Leaving Out What Will Be Skipped
By DAVID CARR

DETROIT, May 9 - Elmore Leonard is about talked out. The stories about the craft of America's premier crime novelist have become clichés waiting their turn.

So why not get the hooptedoodle, as Mr. Leonard calls "the part that readers tend to skip," out of the way? He writes seven days a week in the living room of a nice house in the suburbs here with a No. 5 Pilot Pen on unlined yellow paper. He does not use e-mail or a computer. He types the handwritten pages on an I.B.M. Selectric, which occasionally breaks down from daily exertion.

"There's one name in the phonebook who repairs typewriters," Mr. Leonard said, adding, "he says he can live on $6,000 a year. He lives in a trailer park."

That is all he says about the typewriter guy, but with those spare details, the typewriter guy comes alive in the room, full-blown.

That economy and precision have enabled a career that has lasted more than 50 years. One day ran into the next, one book became another, and now Mr. Leonard is a nearly 80-year-old man who has just written his 40th book.

Even though writing comes reflexively to him, there is nothing automatic or tossed off in his books, which use the dyad of character and dialogue to compose mini-epics on human folly, stripped of artifice and adjectives. "The Hot Kid," a robbers-and-lawmen tale set during Prohibition, will be released this week and is getting plenty of love from the critics. Charles McGrath of The New York Times called Mr. Leonard's books "ruthlessly efficient entertainment machines." Writing in The Boston Globe, Stephen King said, "the old guy's still got plenty of bite."

But not in person. To say that Mr. Leonard lacks pretension does not quite get it. He is scary normal, friendly in an absent way. This great American author, one of the best dialogue writers ever, lets people at charity auctions bid for the right to name his characters; Ed Hagenlocker, a "hard-shell Baptist" and cotton farmer in "The Hot Kid," got his name that way. "Why not help them out?" he said.

A former writer of ads and industrial films, "Dutch," as his pals call him, published his first novel, "The Bounty Hunters," a half-century ago. Switching from westerns to crime, he became a not-so-overnight sensation with the publication of "Glitz" in 1985. Mr. Leonard has written many best sellers, including "Mr. Paradise," "Be Cool," "Get Shorty" and "Rum Punch."

If those titles sound familiar to even nonreaders, it is because many of them have been made into movies - Hollywood producers pull up to the curb almost every time he writes, and "The Hot Kid," with its gun molls, strutting lawmen and so-dumb-they-are-smart hoods will be no exception. Mr. Leonard has won the Grand Master Award of the Mystery Writers of America, but he is no big fan of Hammett and Chandler, preferring the lean-and-mean gait of Hemingway and Steinbeck. Mr. Leonard does not think what he does is very complicated.

"The first part moves along O.K., and then I have to think about the second part, because the second part keeps it going," he said. "And then you've got to get to some new things, say around page 250. There is always those surprises near the end."

He wears jeans, sandals and a Detroit Pistons shirt. When he writes, he looks out on a tarp-covered pool and a tennis court beyond. The place smells of pot roast, being looked after by Christine, his wife of a dozen years. He lives in Bloomfield Village, 20 miles north of the city that has supplied endless grit and grist for his stories. His neighborhood has more in common with a John Cheever novel than one of Mr. Leonard's wiseguy librettos.

His longtime researcher, Gregg Sutter, did the grimy version of the Dutch Leonard tour earlier that day. There was a drive past 1300 Beaubien, a cop shop where the fifth floor is occupied by the homicide division, the holiest of holies and a pivot point for a lot of Mr. Leonard's books. There is the Greek joint down the street with the ouzo and the flaming cheese, where cops went to get hammered after their shifts. Mr. Sutter stopped in front of a dilapidated apartment building in the shadow of the now empty Tiger Stadium. It was the site of a triple homicide, Chaldean money guys ripped off by and then killed by drug dealers. Mr. Sutter, who lives in Los Angeles, but happened to be in town, saw it on the news and went right over. He called Mr. Leonard from the scene.

"We got a triple," he told Mr. Leonard. The murders, which involved a chainsaw, body parts and a fire to cover up the crime, appeared in "Mr. Paradise," published last year. But Mr. Leonard has seen and heard plenty in his time, so he can sit in a living-room office and create all sorts of mayhem.

The room includes none of the trophies that men of accomplishment acquire and no grip-and-grin portraits of him with the famous and infamous people he has known. There is just a picture of his agent, H. N. Swanson, who called him up after his first book and said, "Kiddo, I'm going to make you rich." Eighty-four rejections followed, but the now-departed Mr. Swanson ended up being right.

Mr. Leonard seemed genuinely surprised that "The Hot Kid" had the press in a tizzy. "I kind of thought of it as one of my quieter books," he said. Part of the reason that "The Hot Kid" works is that it manages to bookend his career in one crisp little novel. The men, both bad guys and good, who ramble through Tulsa and Kansas City in the 1920's and 30's are part gangster and part gunslinger. As such, they are hybrids, embodying his early career as a western writer and his later critically acclaimed run as a crime novelist. He is happy for the good reviews but the approbation is a little beside the point.

"I write them to find out what happens," he said of his novels. "I don't write for anybody else."

Characters serve as can-openers on plots for Mr. Leonard. Once conceived, they become his masters, shoving him from one scene to the next, until the book ends, usually at about 300 pages.

Critics aside, "The Hot Kid" came up short. Two hundred and eighty pages.

"I thought it should be longer than 280," he said, sitting in one of the chairs in front of his desk. "So I said reset it with one or two lines less per page and make it work. And it came out to 312."

Mr. Leonard was less able to count when it came to his drinks, so he has been sober since 1977. At the end of the day, he enjoys a nonalcoholic beer and a single cigarette. He used to chain-smoke, but for the first time in his life, he seems to be aging with a bit of high blood pressure and arterial fibrillation.

"I'm turning into an old man all of a sudden," he said. "And I've got hearing aids, but they don't do much good. I have trouble hearing my wife."

His wife, picking at the daffodils in the front of the house, said, "Elmore always says you have to do what you love; otherwise, what's the point?"

But Mr. Leonard hates that he now takes pills. "I don't want to live forever," he said, having his daily smoke out by the pool. "What am I gonna do, write another book?"

He knows the answer is yes.



Leaving Out What Will Be Skipped - New York Times