leonard’s novel, LaBrava. “That’s why he’s so popular here.” There is another reason: Barry Sonnenfeld’s 1995 film version of Leonard’s satire on Hollywood, Get Shorty, was a big critical success. It made more than $200-million.
The 359-page manuscript of Leonard’s latest (unpublished) work, Be Cool, has just thumped on to the desks of studio executives. The book tells the story of what happens when Chilli Palmer, the loan shark-turned movie producer in Get Shorty, joins the music industry as the manager of a band fronted by a female singer recruited from a Spice Girls tribute group. (Yes, Leonard can name the Spice Girls; his favourite is Posh.) Those who have read the book describe it as his best and funniest. Negotiations with the studios have started, with the Leonard manuscript cast as the object of desire. This time it is the bags of money that are doing the chasing: the figure being bandied around is $5-million plus.
In the flesh, Leonard looks cool in the burning Detroit sun, dressed in khaki shorts, a white Discus Athletic t-shirt and a pair of greying Reebok trainers that have caught the fashion wave second time round. The brown skin on his neck is beginning to hang a little, turkey fashion. The voice is a mid- range, midwestern drawl.
“These figures,” he says, lifting his hand to pluck fruit from an invisible tree. “Nothing to do with reality.” As you might expect from such a stylish writer, studied cool is Leonard’s stock demeanour. He is friendly and forever wandering off into his vast home in the northern suburbs of Detroit to search for dog-eared magazines that will piece together his early literary career. But Leonard himself doesn’t give much away. Read through cuttings of his interviews and it’s clear he has planed down the story of his life and work. Anecdotes are re-cycled down the years (the prison librarian’s letter made its first appearance in a 1991 BBC documentary). Fresh information has to be chiselled out.
Perhaps he no longer feels he needs to give too much away. Why should he? He’s 72, rich beyond any writer’s dreams, and has Martin Amis licking his boots. Or perhaps it is because he is “shy” and “reserved”. Both adjectives are frequently used by friends to describe Leonard, along with “droll”, “hysterically funny”, “loyal” and “a very social person”. Everyone speaks in admiration about his Stakhanovite work ethic (nine to five, six/seven days a week, four pages a day, one book every year).
Then there is his ability to turn the mundane anecdote told over the dinner party table into racy prose. “He’s the greatest listener I’ve ever come across,” says Balthazar Korab, the renowned architectural photographer who turns up as a Hungarian anarchist in Freaky Deaky.
Leonard’s sister, Margaret Maday, says he was “a wonderful little boy, lively, intelligent, always interested in what was going on around him and always telling stories. I had a wonderful relationship with my brother. I used to read to him all the time.” It appears to have been a Waltons- esque existence. The two Leonard children were shielded from the worst effects of the Depression by their father’s job as an executive with General Motors. The family lived in cities all over – Dallas, Oklahoma, Memphis – before finally settling in Detroit in 1934. Elmore was nine. He has a blown-up picture taken around that time showing him wearing an over-sized white cap and pointing his finger like a gun. “That was around the time of Bonnie and Clyde, Pretty Boy Floyd and John Dillinger – I think that’s where I got my interest in gangsters,” he says.
He certainly didn’t get it at the University of Detroit High School, a strict, Jesuit-run establishment in the north-west of the city where middle-class Catholics sent their children.
Leonard was bright enough to be accepted for university but World War II got in the way. Bad eyesight consigned him to the Construction Battalion – the SeaBees – as a store manager. He spent most of his time on a South Pacific island dishing out beer to combat troops.
Back from the war, he enrolled at the University of Detroit, majoring in English. It was only then that he started to show some signs of literary promise. He entered a couple of short-story competitions, finishing in the top 10 in one and second in the other. “I only entered because the teacher said you would get an automatic `B’ if you did.” He already had a job at a Detroit-based advertising agency called Campbell-Ewald when he graduated in 1950. By then, he’d decided he wanted to make his living from writing.
“I think discovering Ernest Hemingway was a big moment in Elmore’s life,” says his long- time friend and attorney, Bill Martz. “He loved the dialogue, y’know. He would take one of Hemingway’s books and write his own story the way Hemingway might do it. Once he made his mind up about being a writer, he was very methodical about it, figuring out how he could break through, about what kind of writing would sell. He had a commercial approach to writing.”
Leonard acknowledges the debt. “Sure, I’d open For Whom the Bell Tolls anywhere and start reading for inspiration. I loved his work – the short dialogue, all that white space, his constructions, his use of participles. I realised that I didn’t share his attitude. He took himself too seriously. I didn’t.”
Westerns were what sold in the early 1950s so that was what Leonard wrote. His earliest attempts were rejected by the dime western magazines. “I decided I’d better stop making it up and find out what cowboys actually wore, what Apaches wore, what a canyon really looked like. I subscribed to the Arizona Highways Magazine. If I needed a canyon, there it was – it was like being there.”
The drive for authenticity still plays a very important part in his fiction. He has his own full-time researcher, Greg Sutter, a 47-year- old gumshoe with the vocabulary of a Goodfella. Sutter is devoted in equal measure to his boss’s writing and surf bands. He considers himself to have the world’s No 1 job, hanging around on the fringe of seedy America. He has been to Cuba (for Cuba Libre), Atlantic City (for Glitz), Florida (Riding the Rap and Out of Sight). He set up home in Los Angeles last year to research Be Cool. “Elmore wants everything in his books to be right. He wants a sense of realism about them,” Sutter says.
Leonard’s first published work of fiction, a short story entitled Trail of the Apache, appeared in Argosy magazine in December 1951. Within days, he was contacted by an agent and within a couple of months she had sold another five short stories to the pulp magazines. “As fast as I could write ’em, she sold ’em.” He wrote his first novel every morning between 5 to 7am before going to work at Campbell-Ewald, where he wrote advertising copy for Chevy Trucks.
It was not a happy time. “It was hard to get passionate about a Chevy truck,” he says. “But I had to stay at the company for seven years to get my profit share.” The Bounty Hunters was published in 1953. Four more novels and 30 short stories appeared over the next seven years. Two of the stories were made into movies.
Leonard was paid $5 000 for the film rights to The Tall T and the same for 3.10 to Yuma, basically a small-town siege movie starring Glenn Ford and Van Heflin, released in 1957. This was nowhere near enough money to enable him to become a full-time writer. His son Peter remembers early morning visits to the damp basement of the family home where he would find his father behind his desk, surrounded by discarded balls of yellow paper. “I must have been about 10 years old when the two of us were standing in the kitchen and he said to me, `that’s it, I’m going to make my run for it’,” he says.
This was 1960. Leonard had just finished writing Hombre, another kind of siege story given an extra dimension by its shrewd observation of race prejudice. The book was later chosen by the Western Writers of America as one of the 25 best westerns ever written. At that time in 1960 Leonard couldn’t sell it, the market was saturated. There were 30 western series running on television – all of them terrible, according to Leonard. He managed to find a buyer a year later but his price was dropping, $1 250. It was his last published work for five years – the least creative period of his life. He started drinking heavily.
The Leonards had five children. To pay the rent he wrote scripts of 25-minute educational films at $1 000 a throw. Relief came in 1966 with the sale of the film rights to Hombre for $10 000. The money gave Leonard freedom to write fiction again. This time he used crime instead of the Wild West as his backdrop, again, a purely commercial decision: crime novels were big in the late Sixties.
His next book, The Big Bounce, was passed to the legendary Hollywood agent HW Swanson, whose clients included Hemingway, F Scott Fitzgerald and Raymond Chandler. “He called me a couple of days later and said `Kiddo, did you write this’. I said I did. He said, `Kiddo, I’m going to make you rich.’ ” The Big Bounce was rejected 84 times. “I read it again and realised it needed a plot,” Leonard says, as if this was a mere oversight for a novelist. In the end it sold for six figures.
The next decade saw his reputation soar. His tight, dialogue-driven prose, free of metaphor or simile, caught the eye of critics, who began to compare him favourably with Chandler and Dashiell Hammett. His marriage to Beverly began to fall apart, partly because of his prodigious work rate, though mostly because of his drinking. He joined Alcoholics Anonymous and, like most AA members, the date of his “last drink” is committed to memory – 9am, January 24 1977.
Two years later, divorced from Beverly, he married a neighbour, Joan Shephard, whom friends describe as the greatest influence on his life. She was stronger than Leonard, his intellectual equal. Unlike Beverly, she took a keen interest in his work. She read his manuscripts, suggested changes, urged him to develop his female characters into more than ornaments. The result was a spell-binding series of books: City Primeval, Split Images, LaBrava, Stick.
Joan died suddenly from cancer in 1993. A few months later he married Christine, a 49-year- old master gardener who caught his eye when he was gazing through the study window. He liked the way she hung her clippers from her belt. “He was devastated about Joan,” says one friend, “But the thing is, Elmore doesn’t like to be alone.”
He didn’t make an appearance in the best- seller lists until 1985, with Glitz, but by then his popularity amongst movie executives had never been greater.
If Hollywood was ever brought up on a charge of murder, the prosecution would open with the case of Elmore Leonard’s collected works. Get Shorty was a success, critically, artistically and financially. The jury is split on Jackie Brown. As for the rest? Most of them have been terrible, says one critic. “Stick? Terrible. The Big Bounce? I left after 15 minutes. ’52 Pick-Up had some good bits but overall, not very good.” That critic is Elmore Leonard, who has long been immune to the fact that the movie industry’s enthusiasm for his books is in inverse proportion to its ability to make decent movies from them.
“They like my books because they are easy to read in scenes, full of characters and dialogue. They love dialogue. But you take a 350-page manuscript and turn it into a 120-page screenplay and most of the good stuff will be gone. Then they always want to change things – why pay a million dollars for something then change it?”
Leonard shrugs. “What’s the point in worrying? It’s only a movie.” Such insouciance in a writer is admirable, even when it is shored up with the knowledge that the cheque won’t bounce if the movie stiffs. But it’s a fascinating question: if you pay $1-million for a story why on earth would you change it?
“What proportion of movies that are made do any good?” says Walter Mirisch. “Five per cent. If you take the number of Elmore’s stories that have been made into movies and then turned out to be successful he’s got about the same strike rate as anyone else.” One screenwriter, who preferred to remain anonymous, said: “No plot. His books don’t have stories and in the movies you need a story.”
He is right in that Leonard’s books have no plot when he sits down to write them. He starts with a character and sees where it takes him. Be Cool begins with Chilli Palmer having lunch with a music industry executive. The guy gets shot. “Who shot him? I got 90 000 words to find that out,” says Leonard. “If you don’t know what’s going to happen next, better things happen.” In the hands of a less relaxed or less-established writer, this method leads to abandoned manuscripts and a rapidly curtailed career.
For a spell in the late Eighties and early Nineties Leonard’s reputation in Hollywood dipped. Executives still bought his stories but only after they appeared on the best- seller list, or received raves in the New York Times books pages. His price fell to $25 000 to $50 000 for an option. A new breed of executive considered Leonard to be yesterday’s man. Until Get Shorty.
Ironically, Barry Sonnenfield’s adaptation stuck more rigidly to Leonard’s original story than any previous film versions of his work. It finally proved that his books could be made into good movies, that it was more a question of touch and humour rather than plot, according to Michael Siegel. “The film premiered at Mann’s Chinese Theatre the day after Elmore’s birthday,” Siegel says. “When it ended he leaned over to me and said in his sweetest, most modest way, `I hot!’.” Typical Elmore Leonard. Even when he’s hot he’s cool.
Cuba Libre will be available in South Africa in August