I feel like I chose the wrong introduction to Elmore Leonard, a writer whose books have been turned into several movies I've liked and who I've until now read just one book by, a very good western. I was looking for one biography and one critical study. I chose this biography because it is the most recent (the other was written a decade earlier); I chose a particular critical study also because it is the most recent, but it is limited in scope. I stayed away from the Twayne series book on Leonard, because the series seems so formulaic and basic, even as I'm now thinking the one in the series may actually have been more in line with what I wanted—a true critical introduction.
Challen's book is the work of a fan. Not being an aficianado of Leonard's, other than the impression he's worn on me via film and the one book, I actually found myself a bit turned off by the work. You can sell a subject too hard, and that's how I felt here. I'm not particularly keen on violence, but there's supposed to be lots in Leonard (so this book makes clear, with gusto). So why am I reading more by him? Because I was impressed by the one book.
As a fan, Challen doesn't engage much in actual critical analysis. More often, the work talks about the various books and how Leonard writes. Challen did a lot of interviews with people who knew Leonard, many of whom are also fans. So there's lots of gushing about how great Leonard is as a person and as a writer. And I guess that was what Challen aimed for—nothing negative or even anything that might be seen as such. This is not a warts and all biography.
So what did I learn about the writer? He comes from a middle-class background; his father worked in corporate America, and Leonard sort of followed in that vein, becoming a copywriter for an ad agency. That was his day job. Most of his life was spent in Detroit. His off-time job was writing, at which he worked hard. He started at a time when the short story era was just coming to an end. What I mean by that—people obviously still write short stories—is that it was the end of the era where magazines were devoted to stories and had substantial subscribers and paid substantial amounts. So Leonard sold his first story for a thousand bucks, and this at a time when that was several months pay at his regular job (today, you might get a few thousand in a glossy magazine, but it would likely take only story an issue; most publications pay nothing or a few hundred if lucky). It was a western. An agent noticed the work and got in touch with him, offering to help. Leonard took her up on it.
For many years, Leonard churned out western short stories, selling them for a hundred or so dollars apiece. It wasn't enough to quit working, which the agent made clear. Indeed, the agent worked with writers like Leonard in the hope of one day scoring big, once such authors started writing novels. And so Leonard did. Again, he was paid a modest sum, something like three thousand dollars, which if you think about how much he was paid for that first story, tells you how little/much such work paid: not quite a year's salary with no guarantee of more money to come. But Leonard plowed on, and his books sold for movie production, at which he made a little more money.
His agent, meanwhile, started to push Leonard to write something other than westerns (indeed, other than stories involving Indians). She knew the market for such stuff was drying up. She encouraged him to write adventure tales. And so he started.
And that's, of course, when he started to really hit the big time—or at least, do well enough that he felt he really could quit his day job writing ad copy. From there, he'd churn out mystery books with regularity, selling quite a few to film companies, and also getting work as a screenwriter here and there (his first screenplays were for a series of documentaries). As decades passed, his reputation grew until two decades in or so he started hitting the best seller list.
As a writer, Leonard treated his profession like a job, writing each day from about 9:00 to 5:30. He worked longhand, on the first draft, and then with a typewriter thereafter. Very old school. He didn't plot out his novels. Rather, he let the characters take him where the books were to go. Dialogue was his huge focus, enough that you'd think, based on what he said in interviews and what Challen writes about him, that his books were just collections of dialogue, which they are not—there are plenty of descriptions, even if they aren't florid. But I do think it interesting that he didn't know where a book was going or how it was to end until about forty pages to the end; given how intricate some of his plots are, one would think he planned a bit more. What he did do, though, he says, is as he was nearing that end, he'd realize certain things were important and then go back and add in the scenes that were needed to make that ending work. He was clearly a talented guy. I find that plotting something out in advance tends to give a work a kind of shallowness and fakeness, because one is forcing characters to do things rather than letting the characters guide themselves, so I understand his point; on the other hand, when one is writing longer works, it's also easy to lose track of characters and history and so forth, which is a big challenge of book-length fiction. It's also easy for a character to become completely predictable in terms of the plot that comes into being. So in those senses, Leonard seems to have been gifted with a good memory and kind of natural ease of finding ways to keep characters from simply falling into standard tropes, or at least that's my impression of him. I guess I'm going to find out over the coming months, as I read a selection of his work.
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