Wednesday, August 06, 2008
Elmore at The New Yorker Festival
Elmore will appear at The New Yorker Festival, October 3-5 and be on a panel with Joyce Carol Oates and Matthew Klam. The title of the panel is “The Devil Within.”
Monday, August 04, 2008
Elmore’s Paperback Western Covers by Artist Tim Cox
Take a look at the cover art for Elmore’s 8 Western novels and 4 story collections. The novels are the work of Western Artist, Tim Cox. The story collections do not have an artist credit on the copyright page so I’m not sure if they are also Cox.
This art is perfect for Elmore’s Westerns. They are not particularly relevant to a given novel but they set the right tone.
Friday, August 01, 2008
Misconceptions about Killshot
When you read about Killshot on the Internet or in the press, chances are one of the following persistent errors will be present.
Quentin Tarantino is the Executive Producer
He is not. Quentin Tarantino, for reasons unknown, is not an executive producer, and in fact, has had nothing to do with Killshot except perhaps at the very beginning of pre-production. Originally, Tarantino was going to play Richie Nix opposite Robert DeNiro as the Blackbird, with Tony Scott directing. Never happen. Harvey Weinstein eventually gave the job of director to John Madden. From that point forward, Quentin had zero to do with the movie. I have seen the final movie and his name or the name of his company, A Band Apart, are nowhere to be found. Lawrence Bender, QT’s partner has a producer credit, but that’s it.
Justin Timberlake is in the cast
He never got that chance., but you can still find references to this casting all over the Internet. I saw Timberlake’s screen test and he could have easily handled the part. Apparently somebody didn’t think Justin could do the job, and he was out and Joe Gordon-Levitt was in.
Johnny Knoxville is in the cast.
He was, but was written out, during the extensive rewrites. He played Ferris, the U.S. Marshall in Cape Girardeau who sexually harasses Carmen (Diane Lane). Insiders report that he really was quite good in his role, but the test audiences could not shake his “Jackass” persona.
Cape Girardeau is out of the film.
Almost. There still are a few shots from the original Cape Girardeau shoot, but the majority of the scenes that are supposed to be Cape Girardeau were shot in Ontario.
There is a trailer for Killshot.
There is, but it’s an old one and does not accurately represent the final movie. It still lists Tarantino as executive producer and follows the original storyline where Wayne and Carmen are happily married, as Elmore wrote in the book.
Killshot is going directly to DVD.
That seems likely but no decision has been released and nobody is talking.
Thursday, July 31, 2008
Tom Jane’s Remarks about Killshot
Jim Dorey at the MarketSaw 3d Website, did an interview with Thomas Jane who plays Wayne Colson in Killshot. In the audio interview, Jane said:
I did a movie called Killshot, that looks like it’s going straight to DVD. It didn’t turn out so hot, I guess.
While what Tom says is probably true about Killshot going straight to DVD, I don’t think he has any inside information, just common sense about a movie that should have been released at least a year ago. As to his other statement, I’m not sure Tom has seen the final version. The movie turned out just fine, even Elmore said so. Tom had a tough role for many reasons, and with all the rewrites, he may have lost perspective about the film’s value and his character Wayne in particular.
Jane’s comments were also reported on KFVS12 TV in Cape Girardeau. The folks in that neck of the woods are still hungry for news about the movie and their city’s place in it.
Rest assured, the Cape is in it, but minimally. Most of the scenes that are supposed to be Cape Girardeau were reshot in Ontario. There are still a few images left. There’s a particularly nice beauty shot from the steps of the Courthouse.
Tuesday, July 29, 2008
Swanie on Elmore
H. N. Swanson, the legendary “Swanie,” was a Hollywood-based literary agent whose roster of clients, at one time or another, included just about anybody who was anybody in American literature (and screenwriting) from the 1930s through the 1950s—among them F. Scott Fitzgerald, John O’Hara, Raymond Chandler, James M. Cain, William Faulkner, Steve Fisher, and, of course, Elmore Leonard. When LaBrava came out and Elmore was began heating up in the early 1980s, Swanie took out a full page ad in The Hollywood Reporter, expressing his feelings for Elmore.
Not since I represented John O’Hara has a writer defined so well what happens between a man and woman
Not since Damon Runyon has any fellow done dialogue that runs so true and is as entertaining at the same time.
Not since James M. Cain has a writer shown how the lives of everyday people can turn into explosive melodrama
Not since Raymond Chandler have I had a man who knows so well the hills and valleys of plotting
H. N. Swanson
They don’t make ‘em like Swanie any more. I’m sure Elmore would agree.
Monday, July 28, 2008
Elmore’s Fans Won’t Be Disappointed in Son’s First Crime Novel
Leonard’s the name, noir’s the game . . . just like dad
Gritty plot, tough women, set in Detroit. Sound familiar? Elmore’s fans won’t be disappointed in son’s first crime novel
thestar.com
JACK BATTEN
Peter Leonard has been writing advertising copy for 25 years. It pays the bills. He lives in Birmingham, Mich., with his wife and four kids. Working nights and weekends, Leonard finished his first crime novel not long ago. It’s called Quiver. Especially for a first novel, Quiver is mature, funny, well paced and smartly structured.
Is there a catch in this nice story of long-delayed accomplishment?
There might be if you ask about the first name of Peter Leonard’s father. The answer is Elmore. Peter grew up in a home where his old man happened to be writing some of the greatest books in American crime fiction.
It’s inevitable, reading Quiver, that the reader’s mind drifts to comparisons with the works of Elmore. Early in the book, a principal character named Jack Curran turns up. Immediately, thoughts of other memorable Jacks surface. Jack Foley from Elmore’s terrific 1996 book, Out of Sight. Or Jack Delaney in 1987’s excellent Bandits.
A guy in Quiver says to a woman, “You’re better looking than Sister Mary Andrew who I had in second grade.” Elmore, the reader thinks, would have left out the “who.” Later on, Peter Leonard describes the way a character is talking, “Trying to put a little enthusiasm behind it.” The phrase is reminiscent of a favourite line of Elmore’s: “Not putting too much into it.”
The reflex habit of matching Peter’s style to Elmore’s never quite goes away. The son writes in a manner resembling his father’s. The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. But the reader’s impulse to compare does nothing to spoil Quiver’s pleasures, which are legion.
One more mention of Elmore may be relevant. According to a charming interview that Elmore and Peter recently conducted with one another – it can be Googled – Quiver started out as a movie script. Peter rewrote it as a novel when his father, who has a long history with Hollywood, said to him, “Being a screen writer is like wanting to be a co-pilot.”
The book’s story, which is best described as multi-faceted, concerns the efforts of three bad guys, plus one really nasty girlfriend, to shake down a rich widow for as many millions as possible. With these guys, shakedown is a wide-ranging concept. Scamming enters into it of course, but homicide is far from out of the question,
Jack Curran, a Detroit guy, has what passes for the brains of the threesome, though Jack isn’t as slick as he thinks he is. Then comes Teddy from southern Illinois, a dumb and vicious hick. Last is DeJuan, a super cool, inner city Detroit dude. Teddy brings Celeste to the party. She’s blond, shapely, spectacularly tattooed and bad-tempered. Nobody should look sideways at Celeste.
Tension fuels relations among the group. More than three years earlier, the three guys stuck up a supermarket for either $257,000 or $166,000. Jack got caught and did 38 months for armed robbery. He didn’t rat out the other two, but neither did he reveal what happened to the loot.
Teddy and DeJuan think Jack hid it. He didn’t, but everybody’s mad at everybody else, and the only route to recouping is by way of a scheme to separate the widow Kate McCall from her money.
Kate’s late husband, Owen, built a fortune in NASCAR, first as a driver, then as a team owner. Owen and Kate, happily married, had a son named Luke. A few months before the book opens, 16-year-old Luke killed his father in a horrible accident while the two were hunting for deer with bows and arrows.
The kid is practically catatonic with grief. The widow works hard at coping for the two of them. Then Jack, Teddy, DeJuan and Celeste swing into view.
For the rest of the book, with all the characters established in their roles, the story lopes along to an admirably brisk and exciting rhythm. Surprises enliven events. One obvious and unnecessary plot misstep slows the tempo, but only briefly.
In the online interview between the two Leonards, Peter says his favourite character is DeJuan. Elmore more or less agrees. The reader may not. Crime writers seem to embrace their bad guys, all decked out with weird pathologies, getting off on cruel one-liners.
But DeJuan, as with most characters like him, seems just another psychopath. He’s fairly funny in his homeboy way, but what’s so amusing about killing somebody when DeJuan has all the odds, not to mention the weapons, in his favour?
Much more essential to Quiver’s plot, much more interesting and successful as a character, is Kate McCall. The novel wouldn’t click if Peter Leonard couldn’t deliver the goods in shaping Kate into someone strong and dependable. Happily for us readers, he makes Kate into the real thing.
Now in her late 30s, Kate has a back story that works in terms of the plot. Years earlier, after she came out of the University of Michigan, she joined the Peace Corps. She took her good intentions to East Guatemala. While protecting a young Guatemalan woman, she angers the local police chief. He sends two cops to rape and kill Kate. She shoots both cops dead.
When Jack and his colleagues make life hard for Kate and Luke, when they abuse and threaten the woman and her son, we know that Kate has the toughness to resist.
Come to think of it, Kate bears a likeness to Carmen Colson, the housewife in Elmore’s 1989 book, Killshot. In the last pages of Killshot, Carmen drills two bullets into the hitman known as Blackbird. That’s something Peter Leonard’s Kate McCall could handle.
Jack Batten is a Toronto author, novelist and freelance writer. His Whodunit appears every two weeks.
Saturday, July 26, 2008
From Legends to Gunsights
Before writing Gunsights in 1979, Elmore wrote a treatment for a western movie called Legends. Two excerpts from the Legends treatment are reproduced below. They were published in the book, Give ‘em What They Want: The Right Way to Pitch Your Novel to Editors and Agents by Blythe Camenson, Marshall Cook.
Long before Elmore Leonard became one of North Americas most popular and prolific novelists, he wrote a treatment for a Western yarn he called Legends and tried to sell it to the movies. “I would write a book on spec.” he says. “but not a screenplay.” He had been immersing himself in Western lore and was able to write the treatment without much new research.
The treatment failed to sell as a film, but Marc Jaffe, an editor at Bantam Books, asked Leonard to do a Western novel, and Leonard used the Legends treatment to write the book. “Emmett Long” from the treatment became Dana Moon” in the book. “If I wrote any more Westerns.” Leonard explains. “I planned to use Emmett Long as a pseudonym.” Something he never did.
The treatment for Legends doubles as a synopsis, and a compelling one at that – a good plot in an authentic setting. rendered crisply and with a good dose of Leonard’s famous dialogue for flavor. It’s long, but it reads short. And it shows how you can turn the sawdust of a failed project into gold. Although Leonard uses past tense, we recommend that you use present tense for your synopses.
The Legends treatment is reproduced here.
Read More>
Thursday, July 24, 2008
“Killshot May Never See the Light of Day”
The Independent (London)
BYLINE: Guy Adams
This is very sad, if true.
Drama in the film industry: Tough times for Hollywood’s tough guy
The movie mogul who championed intelligent, independent film-making has never been short of enemies. So has the news that his empire has hit stormy waters been exaggerated by his rivals? Guy Adams reports from Los Angeles Drama in the film industry
In a town where image is everything and personalities come larger than life, Harvey Weinstein has always been a force of nature. For three decades, the cigar-chomping movie mogul has used his explosive persona and mercurial talent to occupy Hollywood’s top table, confounding the critics who said his career was built on style and bluster, rather than substance.
A sense of history in the making is therefore greeting speculation that Weinstein’s media empire has sailed into choppy waters. In a troubled market, he faces mounting commercial pressures that would leave a lesser mortal resembling one of the bloodied extras from the blockbusting Quentin Tarantino films on which much of his early success was built.
The impresario, who made his name bringing intelligent, independent cinema to the masses, faces a multitude of problems, but they all boil down a single, intractable difficulty: he is struggling to produce and distribute enough intelligent, independent cinema that the popcorn-scoffing masses actually want to see.
Killshot is awaiting a release date amid reports it may never see the light of day.
Wednesday, July 23, 2008
Tough Chicks in Literature
National Public Radio (NPR)
July 22, 2008 Tuesday
SHOW: All Things Considered 9:00 PM EST NPR
Smart, Sassy Heroines Pack a Literary Punch
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
Writer Mary Curtis is a big fan of strong women. And that’s her theme for today’s installment of Three Books, that’s our series in which writers recommend a group of books on a single theme. Curtis’ three books each offer a variation on the powerful heroine.
Ms. MARY CURTIS (Features Editor/Columnist, Charlotte Observer): You may not like her, but you do what she wants. She’s a tough chick, a woman with attitude and an instinct for survival. She’s quick with a quip and totally in charge of herself and those around her.
Curled up on a couch in a fuzzy robe and slippers, book in hand, I don’t feel so indestructible. That’s why I look for my tough chicks in literature.
Elmore Leonard is the king of wise-guy dialogue. In the book, “Out of Sight,” he created Karen Sisco, a woman every bit equal to the Detroit lowlifes she encounters as a federal marshal. Guns? Oh, she’s got them, from a pump-action shotgun to a sexy Sig Sauer, held snug against her thigh. Even when pushed tight against an escaping bank robber in the trunk of a car, Karen’s dressed sharply and talking coolly. She earns the bad guy’s respect - and yours.
Read the rest of the story.
Tuesday, July 22, 2008
From the Western to the City
Writer Carlo Rotella was online Monday, July 21 to discuss ”Crime Story,” his Washington Post Magazine profile of George Pelecanos as he considers a future beyond crime novels.
Carlo Rotella, director of American studies at Boston College, last wrote for the Magazine about WaterFire, an environmental art piece in Providence, Rhode Island.
Also, I was interested by your comment that hardboiled crime stories are descended from westerns. I think Book World columnist Michael Dirda once wrote that Westerns are a Hollywood invention. Hardboiled detective stories, however, are generally attributed to authors Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett. Although both were based in Los Angeles, it’s an interesting thought to consider Chandler’s Philip Marlowe as an urban version of John Wayne.
Carlo Rotella: Westerns and crime stories, certainly have a shared history that extends well into the 19th century--into dime novels, for instance--and therefore precedes Hollywood. The two strands, Western and urban, have developed separately over the past century, but they also come together at various points in their development. A good example would be the moment in the late 60s and 70s when a number of urban Westerns suddenly appeared: Coogan’s Bluff, Dirty Harry, Death Wish, the great early Detroit novels of Elmore Leonard. These were crossovers of stars, stories, storytellers, and imagery from the Western to the city, and what they suggest, to me, is that the two genres have so much in common that there are times when they can fuse to form hybrids.
Monday, July 21, 2008
The Period of the Great Moonshine Wars
This is an occasional series to highlight a book that influenced an Elmore Leonard novel. In this case, The Moonshine War. The book that influenced it: Night Comes to the Cumberlands by Harry M. Caudill.
Elmore tells the story about a Hollywood producer who wanted him to write something like Valdez is Coming only different. Note, Valdez was written before The Moonshine War, but published a year later. Elmore went to the library looking for an idea. He pulled a book off the shelf in the history section and remembered opening it to a chapter entitled: “The Period of the Great Moonshine Wars.” He says he closed the book real quick so it wouldn’t get away.
There are a few discrepancies in Elmore’s account. The actual chapter heading in Night Comes to the Cumberlands is: Moonshine and Mayhem.” He is certain that he has the right book. Where the chapter title came from is a mystery.
The story line to The Moonshine War is laid out in the few paragraphs of the chapter.
Read More>
Sunday, July 20, 2008
The Wire: “Hurrah for Smart Literary TV”
John Williams discusses The Wire in an article in The Guardian entitled, ”Is this the best TV series ever made?”
Some time in the 1980s it struck me that mainstream contemporary fiction was doing a woeful job of reflecting what was going on in our modern-day cities. Meanwhile, in the world of crime fiction, writers like Elmore Leonard, James Lee Burke, Sara Paretsky and the late, great George V Higgins were turning out books that married social realism to energetic storytelling. They, and others who followed in their footsteps, such as Walter Mosley and George Pelecanos, successfully conveyed the notion that out there on the streets was a world that Miss Marple and Hill Street Blues were never going to set right, a world that Amis and McEwan, or McInerney and Ellis, barely seemed to realise existed.
I was so enthused by this notion that I wrote a book called Into The Badlands in which I roamed America, talked to its great crime novelists, and fleshed out my case. And for the next decade or so I suppose I mostly still believed in it. But as I went on reviewing crime fiction in the Noughties, I felt an increasing sense of disappointment at the prevailing lack of ambition to do anything more than entertain. Everything people always used to say about crime fiction - isn’t it just a formula? - seemed to be true. There was a plague of serial killers, pathologists and profilers, cops with bad marriages and drink problems. Lumbering plots with saccharine endings. I couldn’t deny it any longer: the world of crime fiction had ceased to interest me.
Then I watched The Wire. And there was everything I’d liked in the work of Higgins or Leonard or Pelecanos: the inventive dialogue, the characters etched in shades of grey, the prevailing mood of moral ambiguity and profound cynicism as to the motives and efficacy of the forces of law and order. There, in particular, was the sustained attack on the war on drugs - a war that makes the Iraq adventure look well thought out - that neither our newspapers nor our novelists (with the shining exception of Richard Price) seemed able to make. There, in a nutshell, was the revival of American social realism: the Steinbeck/Hammett/Algren tradition that seemed to have been lost in a welter of postmodernism, post-colonialism and pure unadulterated schlock.
So I watched The Wire, and watched it some more, and nodded my head in respect as it widened its brief to take on education and politics, becoming positively Zola-esque in its detailing of the ways in which the rich and the powerful fail and exploit and madden the poor and the powerless and - in Baltimore at least - the black.
My one consolation, I suppose, in finding a TV series that is so much better than contemporary crime fiction is that much of the series is actually down to writers - not screenplay writers but book writers. Its progenitor, David Simon, made his name with a wonderful non-fiction account of policing in Baltimore called Homicide. And the show’s regular writers include the aforementioned George Pelecanos and Richard Price, as well as Dennis Lehane.
Which is perhaps why, for me, The Wire is so satisfying. It’s got all the advantages of a great series of crime novels, plus moving pictures - and for once there’s no one telling the writer that it’ll only sell if they stick a serial killer in the middle of it. So hurrah for smart literary TV; and boo to dumbed-down crime fiction.
Friday, July 18, 2008
Jim Born - “My Biggest Thrill is Having Dutch Be Proud of Me”
Scott Eyman still thinks Elmore is a mystery writer, but at least he didn’t take some cheap shot at him as he has in the past, even in articles that weren’t even about Elmore! A kinder, gentler Scott writes a nice profile of our friend, James O. “Jim” Born.
Born met legendary mystery novelist Elmore Leonard through the late Judge Marvin Mounts, and helped Leonard out as a technical advisor about guns. Leonard encouraged him to write, becoming a sort of surrogate literary father. Born says that, absent his father, “my biggest thrill is having Dutch (Leonard’s nickname) be proud of me.”
Thursday, July 17, 2008
Killshot on TV?
It’s been in the press this past week that Harvey Weinstein has a deal with Showtime to deliver 96 films in the next 7 years. If true, everybody wants to know: Does that include Killshot? Nobody’s talking. Weinstein Company has been silent about its plans for Killshot.
Are they still planning a theatrical release? We certainly hope so. To do otherwise would be an insult to a lot of fine people who brought Elmore’s classic to the screen.
Tuesday, July 15, 2008
Be Cool, the iTunes 99¢ Movie of the Week
Is it worth it?
Out of Sight In Plain Sight
They rip off Elmore and his Karen Sisco TV series then the reviewer compares the writing to his. Pretty thorough screwing, don’t you think?
In Plain Sight is in the hard-boiled tradition (if not yet the league) of writers like Elmore Leonard and Ross Thomas for whom hard-boiled means speaking the distinctly American tongue of smart-ass. McCormack speaks it fluently. The show is unimaginable without her. Even when the plotting goes blooey (some of these hiding witnesses lead awfully visible lives), McCormack sets the tone, carrying the whole thing on her weary, slightly hunched shoulders. Her performance is an essay in the exasperation of a smart, wised-up person who has to put up with the world’s bullshit. I don’t think I’ve loved her more than when she explained her refusal to tip a barista. “They pour coffee! It’s not like they’re waiters.” Do your job and shut up.
Monday, July 14, 2008
Elmore, Dave Barry and Carl Hiaasen on Charlie Rose Promoting “Manatee”
Part One
Part Two
Elmore’s Chapter in Compilation Novel
Naked Came the Manatee (1997) is not a novel, it’s more like 13 short stories. It was originally published in 13 installments in the Miami Herald’s Tropic magazine
Elmore wrote the penultimate chapter: Odyssey which focuses on fatality cleanup amd only minimally deals with the actual story line. He left the writer of the last chapter, Carl Hiassen, with two, fresh, dead bodies. There’s a running joke that Elmore did not read the 11 chapters that proceeded his.
Here’s the description of Naked Came the Manatee from Amazon:
Dave Barry starts the madness in Naked Came the Manatee, introducing a 102-year-old environmentalist named Coconut Grove and a manatee saddled with one of Barry’s favorite monikers, Booger. Carl Hiaasen closes down the party, and in between, 11 of Florida’s literati, including Elmore Leonard, John Dufresne, and Edna Buchanan, make twisted offerings to the affair: three severed heads, all bearing a remarkable resemblance to Fidel Castro; four murders; some sex; some espionage; even an appearance by Jimmy Carter and one by Castro himself.
...Naked Came the Manatee resembles a literary game of telephone, with each writer contributing a chapter and passing it on to the next, who then makes the most of what he or she is given. The result is a novel with wildly fluctuating styles and more crazy plot curves than a daytime drama, but thanks to these 13 masters of the craft this roller coaster of a book is almost as much fun to read as it obviously was to write.
Saturday, July 12, 2008
Swag and Moonshine War Finally Back in Print?
Not yet, but soon probably for Swag, then The Moonshine War a little later on. Here are the last paperbacks of both books, from the mid to late Nineties.
Wednesday, July 09, 2008
Einaudi Publishes Complete Westerns in Italy
Elmore’s Italian publisher has come out with a translation of The Complete Westerns, Tutti i racconti Western.
“Thirty stories written almost all within a decade, set in Arizona and New Mexico between 1870 and 1890, able to evoke the eternal myth of the frontier...”
Here are some more Einaudi covers. Do you like them better than the French or British?
Tuesday, July 08, 2008
Killshot Vanishes from Weinstein Company Website
Go to the official site of The Weinstein Company and see if you can find any reference to Killshot.
In case you’re busy, I’ll make it easy for you.
Is it in the “Film Index?” No
How about, “Coming Soon?” No
Is it “Playing Now?” No
Is it “Now on DVD?” No
Maybe there’s a secret easter egg button I failed to find for “Disappeared Films.”
I see that TWC does have a film called “Where in the World is Osama Bin Laden?” I found that one.
Where in the world is Killshot?
Monday, July 07, 2008
If They Like You in Poughkeepsie…
Don’t ask for a second opinion.
Poughkeepsie Journal (New York)
Spice up your summer with fast-paced thrillers
As we approach Fourth of July weekend, it’s time to turn our attention to barbecues, beaches and books. It’s time for my 10th annual Summer Reading Recommendations from the Dutchess County courthouse.
Here are a few I’ve enjoyed over the past 12 months that I’d recommend you bring to the beach this summer:
* “Up in Honey’s Room” by Elmore Leonard. This country’s best living fiction writer is 83 and hasn’t lost anything off his fastball. This one is about a bumbling German spy ring in Detroit during World War II, and Leonard reprises a character, U.S. Marshal Car Webster, from one of his earlier novels. The pacing is fast. The dialogue is dead-on. This is vintage Leonard.
Larry Hertz covers the criminal justice system and social issues. Reach him at lhertz@poughkeepsiejournal.com or 845-437-4824.
Sunday, July 06, 2008
Elmore Discusses the Film Adapation of Killshot
Left to right: Joe Gordon-Levitt, Elmore, Mickey Rourke, John Madden and Caleb Deschanel in Toronto during the filming of Killshot in the fall of 2005.
I wrote this press release over a year ago in anticipation of the release of Killshot in the fall. Never happen. Thought you might like to read what Elmore thought of Killshot then and now. - Gregg
LOS ANGELES, July 1, 2007. Last month, director John Madden brought a copy of Killshot to Detroit to show Elmore Leonard. A rare visit to the Killshot set in Toronto, had given Leonard an early inkling of good things to come, but now the adaptation of his classic suspense novel was nearing completion and Madden was eager to show it to the author, whose work he had so painstakingly brought to the screen.
Read More>
Saturday, July 05, 2008
Killshot - The Disappeared Movie
You will note that we have been very quiet for a long time about Killshot and its fate. That’s because we didn’t want to have our statements work against our only goal: the release of the movie. Now however it’s been too long, nearly three years! Everybody is asking the same question: Where’s the movie? Some people think they might have blinked and missed it. To them we say, you didn’t miss it, it never came out. Why?
We have to speak up, and ask the man who owns or controls it, Harvey Weinstein, to please release Killshot. With all due respect. Give it a theatrical release. It is a very worthy movie. It has an audience. Everybody who has seen it, including Elmore and I, believes strongly in the movie.
You will be hearing more about this disappeared movie in the days to come.
Thursday, July 03, 2008
Tishomingo Blues - “You believe it’s happening in real life”
by Heather Johnson
at The Questing Librarian
.Tishomingo Blues takes its readers through a string of nerve-wracking events. The tale blends big city mobsters with backwoods criminals and a very confused high-diver. Only Leonard can weave a tale like this and leave the readers on the edge of their seats. Step into a world where justice takes a back seat to the whims of the heavy hitting criminals.
Tuesday, July 01, 2008
“Looking Forward to a Long Writing Career”
Monday, June 30, 2008
You Have to Start Them Young
Our friend, American novelist, Ace Atkins, believes you have to nurture the reading bug in infancy. Here he reads Cuba Libre to his baby son. Ace’s latest is Wicked City.
Saturday, June 28, 2008
George W. Bush’s Perfect Day
From Vincent Bugliosi’s latest book, The Prosecution Of George W. Bush For Murder, I offer the following without comment:
As Vince tells it:"In the middle of some of the worst atrocities in Iraq, with the survivors of victims screaming out in anguish over the unspeakable horror of it all, Bush after a hearty breakfast tells the media: Quote: I’m gonna have lunch with Secretary of State Rice, take a little nap, I’m reading an Elmore Leonard book right now - knock off a little Elmore Leonard this afternoon - go fishing with my man Barney [his dog], have a light dinner, then head for the ball game. So it’s a perfect day.”
Friday, June 27, 2008
Elmore’s Early Ride
Elmore and I were just talking about his 1956 Fiat 600 at dinner the other day and a very funny story about it. I showed him the picture above, and he said, That’s it! Except his was powder blue, but it did have the sunroof. He had three of his five kids by then (1956) and they all piled in the back. By the time, the fourth kid arrived, I think he switched to a station wagon.
Here’s the story that appeared in Esquire. Thanks to our intrepid Robb for digging it out.
My Car Story by Elmore Leonard
Esquire (Oct 1998)In the mid-1950s, I worked for an advertising agency writing print ads, magazine and newspaper, on the national Chevrolet account.
One evening after work, the senior vice-president and account executive, Colin Campbell, stopped by my office to say his Bel Air was in for service and to ask if I could give him a lift home. We lived in adjoining suburbs north of Detroit. Together, then we left the General Motors building and walked two blocks to the lot where I parked for fifty cents a day.
I should mention that Mr. Campbell was Mr. Chevrolet at the agency, perhaps the product line’s most loyal champion. He would spot typos missed by proofreaders.
As we approached my car, I said, “Here we are.”
Mr. Campbell said, “Where?” looking around for a Chevy Bell Air or at least a Biscayne.
I said, “Right here.”
He said, “This is what you drive?”
I admitted it was.
He stared at the sporty little subcompact, light-blue, with the canvas top that rolled all the way back, and said, “What is it?”
I told Mr. Campbell it was a rear-engine Fiat 600.
He said, “Oh.”
And that was about it for conversation on the way home.
Wednesday, June 25, 2008
Where Do Elmore’s Ideas Come From?
Elmore just finished revisions to Road Dogs and it is off to the publisher. He received an offer from the AARP to write a 1500 word piece on any topic he wanted. He chose to answer his own question: where do my ideas come from? He has so much to draw from, that the 1500, more like 2000 words will be packed with gems. Elmore works very hard on these short pieces. It’ll be entertaining.
So, I’m asking everybody out there in Elmore Land to discuss what you think are his best ideas and where you think they came from. Comment in The Dutch Forum
Monday, June 23, 2008
Elmore Knows His Guns
And so did the prop master on the movie! Comments like this are why he has to get it right.
JOE KIDD
Writer Elmore Leonard certainly did know something about classic firearms. From Frank Harlan’s Custom Savage 99 (1899), Olin Mingo’s Remington-Keene sporter (1880) in .45-70, Lamarr Simms Mauser C-96 (1896) broomhandle and Joe’s Cased Ross Rifle sporter model M-10 (1910) in .280 Ross. Leonard took special care to ensure all weapons (even the optics) were period accurate for that movie, being set in pre-statehood New Mexico territory (1912).
“He Doesn’t Waste Your Time”
Ian Vasquez, a copy editor at the St. Petersburg Times, just published his first novel, In the Heat. Vasquez, 42, is busy editing his second novel and writing his third: “Having a contract really makes you want to write.”
What is on your nightstand?
I just finished Meg Abbott’s Queenpin. It has that noirish ‘50s style, but she makes it her own. It’s like an old black and white movie, that snappy dialogue. I’ve also been dipping in and out of Story: Substance, Structure, Style and the Principles of Screenwriting, by Robert McKee. It’s good for anybody in the narrative arts.
What writers have influenced you?
One of my favorite authors, though I don’t write anything like him, is Gabriel Garcia Marquez. His fictional world is so much his own. You recognize the qualities of society and people, but it’s so strange and bizarre. I love Elmore Leonard. He doesn’t waste your time. He gives you a character in one sentence, and he writes the best dialogue.
Saturday, June 21, 2008
100 Best Westerns from Western Writers of America
Elmore has four on the list.
WWA Top 100 Westerns
23. 3:10 to Yuma (2007)
49. The Tall T
69. Hombre
88. Valdez is Coming
Read the entire list here.
Entertainment Weekly 100 best books of the last 25 years
LaBrava is #42.
Read entire list here.
42 LaBrava
Elmore Leonard (1983)
Why LaBrava and not Get Shorty? Or Killshot? Good question they’re all terrific. But we like LaBrava for its almost-smart-enough hero, the louche Miami Beach setting, and the saucy love interest.
Thursday, June 19, 2008
LaBrava - “Fast-moving, pitch-perfect, and utterly, authentically irresistible.”
Nice little capsule review of LaBrava at PaperBack Swap. A bit wordy, but the right words. -gregg
LaBrava [is a] blend of the true-to-life and the totally make-believe, the cinematic and the suspenseful, the world we know and a whole lot of worlds we’re glad we don’t. Only Leonard can concoct such a potent cocktail: one part raw humanity, one part pure insanity, a dash of lethal action, and his irresistible, eccentric spice. Joe La Brava is an ex-Secret Service agent who gets mixed up in a South Miami Beach scam involving a redneck former cop, a Cuban hit man who moonlights as a go-go dancer, and a one-time movie queen whose world is part make-believe, part deadly dangerous. This is vintage Leonard: fast-moving, pitch-perfect, and utterly, authentically irresistible.
Monday, June 16, 2008
Elmore Leonard + Steven Soderbergh + George Clooney = A Great Movie
Nice piece on Out of Sight. This film is really being appreciated as the classic it is. Note to George and Steven: Elmore has a dandy sequel!
PS Let’s not forget Scott Frank who is the master of bringing Elmore to the screen.
“It’s like seeing someone for the first time. You can be passing on the street and you look at each other and for a few seconds there’s this kind of recognition. Like you both know something, and the next moment the person’s gone. And it’s too late to do anything about it. And you always remember it because it was there and you let it go. And you think to yourself, what if I stopped? What if I said something? What if?” – Jack Foley
This bit of dialogue from Out of Sight (1998) perfectly captures the essence of the relationships between the characters in this film. It is about the what ifs and the what could have beens. What the characters do and, more importantly, what they don’t do directly determines their fate.
Read the rest here.
Friday, June 13, 2008
The Perfect Gift for Father’s Day
Wednesday, June 11, 2008
Peter Leonard’s ‘Quiver’ follows dad’s literary footsteps
Tampa Bay Times
By Philip Booth, Times Correspondent
Chatting briefly with Elmore Leonard during a book signing in New York a couple of years ago, I asked the masterful crime fiction writer how he creates such colorful, believable dialogue.
“That’s just how those characters talk, isn’t it?” he offered. Making it look easy is part of his brilliance.
Leonard’s son Peter also has a knack for putting pithy, entertaining lines in the mouths of quirky characters.
The younger Leonard, 56, an advertising executive, demonstrates with his debut novel, Quiver, a knack for tough-guy (and -gal) dialogue, skillful plotting and characterization.
Like his father, Peter plunges right into the action in a fashion demanded by readers bent on finishing a novel in the time it takes to fly from hinterlands to big city. That’s a compliment.
One minute, Kate McCall is mourning husband Owen, a millionaire race-car driver killed in a hunting accident in Michigan. The next, readers are taken back 25 years, as the two meet cute at Farmer Jack’s grocery store. Then it’s a quick skip to Guatemala, where Kate, a Peace Corps worker teaching English to second-graders, barely escapes from corrupt local cops.
Here’s where Leonard overdoes it a little: Kate is not only smart, funny, sexy and compassionate, she’s a lethal one-woman army, too. But without that setup, her aggressive response to later threats would be much harder to accept.
The author introduces a gaggle of characters whose fates are eventually entwined in a criminal conspiracy that inevitably goes comically — and darkly — awry. At the center of these hoodlums is good-looking, overconfident Jack Curran, Kate’s college boyfriend, newly released from prison and determined to reawaken that old love connection in the service of a criminal plot involving her teenage son Luke, still reeling from his father’s death.
Like his father, Peter Leonard uses pop-culture references to add dimension to characterization — risky, as many readers may not get the allusions, and they seldom age well. Characters listen to Drive-By Truckers, the White Stripes and Hank Williams Jr.; eat at P.F. Chang’s; talk like a Trekkie; watch Reservoir Dogs and Spider-Man 2; make fun of Lindsey Lohan and Nicole Richie; and read John Grisham and Stephen King.
He closes the book with the bodies of villains (and a nominal good guy) falling in rapid succession, not unlike the conclusion of a Martin Scorsese film.
It’s a bloody and ultimately satisfying end to a first novel from an author whose voice sounds familiar. No, it’s not as distinct or riveting as Elmore’s, but has its own appealing accent. Readers will decide if Peter Leonard’s debut is the start of a long career — with two novels already sold, his third is in progress.
Philip Booth is a Tampa writer who specializes in music, film and books.
Tuesday, June 10, 2008
“If It Takes You More Than Six Months to Write a Book, You’re Not Working.”
The Boston Globe
BYLINE: David Mehegan Globe Staff
Top writers feel heat from publishers’ presses Some resist call for a book each year
In an age when reading for pleasure is declining, book publishers increasingly are counting on their biggest moneymaking writers to crank out books at a rate of at least one a year, right on schedule, and sometimes faster than that.
Many top-selling writers, such as John Grisham and Mary Higgins Clark, have turned out at least one book annually for years. Now some writers are beginning to grumble about the pressure, and some are refusing to comply.
Not that writers are being explicitly harassed, but costly advance marketing plans are increasingly tied into the expectation that the most profitable authors will have a new book out at roughly the same time each year. In today’s intensely competitive marketplace, readers will turn to another author if a writer fails to come through at the usual time, which could cost a publisher big bucks.
Many writers below the top tier are also being urged to pick up the pace. In some cases, publishers have made a book-per-year promise an explicit condition of taking on a new author.
“It’s no problem, as long as you don’t have a life,” said Patricia Cornwell, the Massachusetts-based author of the enormously successful Kay Scarpetta crime thrillers. “The Scarpetta [manuscript] that’s due out Oct. 7 is due in a few weeks, because they have to reserve the storefront real estate and pay for it. If I don’t get the book turned in on time, they’ll be freaking out. If I miss my deadline, I miss the entire year. Sometimes there’s an overwhelming feeling of panic. It’s like a rock ‘n’ roll concert, and what if I don’t show up?”
Cornwell isn’t the only one. There are signs of a growing resistance among suspense authors to becoming factory producers, even if it costs them sales and readers.
“There’s pressure to treat authors like Coca-Cola,” said California thriller writer Brad Meltzer, who was asked to publish once a year but refused. “Every time you get a bunch of writers together, this is all they complain about. The trend is, `How many books can you put out?’ From building your reputation to get on the best-seller list, it’s gone to trying to get to the tippy-top of the list. It’s not worth it to me.”
No one is forced to sign a book-a-year contract, of course, but in the thriller and suspense genres, which make the biggest profits and dominate best-seller lists, publishers are desperate for writers to be as predictable as the seasons. “There’s enormous pressure on writers to repeat at least annually, and some can do it more frequently,” said Meg Ruley, a New York literary agent. “The rapid publishing sequence is a reality of the retail marketplace. In commercial fiction, it’s crucial. This is what we have come to.”
It’s all part of an ever-fiercer competition for a dwindling number of book buyers in the age of mass electronic entertainment. The huge success of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter novels has tended to obscure the underlying stagnation of book publishing. Book Industry Study Group, a research organization composed of publishers and printers, projects a 0.9 percent increase in trade book sales (that is, apart from text- and professional books) for 2008, and a measly 1.4 percent increase between 2009 and 2012. Retailers are also in a funk. First-quarter sales slumped by a combined 0.3 percent at Barnes & Noble, Borders, and Books-A-Million, the nation’s biggest booksellers. One result is more pressure on authors to gin up bigger and more frequent blockbusters.
Publishers insist they are not asking the impossible. “There’s no one rule that fits all,” said Lisa Gallagher, senior vice president and publisher of William Morrow. “We want the best book an author can write. It doesn’t make sense to force them to deliver on a schedule that will make them suffer.” Yet she acknowledges that “every book has a deadline,” and those who crank out a new novel per year enable the publisher to bring out last year’s book in paperback around the same time, doubling the opportunity to promote the brand.
In the various suspense genres - serial killers, international conspiracy, romance suspense, and traditional detective fiction - the public’s memory can be short. “If you don’t write a book a year, it might not be devastating, but it helps to keep your face out there,” said thriller writer David Baldacci, who says he doesn’t mind the pace.
Michael Palmer of Swampscott, author of medical thrillers including “The First Patient,” wrote a book every two or three years with his previous publisher, but his sales began to decline. “My reviews were uniformly good,” Palmer said. “I had to assume the reason was that I wasn’t getting a book out frequently enough.”
Then Palmer’s agent pitched him to Matthew Shear, publisher of St. Martin’s Press. “I told him, `I’m a big fan, but in this competitive market, I need a book a year. If you do that, I can increase your sales,”’ Shear said. Palmer agreed, with trepidation, and has made his deadlines for the first two books in a three-book contract. Like Cornwell, he has sweated bullets over the deadlines. Even so, he acknowledged, “I’ve gotten tons more mail and attention.”
Some writers contend the time pressure corrodes their work.
Boston’s Dennis Lehane tried the book-a-year pace once, to his regret. He had written a second book by the time his first novel, “A Drink Before the War,” was published in 1994. He wrote a third book, he said, “blazing fast, a real fluke.” His fourth took 2 1/2 years.
“Then they asked me to turn a book around in a year,” he said. “I did it ["Prayers for Rain” in 1999], but the week it was published I realized what would have made it a really good book. The anger of that realization haunted me. I said I would never go back on that hamster wheel. It’s what led me to write `Mystic River.”’ He took two years, published it in 2001, and it was his biggest book. The 2003 movie won two Academy Awards.
Not everyone minds a breakneck writing schedule. Allison Brennan of Sacramento, Calif., has published eight suspense/romance novels in the past 2 1/2 years. She writes while her five children are in school or asleep. “I would be so bored to write a book a year,” she said.
Boston’s Robert B. Parker, creator of the Spenser detective series, publishes four books a year in several different series. “I don’t know that I have an imagination that would allow me to write better than I do now, even if I had all the time in the world,” Parker said. “Elmore Leonard said, `If it takes you more than six months to write a book, you’re not working."’
Monday, June 09, 2008
No Power? No Problem!
Severe weather in the Detroit area caused many power outages last night. But that didn’t stop Elmore from working on his book!
Saturday, June 07, 2008
The Writing Code: Featuring Elmore
Library Journal Reviews
BYLINE: Linda Frederiksen
http://www.thewritingcode.com . 2007. DVD $545 + $15 s/h. Public performance. COMM
Elmore is seen throughout this program. Very much a sleeper project a long time in the making but worth checking out. The program was aired on PBS last fall and is now available on DVD, but obviously not at a consumer price point. - Gregg
Arguably the most important invention in human history, writing is fundamental as a communication tool and as a way of understanding both our collective past, present, and future. Program one of this three-part documentary, “The Greatest Invention,” explores the earliest forms of writing, from Chinese pictographs to Egyptian hieroglyphics while also discussing common features such as alphabets and syllabaries in the approximately 50 known writing systems. Part two, “The Art and the Craft,” asks the question, “What’s so great about writing?” while authors and academics share their passion for this invention that rivals the wheel in importance to humankind. “The Literate Society” establishes the close connection among writing, reading, and literacy. In the midst of a technological revolution similar to Gutenberg’s, reading and writing remain as transformative an experience as when these codes were first developed. This fast-paced tour de force of human history makes fascinating stops along the way to examine evidence of the writing record. Interviews feature an array of scholars and writers, including novelists Margaret Atwood and Elmore Leonard, poet Quincy Troupe, web developer Tim Berners-Lee, and psychologist Steven Pinker. More than 100 location shots from around the world further emphasize that writing is a unique way of being human, not an invention or possession of either the West or the East. A great deal of information is presented in a lighthearted, enthusiastic way. Highly recommended for general audiences.-Linda Frederiksen, Washington State Univ. Vancouver Lib.
Tuesday, June 03, 2008
French Documentary by Laurent Chalumeau
Elmore on French TV
The French understand Elmore Leonard in ways that are just not typical of most people. To be sure, Elmore is no Jerry Lewis in France, (thankfully) but he is celebrated. That’s why I was open to the idea of a French documentary for Canal Plus, a premium French cable channel, written by French writer, Laurent Chalumeau. I knew it would not contain a single liter of the usual boring crap you find in North American video “biographies.”
Laurent Chalumeau might bristle if you called him the “The French Elmore Leonard” but not if you called him Elmore’s number one fan in France. Laurent has, by his own admission, been “ripping off Elmore” since 1984 when he first became aware of him, reading Stephen King’s review of Glitz in The New York Times, then everything by Elmore he could get his hands on. He compared his Elmore Leonard epiphany to the conversion of St. Paul on the Road to Damascus.
Laurent Chalumeau began his writing career as a rock writer for the French equivalent of Rolling Stone. Since then, he has written several novels and screenplays and has pretty much “been there, done that” for most of his personal obsessions with the exception of one: to meet Elmore Leonard, the man who has been such an influence on his work for the past twenty five years.
Laurent came to Detroit in late May, hired a Detroit film crew and set about fulfilling his dream. He shot a couple of lengthy interviews with Elmore as well as an interview with yours truly, Gregg Sutter. He filmed a joint appearance by Elmore and Peter Leonard at an event at Border’s Books in Birmingham for Peter’s debut novel, Quiver. Later Elmore would say of Laurent’s interview: “his questions were hard!” But a good time was had by all, despite the extra brain work.
I don’t know when we can expect to see Laurent’s documentary on Elmore Leonard in France or anywhere else, but I predict that it will be the best damn documentary to come along since the BBC production, Elmore Leonard’s Criminal Records in 1991.
Monday, June 02, 2008
The Peter and Elmore Show
On May 29, Peter Leonard had his second book store event for his debut novel, Quiver at Border’s Books in Birmingham, Michigan. This was a hometown event and the entire Leonard family was there as well as many of his old friends. Elmore appeared with Peter and asked him questions about life and writing for about twenty minutes followed by a Q&A with the audience and a book signing. The whole thing was filmed by Laurent Chalumeau for a French Documentary. Peter’s signing was a tremendous success and Elmore was very happy for Peter.
It may have been Peter’s event all the way, but that did not stop a few intrepid audience members from putting Elmore to work signing their books. A gentleman came from Traverse City, 230 miles to the North, with five cloth shopping bags filled with hardcovers. He left happy.
Check out Peter Leonard’s website for more pictures.
Saturday, May 31, 2008
“One foot on the high road, one in the gutter”
From James W. Hall’s Blog:
Twenty years ago I wrote Elmore Leonard a fan letter. I’d taught LaBrava in one of my classes and wanted to let him know that not only was it a super enjoyable read, but it “stood up to literary inspection.” My students found, for instance, patterns of black and white imagery running through the novel. Amazingly, he wrote back. He thanked me for my kind words, then went on to say that he didn’t think he’d do very well in my class since he had no idea what an image pattern was. Oh, that Dutch.
Great writers like Leonard or Frost or Twain reward the careful reader as richly as the reader who doesn’t give a damn about any of that fancy crap. The best writers always do that. They have it both ways—one foot on the high road, one in the gutter. It’s pretty simple really. That’s why I write this stuff. I want to learn how to do that.
Tuesday, May 27, 2008
Washington Post Profile of Elmore
Neely Tucker, Washington Post staff writer, profiled Elmore in that paper today in an article entitled, ”A Blast of Bullets, Beneath Elmore Leonard’s Cool Exterior Lurks a Crime-Novel Mastermind”
Neely Tucker, as some of you may know, is the name of a character in Cuba Libre. The non-fictional Neely also helped Elmore and I find a guy in Rwanda to help us with the Pagan Babies research.
Jackie Reads Elmore
CNN.com
With soaring gas prices and travel costs, the cheapest route to whisk yourself away this summer is through a good book. Ten top-selling authors share their favorite lazy-summer-day reads.
Jackie Collins “Anything by Elmore Leonard. Short, smart, hilarious.”
Friday, May 23, 2008
More Cool French Covers
I can’t resist them!
Thursday, May 22, 2008
Peter Leonard Signing in Ann Arbor
Last night Peter Leonard had his first bookstore appearance and signing for his debut novel, Quiver. He brought along his dad, Elmore, who quizzed him about his book in front of a nice crowd. Thanks to Nicola Books in Ann Arbor for the pictures.
Meltdown!
The server that elmoreleonard.com sits on has had major problems in the last 24 hours. I hope the worst is over. When informed of this development Elmore said: What’s a server?