Amis:Were you inspired by the research he put into this book?
Leonard:He got me everything I needed to know. I asked him to see if he could find out how much it cost to transport horses from Arizona to East Texas and then to Havana. And he did. He found a cattle company that had been in business over 100 years ago and was shipping cattle then. He found an old ledger book and copied it and faxed it to me.
Amis:Among the differences from your earlier books, this book is more discursive, less dialogue-driven and, till the end, less action-driven. Toward the end, you get a familiar Leonard scenario where there’s a chunk of money sitting around, and various people are after it and you’re pretty confident that it’s going to go to the least-undeserving people present. And it’s not hard-bitten; it’s a much more romantic book than we’re used to from you. Could your Westerns have had such romance?
Leonard:No. In my Westerns there was little romance except in Valdez Is Coming, which is my favorite of the Westerns. No, I just wanted to make this a romantic adventure story.
Amis:And there’s a kind of political romanticism, too. You’ve always sided with the underdog, imaginatively; one can sense that. And who could be more of an underdog than a criminal? And your criminals have always been rather implausibly likable and gentle creatures. What is your view about crime in America?
Leonard:I don’t have a view about crime in America. There isn’t anything I can say that would be interesting at all. When I’m fashioning my bad guys, though (and sometimes a good guy has had a criminal past and then he can go either way; to me, he’s the best kind of character to have), I don’t think of them as bad guys. I just think of them as, for the most part, normal people who get up in the morning and they 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. Because that’s the way they are. Except for real hard-core guys.
Amis:The really bad guys.
Leonard:Yeah, the really bad guys…
Amis:Before we end, I’d just like to ask you about why you keep writing. I just read my father’s collected letters, which are going to be published in a year or two. It was with some dread that I realized that the writer’s life never pauses. You can never sit back and rest on what you’ve done. You are driven on remorselessly by something, whether it’s dedication or desire to defeat time. What is it that drives you? Is it just pure enjoyment that makes you settle down every morning to carry out this other life that you live?
Leonard:It’s the most satisfying thing I can imagine doing. To write that scene and then read it and it works. I love the sound of it. There’s nothing better than that. The notoriety that comes later doesn’t compare to the doing of it. I’ve been doing it for almost forty-seven years, and I’m still trying to make it better. Even though I know my limitations; I know what I can’t do. I know that if I tried to write, say, as an omniscient author, it would be so mediocre. You can do more forms of writing than I can, including essays. My essay would sound, at best, like a college paper.
Amis:Well, why isn’t there a Martin Amis Day? Because January 16, 1998, was Elmore Leonard Day in the state of Michigan, and it seems that here, in Los Angeles, it’s been Elmore Leonard Day for the last decade. [Laughter]
[Applause]
Editor’s note: Martin Amis is the author of many novels – including Money: A Suicide Note; London Fields; and Night Train – and many works of nonfiction, including a collection of essays and criticism, The War Against Cliché, in which may be found other interesting observations on the work of Elmore Leonard.
Elmore Leonard has written more than three dozen books during his highly successful writing career, including the national bestsellers Tishomingo Blues, Pagan Babies, and Be Cool. Many of his novels have been made into movies, including Get Shorty, Out of Sight, Valdez Is Coming, and Rum Punch (as Quentin Tarantino’s Jackie Brown). He has been named Grand Master by Mystery Writers of America and lives in Bloomfield Village, Michigan, with his wife.
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“The hottest thriller writer in the U.S.”
Time
“Razor-sharp characterizations, wonderful dialogue, quirky humor… He can render a human being’s entire life in a few sentences of wardrobe description… Elmore Leonard proves he has few peers in unfolding this sort of story.”
Los Angeles Times Book Review
“Leonard is one of the crime genre’s great writers.”
Dallas Morning News
“First-rate… crackles with suspense and intrigue… Leonard’s dialogue flourishes throughout… The Hunted shows that Leonard has deserved all the praise he has received. He deserved it years ago.”
Bergen Record
“Leonard is the best in the business: His dialogue snaps, his characters are more alive than most of the people you meet on the street, and his twisting plots always resolve themselves with a no-nonsense plausibility.”
Newsday
“Does Elmore Leonard ever tire of hearing how fine a novelist he is? How remarkably consistent?… If he does, he might want to skip this valentine… The reader often finds himself laughing out loud at how ingeniously and how naturally the writer fits all the pieces together. As for dull patches, well, there is more down time in a class of Ritalin-dosed kindergartners than in any Leonard novel… If there is anything we have come to expect in a Leonard novel, it is to expect anything… If Leonard had marketed Yugos, we’d all be driving one today.”
Orange County Register
“[Readers] should add the work of Elmore Leonard to their not-to-be-missed book lists. His tone-gritty, deadpan, matter-of-fact, and quietly poetic-makes his tales of violence and retribution both inimitable and addictive.”
Washington Post Book World
“The debate over who’s the all-time king of the whack job crime novelists just ended. Living or dead, Elmore Leonard tops ’em all.”
Ft. Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel
“Nobody but nobody on the current scene can match his ability to serve up violence so light-handedly, with so supremely deadpan a flourish.” Detroit News
“Leonard is a writer, which is like saying Michael Jordan is a basketball player. He is a master of a kind of tabloid literature: quick, knowing, filled with perfectly observed talk, and always with at least one dead body somewhere on the premises.”
New York Daily News
“The hallmark of a Leonard novel is the dialogue-crackling, vivid, full of menace, bluster, heat, and frustration. The stuff begs to be read out loud.”
Orlando Sentinel
“When Mr. Leonard is observing, satirizing, plotting, working up suspense, thickening the air with menace, discharging it in lightning flashes of violence, exposing the black holes behind the parts people play-when he tends to business, he gives us as much serious fun per word as anyone around.”
New York Times Book Review
“[With] his street-smart dialogue and funny backroom characters, he’s a sage poet of crime.”
Houston Chronicle