Elmore Leonard: Bandwagon-jumping bestseller or musical dialogue feller? (Update -- RIP, August 2013)

I think he's a tremendous creator of characters and writer of dialogue. He's not as flawlessly naturalistic in his dialogue as Higgins (nor does he use it nearly as much as the main plot driver, though still more than almost anyone else), but I find his dialogue funnier and more energetic. His plotting is sometimes a bit lacking, but I really like him a lot - he is always at the very least enjoyable and never boring.

i'm reading la brava now.

s/d?

I've never read his story, but the very fine original film version of 3:10 to Yuma (1957) is out on DVD today, just before the Crowe-Bale remake.

I really strongly dislike the poster for 3:10 to Yuma.

which? it's been changed.

the one with one of the leads shown from the back. his pants are too flared and I always think it's a woman when I first look at it.

just finished 'road dogs', which is really good and an unexpected sequel to three novels (feat. jack foley from 'out of sight', cundo rey from 'labrava', and dawn navarro from 'riding the rap.') dude is amazing imo.

http://www.vice.com/read/elmore-leonard-is-the-man-894-v16n6

also this interview is good and this bit is pretty funny:

then there’s the character of Danialle, when Jack and Dawn are supposed to be running this con on her. I expected that to be a long, suspenseful thread through the entire book but, bang, a few pages later you have her saying that she knew it was all a hoax and that she didn’t mind.

That character is named Danialle Karmanos because her husband paid $40,000 in an auction for me to use his wife’s name. I’ve been doing that for I don’t know how many books—fund-raising events where they’ll have an auction at different schools: “Do you want to be in my next book?”

Oh, so Danialle Karmanos is named after a real person? That’s funny.

Yeah! Karmanos is a cancer center, a big, big cancer-research and treatment center in Detroit. Her husband wanted to be in the book too, so he got into another auction and only had to pay $5,000 to win. But I gave him a lesser part.

Yeah, that character is a corpse!

He’s dead. [laughs]

Do you let them know what their role in the book is going to be, or do they just find out when it’s released?

I don’t tell anybody anything.

Suffered a stroke earlier this morning and word now going around he's passed on. Haven't seen anything formal yet.

Earlier this MONTH I should say.

Here it is

http://gaw.kr/MyKetu1

in spite of decades of critical adulation and all the movie and TV projects, I think he was underrated ... he did his thing so well for so long it sort of came to seem routine, when it was anything but

from rolling obit thread another obit

Elmore Leonard :(

http://www.detroitnews.com/article/20130820/ENT09/308200051/American-novelist-Elmore-Leonard-has-died?odyssey=mod|breaking|text|FRONTPAGE

― BIG HOOS aka the denigrated boogeyman (BIG HOOS aka the steendriver), Tuesday, August 20, 2013 1:51 PM (17 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Oh nooooooo

Fuuuuuck! That guy was such a gift. I remember reading an interview with I want to say Stephen King where he claimed that every time he finished a book he rewarded himself by reading an Elmore Leonard novel.

I mean, what an incredible, incredibly entertaining writer.

he was one of the absolute best

Wow, he was 87?! That was a sharp 87 year old.

Elmore Leonard's 10 Rules for Writing:

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2010/feb/20/ten-rules-for-writing-fiction-part-one

1 Never open a book with weather. If it's only to create atmosphere, and not a charac­ter's reaction to the weather, you don't want to go on too long. The reader is apt to leaf ahead look­ing for people. There are exceptions. If you happen to be Barry Lopez, who has more ways than an Eskimo to describe ice and snow in his book Arctic Dreams, you can do all the weather reporting you want.

2 Avoid prologues: they can be ­annoying, especially a prologue ­following an introduction that comes after a foreword. But these are ordinarily found in non-fiction. A prologue in a novel is backstory, and you can drop it in anywhere you want. There is a prologue in John Steinbeck's Sweet Thursday, but it's OK because a character in the book makes the point of what my rules are all about. He says: "I like a lot of talk in a book and I don't like to have nobody tell me what the guy that's talking looks like. I want to figure out what he looks like from the way he talks."

3 Never use a verb other than "said" to carry dialogue. The line of dialogue belongs to the character; the verb is the writer sticking his nose in. But "said" is far less intrusive than "grumbled", "gasped", "cautioned", "lied". I once noticed Mary McCarthy ending a line of dialogue with "she asseverated" and had to stop reading and go to the dictionary.

4 Never use an adverb to modify the verb "said" ... he admonished gravely. To use an adverb this way (or almost any way) is a mortal sin. The writer is now exposing himself in earnest, using a word that distracts and can interrupt the rhythm of the exchange. I have a character in one of my books tell how she used to write historical romances "full of rape and adverbs".

5 Keep your exclamation points ­under control. You are allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose. If you have the knack of playing with exclaimers the way Tom Wolfe does, you can throw them in by the handful.

6 Never use the words "suddenly" or "all hell broke loose". This rule doesn't require an explanation. I have noticed that writers who use "suddenly" tend to exercise less control in the application of exclamation points.

7 Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly. Once you start spelling words in dialogue phonetically and loading the page with apos­trophes, you won't be able to stop. Notice the way Annie Proulx captures the flavour of Wyoming voices in her book of short stories Close Range.

8 Avoid detailed descriptions of characters, which Steinbeck covered. In Ernest Hemingway's "Hills Like White Elephants", what do the "Ameri­can and the girl with him" look like? "She had taken off her hat and put it on the table." That's the only reference to a physical description in the story.

9 Don't go into great detail describing places and things, unless you're Margaret Atwood and can paint scenes with language. You don't want descriptions that bring the action, the flow of the story, to a standstill.

10 Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip. Think of what you skip reading a novel: thick paragraphs of prose you can see have too many words in them.

My most important rule is one that sums up the 10: if it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.

NYT obit

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/21/books/elmore-leonard-master-of-crime-fiction-dies-at-87.html?src=twr&_r=0

this thread title sucks! anyway, probably more memorable than 95% of living american "literary" novelists. but we live in a kinda lousy time for american literary novelists. they are superfluous in a way. you are better off reading elmore.

you are better off reading elmore.

Words to live by.

so bummed. but a long life with a lot of books.

and yes this thread title is awful

The man was a workhorse, in the best possible way. The fact that he was so ubiquitous in movies is a testament to the vividness of the characters he created and his writing in general, imo.

I am glad that a dude like Leonard stuck around for so long and gave us so much of his imagination to dig into.

RIP genius

I'd forgotten that I'd read Touch, and that it was one of his. Very droll, as is Walken (acting!) in the movie.

His later books fell away a bit, but still SO MANY GOOD ONES in his career

yesterday i went to the bookstore and had five of his books in hand, ready to buy, and put them back. woke up this morning to the news that he died and figured i should go back and get them (i did: riding the rap, bandits, freaky deaky, killshot, tishomingo blues)

wait, i thought you were buying donald westlake books yesterday... changed your story huh

http://www.theonion.com/articles/elmore-leonard-modern-prose-master-noted-for-his-t,33559/

http://evangelchurch.cc/sites/default/files/images/sermons/LifeChangingStories.jpg

ah that Onion piece is nice

to my eternal shame, I spent half of today confusing him with James Ellroy

>:(