Elmore Leonard.
With Leonard’s reputation as a Western author growing, [Detroit-based advertising agency] Campbell-Ewald saw fit to match Leonard with their truck division, writing copy geared toward the same rough-and-tumble demographic that, essentially, would read like a Western paperback. “Truck ads I had an easier time with,” he later admitted. “You could be straightforward with a truck . . . I’ve never been any good at similes and metaphors.” Much like his father before him, Leonard was soon sent traveling around the country for company “field work,” gathering customer testimonials from satisfied truckers. “I would call on the Chevrolet dealer, who would then introduce me to a truck owner who had some fantastic story to tell about his trucks,” he would later claim, prompting the owner to “say something colloquial,” in the hopes of shaking loose some down-home phrases to tinker with. However, Leonard’s favorite–“You don’t wear that sonofabitch out, you just get tired of looking at it and buy a new one”–proved too gritty for Chevy.
— from Cooler than Cool: The Life and Work of Elmore Leonard, by C. M. Kushins.
As the above quote illustrates, this is an interesting, well-researched, and well-written biography, much better than the biography of John D. Macdonald that we discussed a few years ago. Kushins begins with a brisk and effective overview of Leonard’s childhood and then moves quickly into the career, bouncing between the style and themes of Leonard’s stories and books; the details of writing schedule, agents, and contracts; and enough of his activities outside of the writing to give a sense of how his life fit together. Thanks to Leonard’s long and stable career, Kushins is also able to spread the details uniformly through the decades, unlike for example any biography of J. D. Salinger, which won’t have much to say for the final decades of that writer’s life.
The main weakness of Kushins’s book for me is that it doesn’t talk so much about the novels themselves. There’s a lot on how they were written and on their general themes (good guys and bad guys, the roles of the women characters, religious themes, some other things) and on their style (notably, Leonard’s move from Westerns to crime capers and his ear for dialogue), and on movie adaptations and helpful literary agents and how he did his research and where many of the character names came from and all sorts of fascinating things–overall I enjoyed the biography and I recommend it–, but I would’ve liked to see more actual literary criticism, some detailed discussions of the novels and what made them work, as well as, sometimes, what didn’t.
I first learned of Elmore Leonard around 1981, it must have been from a book review in the Washington Post. Phil and I read a bunch of his books with pleasure–my favorite is Swag, which I actually read a few years later–and I also learned about George V. Higgins, an author to whom Leonard was often compared. Over the years, I’ve read almost everything by Higgins that I could find.
Elmore Leonard vs. George V. Higgins . . . what to say? Leonard had a long and successful career, whereas Higgins started at the top and worked his way down. And on a sentence-by-sentence level, Leonard was a better writer: Higgins had a lot of clunky sentences and was notorious for not rewriting. But I think that, of the two, Higgins was more of an artist. There’s something special about Higgins that makes me really love his writing, despite the flaws. Leonard was great too–I think Swag is a close-to-perfect crime novel–but, I don’t know, I don’t have the same feeling of being transported. I want to say that Leonard is Wings and Higgins is the Velvet Underground . . . no, that’s not quite right . . .
What else? Both Leonard and Higgins wrote about loquacious lowlifes. Leonard wrote with more affection, Higgins with more cynicism, but both had a habit of playing favorites with their characters, liking some and finding others irritating. Which can lead to some absolutely wonderful things, such as the pitch-perfect final line of Swag.
The other thing is . . . oddly enough, neither Leonard nor Higgins had great plots, or great characters. A crime novel needs a plot, and both authors’ plots were serviceable, often excellent in the details (for example, the robberies in Swag and The Friends of Eddie Coyle), but for both authors the plots weren’t much more than vehicles to allow for stunning set-pieces of dialogue and the development of themes of friendship, betrayal, etc. As to the characters: it might seem odd to describe these authors’ characters as empty, given that they were portrayed by great actors in memorable films, but . . . ok, let me put this more carefully . . . I wouldn’t say the main characters in their books are one-dimensional, but rather that they are blank. Not completely blank, of course–they have characteristics–and they have a lot more personality than the killers in Agatha Christie books–but not what I’d call memorable characters.
If it’s not the plots, and it’s not the characters, then what are we reading Leonard and Higgins for? The juicy dialogue, sure, but also the situations. Swag doesn’t have an elaborate plot, but the setup of these two criminals with rules for robbery, that’s great. Similarly with The Switch: it’s a great setup. Or The Digger’s Game, with all the events spooling out with a sense of inevitability. I guess you could label all of this as “plot,” but these are not cool plots in the manner of The ABC Murders.
OK, so here you have it: Leonard and Higgins place real (if sometimes blurrily-defined) people into compelling situations, and they make it all run on sharp, hilarious, compelling dialogue. This is actually very cinematic! It’s the setup more than the plot, but the setup only works because you’re throwing (some version of) real people into it.
And why do I find Higgins more compelling than Leonard? Because with Higgins the stakes are higher. Not just that it’s life and death–lots of bodies hit the floor with Leonard too–but, even in the presence of humor, Higgins’s stories are ultimately more serious.
OK, back to the Kushins book, which, again, I like a lot. I’m just bummed that he doesn’t engage with Leonard’s writing, even to the extent that I do above, or to the extent that those book reviewers did, 45 years ago. I’m not saying that Kushins has to say that Leonard isn’t as good as Higgins–he’s a Leonard fan, and I’d expect him to make the case for the author–; I’d just like some discussion of the novels themselves along with all the fascinating details of how they were constructed.
I often enjoy literary biographies and I appreciate that new ones keep being published, given that they must not sell a lot of copies! That said, it seems likely that Elmore Leonard will outlast some other great once-bestselling authors. Younger readers still appreciate his books, at least for now. Higgins, though, unfortunately I think he has no chance. He’s an innovator and I don’t think he’ll ever be completely forgotten, but I think his books are a little too hard to read to ever sustain a revival.
Maybe it helps to write in genre. Readers of crime and science fiction seem loyal to past bestsellers in a way that we don’t always see with mainstream literature.
P.S. I also recommend this review by J. Robert Lennon of a few of Leonard’s books. I don’t agree with everything Lennon says, but that’s fine; it’s what I was looking for, which is a serious engagement with what makes Leonard’s books work. My main disagreement with that review is that Lennon says that Leonard’s strength is creating memorable characters, whereas I think that, as with many crime and suspense novelists, what Leonard does best is to create memorable situations and then work out their logical implications.