Being Cool: The Work of Elmore Leonard

Preface

preface I first became interested in Elmore Leonard because I like to read crime fiction and I’m originally from Detroit. It wasn’t until I was working as an English professor in Boston, married with family, that a friend told me to read Swag. From the first page, I regretted the delay. What hooked me almost instantly was Leonard’s sense of place. This was Detroit just as I had left it: crowded, dirty, parochial, demographically diverse, built up and boarded up, spread out and burned out—not for tourists. Like so many other readers from places other than the Motor City, however, I was also captivated by the Leonard sound, which means the sound of his characters: the curt backhands of their conversations, their compulsive storytelling, the trains of ragged thoughts muttering along in their heads. This was some writing. But decades had to pass and changes in my academic life had to happen before I had the opportunity to try explaining, in my own writing, what made Leonard’s so good. Several years ago I coedited an anthology of essays on crime fiction, to which I contributed a piece on Elmore Leonard (Rzepka, “Elmore Leonard, 1925–”). It crystallized for me a recurrent pattern in his work—the master-apprentice relationship—that invited closer attention. It also emboldened me to contact Leonard to ask questions about his early life, his education, and his work habits that seemed crucial to animating this scarecrow of an idea. The result was several interviews comprising some twelve hours of recorded conversation. They form the core of this book. I wrote Being Cool for three reasons: first, to say something significant about an important writer largely neglected by the academy, even by those knowledgeable in popular genres like crime and detection; second, in doing so, to persuade my colleagues that this writer should be neglected no longer. Leonard has been the subject of three brief literary biographies (Challen’s is best on the viii Preface details of Leonard’s book and movie deals, Devlin’s and Geherin’s on literary influences and textual analysis), along with about a dozen scholarly essays and scores of interviews, reviews, and magazine articles. Being Cool is the first booklength study to pursue a single theme throughout Leonard’s work, and I hope it will inspire more. There is so much remaining to be done: on the character of the artist and the writer in his fiction; on his semi-autobiographical trilogy, The Hot Kid, Comfort to the Enemy, and Up in Honey’s Room; on other outstanding novels treated cursorily here for lack of space, such as Freaky Deaky, one of Leonard’s personal favorites, or Get Shorty, his first meta-fiction; on how speci fic technologies of movie production, marketing, and viewing and their histories have affected his writing style, as well as on their representation in his work; on his use of costume and role-playing. I could go on. The first four interviews I conducted with Leonard, currently posted on the Crimeculture website (www.crimeculture.com/?page_id=3435), run to nearly thirty-nine thousand words. Being Cool comes nowhere near mining their full potential. Thirteen years ago, James Devlin felt obliged to defend Leonard’s status as a “serious” writer (128–33). That debate is over. Admirers now include Martin Amis, Walker Percy, Ann Beattie, and former poet laureate Robert Pinsky. Saul Bellow was a fan (Amis 1), and Leonard has even been mentioned in the same breath as “experimental writers” like Pirandello, Calvino, Robbe-Grillet, Borges, and Nabokov (Grella 36). Both the topical reach of his work and the span of his career and canon are enormous: six decades, dozens of short stories, and forty- five novels, not to mention movies, screenplays, and televised versions of his writings. Space limitations forbid a close examination of the latter body of work here, but such artificial restrictions also offer certain advantages, allowing the contours of his stylistic experimentation and his evolving thematic concerns to emerge more clearly in the one medium over which he has exercised total control. My third aim was to enhance the reading experience of the nonacademic Elmore Leonard fan. If I’ve failed in the attempt, please blame me, not the critics and theorists I cite. Similarly, I take sole responsibility for any errors, factual or otherwise. Hopefully, they will incite readers to write more books and essays about Leonard to set the record straight. In...