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 nonfic
About the Author
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 Bloom-field Village, Michigan, with his wife.
ELMORE LEONARD
KILLSHOT
“One of his most ambitious . . . Leonard has written an Elmore Leonard crime fiction thriller, but it’s a novel, too. Not a pretentious or ‘literary’ novel, of course, but a novel that only Elmore Leonard could write. . . . While there is plenty of the physical tension erupting into violence you expect, the real menace is psychological. . . . Leonard tops himself every time.”
Boston Globe
“Terrifically enjoyable . . . takes your breath away . . . the suspense hardly lets up . . . Leonard’s well-known virtues are all on display: the ripe, funny dialogue; a final scene so masterfully crafted you want to applaud; an array of secondary characters that stay with you the way secondary characters do in Dickens.”
Washington Post Book World
“A master of narrative . . . A poet of the vernacular . . . Leonard paints an intimate, precise, funny, frightening, and irresistible mural of the American underworld.”
The New Yorker
“Classic Leonard . . . Killshot is probably his best.” Newsweek
“Bone-chilling . . . Killshot is a riveting page-turner, a hare-and-hounds chase through the bleak suburbs of Detroit and the seamy riverfront dives of Cape Girardeau. . . . Leonard has a masterful touch with characterization and, in the Colsons, he’s created a wry, likable couple who . . . in their own way, are every bit as tough—and ten times brighter—than the lethal yo-yos stalking them. And the villains . . . are sinister in every dark meaning of the word. . . . Leonard’s dialogue crackles like the riveting torch that Wayne Colson handles so deftly one hundred feet above the hard ground.”
Los Angeles Times Book Review
“Sinewy . . . shattering . . . Leonard pushes the suspense to the edge of endurance.”
Detroit Free Press
“Elmore ‘Dutch’ Leonard is more than just one of the all-time greats of crime fiction. He’s fast becoming an authentic American icon.”
Seattle Times
“Elmore Leonard is an awfully good writer of the sneaky sort; he’s so good, you don’t notice what he’s up to.”
Donald E. Westlake
“Elmore Leonard dazzles as he sprinkles his work continually with unexpected convolutions. . . . In Killshot, Mr. Leonard does not disappoint us; the reader is kept continually off balance, a step behind the action, tugged cunningly into blind alleys.”
New York Times Book Review
“Killshot is fine, taut work. . . .The world’s greatest cops ’n robbers novelist . . . gives us stalking, stakeouts, and the inevitable showdown. It’s all done with Leonard’s spare, deft, understated touch with dialogue and character. Leonard’s growing horde of fans will eat it up.”
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
“Elmore Leonard can still set the compass of his imagination in a new direction and sail off to explore untried territory. . . . While Killshot offers the familiar pleasures of good dialogue and fast action that we’ve come to expect from him, there’s almost as much gratification here in watching him at play with fresh ideas and challenges. . . . It isn’t just good guys against bad guys. To make the whole thing work, Mr. Leonard has to mix about a dozen different shades to the palette of behavior that ranges from decent to sociopathic. . . . Nothing is wasted. Each scene has multiple purposes. And every word counts.”