As it has for most booklovers, both readers and writers, this week has been a sad one for me. We lost Elmore Leonard at 87 this week, for my money the greatest crime novelist of our time. Beyond his greatness as a writer, Dutch was a good man and a good friend. I had not seen him in a few years, and I certainly would not claim any special bond or connection. Many others were much closer to Elmore. But there is also a sense in which he was a special friend to all writers, with his terrific 10 Rules of Writing and, perhaps even more so, as a model of the devoted, unpretentious and wonderfully productive artist and craftsman.
Actually, I had thought about getting in touch recently, especially after a reviewer, whose taste and judgment I admire, wrote this about The Car Bomb and Admission of Guilt, the first two novels in my new trilogy set in Detroit: “If you like Elmore Leonard, you’ll love these books.” Of course, the words came as an unexpected gift, even though I didn’t believe for a second in the validity of any such comparison.
But I held off calling or putting a note in the mail when I heard through his long-time researcher and assistant Greg Sutter that Dutch, who would have been 88 in October, was intensely focused on finishing the current novel in progress. There was no way I was going to intrude or lay even a small, social burden on his precious time.
Now he’s gone. And like so many others, I have a pain in my heart thinking about Elmore falling to that stroke before he could put the finishing touches to what was going to be novel number 47.
My history with Dutch was limited to only a handful of small events and exchanges, but I thought I’d briefly recount them here for whatever interest they might hold for others and perhaps to make myself feel just a little better by adding a tiny bit to the marvelous collective memory that envelops him now.
So twice he gave me an intro to his agent-at-the-time. The first, back in the early ’90s, was an old guy in Hollywood, the one who followed H. N. Swanson, the legendary “Swanie,” who helped make Elmore Leonard both rich and famous. I worked with that fellow for a while, until I sent him part of an early version of The Car Bomb, and he told me he couldn’t sell anything featuring a local TV anchor.
And then some 20 years later Dutch kindly suggested his big time guy in NYC. That second agent and I never got anything going after he expressed no interest in dealing with the novel I ended up publishing last year, The Obsession.
I also worked with Dutch on a couple of occasions when I was making TV specials. Two decades ago I wrote and produced a one-hour documentary on Detroit’s main artery, Woodward Avenue, it’s heartline running north from the river 25 miles all the way to Pontiac. Arrayed along the way was “every reason for hope and despair in urban America,” if I remember the tagline correctly.
It was Dutch’s favorite avenue, featured in more than one of his Detroit-based novels, and he readily agreed to play a role in the story I was telling. First, we recorded him reading a passage from one of those novels, and then as darkness fell in the city’s New Center area, we shot as he walked the empty sidewalk past chained and boarded up storefronts. Finally, the shot pulled back wide to show how deserted the whole place was, and there at the top of the shot was the illuminated General Motors sign atop the giant company’s headquarters a few blocks away.
Later, after the shoot, when I got back to my car parked on Woodward, I found a window smashed and the radio gone. Of course, we shot the looted car, and that image made the perfect capstone to the sequence that married Elmore’s read and his walk.
Then five years ago I finally got the chance to do a piece I had been wanting to produce for decades, a TV bio sketch of the “Dickens of Detroit.” This time we shot for a couple of days with Dutch, including a lengthy interview at his home in Bloomfield Township, about 15 minutes from where I live. Heading for his 82nd birthday, he was thin and a bit frail but still very lively and as sharp as ever. He could not have been more forthcoming and generous with us.
That video bio sketch is the one on this website. The show was part of a series called “World Class Detroiters,” and, of course, Dutch was the most appropriate subject we ever presented. Minus the commercials, the piece was about 22 minutes, and so I struggled mightily to cram in as much of Elmore, his life and story, as possible. In doing so, I could only use brief snippets from an interview that went on for almost an hour and a half. It was conducted by the show’s on-camera host and my good friend, Emery King, a former NBC White House correspondent, working from a long list of my questions.
A few days ago, after Elmore’s passing, I dug out of my computer a transcript of the full interview, something only a handful of folks have ever seen. I read through it and marveled again at how much Dutch had given us. And I quickly decided to see if I could present it in a fashion that would give others the pleasure of an expansive Elmore talking about his life and work. What follows is just a small portion of the interview. If you find interest and value in it, I’ll include more here on my blog and perhaps also find a place to present the whole thing.
So here’s Elmore Leonard talking about why he used two of his favorite settings, the appeal and essence of his stories, and how to rob a bank.
Emery: Two of your favorite settings are Detroit and the Atlantic coast of Florida. Why those two settings and is there a connection?
Elmore: Because I’ve lived in both. Because I’ve lived in Detroit since 1934 and remember a lot about Detroit. And that Atlantic coast of Florida because we have a place there. I bought a motel for my mother back in I guess the ’70s. It only had three units in it, but it gave her something to do. And then we would go down and stay with her. Now we’ve got a place in North Palm Beach, but we don’t stay there that long, never more than two weeks, once or twice a year, because I’d rather be here. I mean, even in the winter. I like the winter. I like the seasons.
Emery: Why do you think your readers are so interested and drawn into these two worlds of cops and criminals, worlds that most people wouldn’t want to be a part of?
Elmore: No, I think they’re drawn into crime and mysteries because these stories always have a beginning, a middle, and an end, and the endings are always satisfying to the readers. They know that the good guys are going to win in the end. I think that’s the main reason. Because you look down the New York Times list, and they’re all crime or mysteries.
Emery: Your major characters are usually trying to outthink each other one way or another, or outwit each other. Do you see your stories essentially as a battle between good and evil?
Elmore: I suppose, when you get right down to it, if I were to analyze my stories. But for that matter, all stories are about good and evil. I mean, there are degrees of evil and good, but I think all stories are asking, what’s the opposition? What are we dealing with here?
Emery: Do you analyze your stories?
Elmore: No, never.
Emery: Why?
Elmore: Because I’m not interested in analyzing them. I don’t know what the theme is, for example. When the screenwriter, Scott Frank, who has written two of mine—Get Shorty and Out of Sight—takes on the job, he’ll ask me, he says, “Well, what’s the theme?” I said, “I don’t know. I have no idea.” So, he’ll read the book, and then he tells me what the theme is, which is always impressive. “Really?” So he feels he needs to know what the theme is in order to write a screenplay.
Emery: About your bad guys, you’ve said this: “I don’t think of them as bad guys. I just think of them as normal people who get up in the morning and wonder what they’re going to have for breakfast. And they sneeze and they wonder if they should call their mother and then they rob a bank.”
Elmore: Yeah. That’s really most of them. I mean, that’s the way it is, you know. There’s a guy in the paper this morning who robbed a bank. He had been let go from his job, and he robbed a bank. And the prosecutor was going to give him less than a year. Now he’s got a job offer, and people feel sorry for him. Bank robbery is attractive to people. Willy Sutton said, “That’s where the money is.” That’s why he robbed banks. But all you’ve got to do is ask for the money, and the teller will give you the money, and then you walk out. They’ll give you the money if you’re convincing enough. There was one guy, the FBI called him, ah, who is that comedian who never got any respect?
Emery: Rodney Dangerfield.
Elmore: Rodney Dangerfield. They called him “the Rodney Dangerfield bank robber,” because he would go in and ask for the money, and they wouldn’t give it to him. Until, finally, he got a gun and went in. But if you go in with a gun, then you’re facing a lot of time, if you’re arrested. So it’s best just to be nice and hand the teller a note and hope that she’s frightened enough to give you the money. Most of them get $2,000 or less. They’ll get whatever is on the top of the open drawer, there in those little sections—tens, twenties, fifties, and one hundreds. But you don’t want to get handed the dye pack. When I first began researching bank robberies, I had a time getting a bank to show me a dye pack. Finally, one of them did, and it is triggered, the mechanism goes off, as you’re going out the door, and there’s something in the door frame that triggers the dye pack and then, phew, you’re covered with red or whatever color dye. And there’s just money on the outside of the pack. You know, inside is what makes it erupt. I had a friend in Florida, a judge, who had a guy who was up for breaking his probation by robbing a bank. So, he did four years, and then he came out and he hoped that having done the four years would suffice for breaking the probation. And the judge said, “Yeah. It’s okay. But how much did you get in the bank robbery?” And the guy said, “$2600.” He said, “But I’m going out and the dye pack went off. And so I had all this red dye, and then I went home, and I tried to wash the money. And I was trying to pass these pink twenties, and they caught up with me.”
So there you have just a taste. If you’d like more of this great writer and wonderful man talking about his life and his craft, just let me know.
