NBMQ: How much time did you spend in Atlantic City?
Leonard: I spent from Sunday through Thursday, five days. I spent one day with the Atlantic County major-crime squad, and I went over their procedures with them — how they would investigate a death, what might appear to be a suicide. For example, I said to the detective, “You’ve got a woman that’s found on the sidewalk. She obviously fell to her death. What’s the first thing you do?” He said, “I’d look up. See if there’s an open window somewhere.” Then he explained how he would canvass the neighborhood or the apartment building first and talk to everybody. The procedures are the same most places except that they use different forms. They may go about it a little bit differently. Then I asked the police how they would react to a cop from another jurisdiction, a cop from Miami Beach coming in there and sticking his nose into it, asking them questions and offering to help. I got their reaction to that. I said, “Assuming, of course, that you feel that there is a rapport between you and the Miami Beach cop, you get along okay, would you allow him to help a little bit?” “Sure, yeah. But I don’t think I’d want my chief to know about it.” Things like that. I spent time with the cops. I was introduced to the president of one of the casinos; then he handed me over to a woman who was in charge of surveillance. She took me into the monitoring room where they look at the monitors of every foot of the casino floor. Then she took me to the eye-in-the-sky where you’re standing right over the tables, where you look directly down on the play. So I got a pretty good view of what goes on behind the scenes. Most of the information, of course, came out of newspaper and magazine articles. Specific stories about a guy who comes to town with a million bucks and how he’s treated and what he does with it. Same thing in south Florida, in Miami Beach, I roamed around there with a friend of mine who’s a private investigator, a fellow I went to college with, University of Detroit, more than thirty years ago. Roamed around there, spent some time with the Miami Beach police, one detective in particular for LaBrava. Asked a lot of questions about situations that appear in the book. What happens if a woman who lives in one of the hotels receives an extortion note, what do you do? What’s the procedure in investigating this kind of a case? Do you bring in the FBI? And so on. I find out exactly how they would handle the investigation.
NBMQ: You wrote westerns before you turned to contemporary crime novels. Do the two genres have anything in common? And why did you switch?
Leonard: I started out with westerns because in 1951 I had written a couple of short stories in college and they really had no purpose. There was certainly no market for them. I decided, if you’re going to write, let’s study a particular genre, concentrate, research and learn how to write within the framework of this genre. I picked westerns because I like western movies so much. I felt that there was a good possibility to sell them, to sell to Hollywood. I hadn’t read many westerns. I began to notice the westerns in the Saturday Evening Post and Argosy. I liked the fact that in this market you could aim at magazines that were paying $850 or $1,000 for a short story and work your way down through Argosy, which was paying $500 to $1,000, to Bluebook, and then down to all the pulp magazines. There were at least a half-dozen very good western pulp magazines. Dime Western being, I think, the foremost one. Zane Grey Western Magazine, Fifteen Western Tales, Ten-Story Western, those good ones paying two cents a word, which is a hundred bucks for a short story. And that wasn’t bad in the early fifties. I concentrated on the western, did a lot of research, subscribed to Arizona Highways for my descriptions for the settings. Did a lot of research on the Apaches and the cavalry, which was very big then. Cowboys — what they wore, what they ate. Guns. I started reading gun catalogs. I put all that together into western stories.
I stopped writing westerns after Hombre. I wrote it in 1959, and it took almost two years to sell because the market was drying up. That’s because of all the westerns on television. It finally came out in 1961, and I didn’t write another western until the early seventies. The last one was in 1979 for Bantam because Mark Jaffe, who was the editorial director at Bantam then, likes westerns. I don’t know if there is a similarity other than the western kind of a hero, that stand-up kind of a guy who manifests his attitude in Destry Rides Again. That’s kind of the idea. Maybe it can be seen to some extent in what I’m writing now, in crime fiction. In the back of my mind I kind of think that I do sort of a Destry Rides Again in that my guy is, usually, misjudged. He’s fairly passive. He’s not a typical hero. I try to make him a very ordinary kind of individual, very realistic. A real person who finds himself in a life-or-death situation. What does he do? He’s a stand-up kind of a guy, like the western hero. And by the time the antagonists realize that they’ve misjudged this guy, he has the situation turned around and he’s coming at them. I get so caught up and interested in some of my minor characters, especially my antagonist, that every once in a while I have to remind myself that I have a hero. That even though this story is not a traditional type of crime story, still there is a hero, and he’s going to have to solve the problem, whatever it is. So I have to get him to do something. Every once in a while I forget about it, that he’s there. He’s just sort of walking through the story and observing.
NBMQ: Many people have said the detective story or the crime story is the last refuge for the traditional, self-reliant American hero. I think this applies to your work.
Leonard: I think it does, too. Sure. I think that my work has come out of a tradition. But I don’t think there’s that much resemblance to the tradition that it came out of, aside from the fact that, yes, I am aware that my lead is the hero and he is going to win. There’s no question in my mind the guy is going to win. But he’s going to have my attitude in the way he does it. He’s not going to be the typical hero; though when you get right down to it, he’s going to be as gutsy as he has to be. My cops, I feel, are real cops, in Glitz, for example, when Vincent confronts Ricky, at Ricky’s car, and Ricky says, “What do you think you’re doing?” he takes him by the hair and the jacket, bangs him against the car, and says, “Anything I want. Rick.” This is a cop talking. I try to make them as real as possible. My cops cut corners a little bit, just as the real ones do.
NBMQ: Do you regard any one of your novels as your breakthrough book? The one in which you found your approach to your material or the one in which you found your authorial voice?
Leonard: Yeah, I think looking back it would be 52 Pick-up. At the time I didn’t realize it, but now I see that was the beginning of the voice that I’ve developed. Then I got into books like Swag and The Switch, where now the main characters are not the usual heroes. They’re on the other side. Then I realized how much fun I could have with those people, that I don’t have to make them entirely despicable. I can have fun with guys who are into crime, into the life.
NBMQ: Are you concerned with making a statement about the nature of criminal behavior?
Leonard: No, I’m not concerned with any kind of a statement. I just tell a story. My purpose is to entertain and tell a story. I’m not grinding any kind of an ax at all. My attitude comes through — maybe my attitude comes through. But they’re not big issues by any means.