Dan Borris/The New York Times, via Redux
Elmore Leonard’s Rocky Road
to Fame and Fortune
It took
him 30 years of writing to make it big. Maybe his drinking slowed him up. Or
publishers didn’t know how to sell him. But no one ever said Leonard didn’t
know how to write.
Before he hit the
best-seller list for the first time with Glitz in 1985, Elmore Leonard
spent more than 30 years writing pulp crime novels and westerns that sold in
paperback racks in drug stores and bus stations. After Glitz, he’d keep
writing for 28 more years, until he died last summer
at 87. He became a mainstay on the best-seller list, praised by critics for his
lean prose and colorful, propulsive stories, and above all for his mastery of
the rhythm and melody of American speech. But well before he became our most
famous crime novelist, Leonard was doing all the things for which he would
later be celebrated. It just took people a while to catch on to how good he
really was.
Now Leonard is being
canonized by The Library of America, which is collecting his novels in what
will eventually be a 3-volume set. The just released Volume One features
Leonard’s early Detroit crime novels (Fifty-Two Pick Up, Swag, Unknown Man
No. 89, and The Switch). Volume II appears next year, Volume III in
2016. If you haven’t read Leonard’s work from the ’70s, you have no idea how
much fun you’re going to have.
For more on the “overnight
success” of a working writer, let’s turn to this fine profile of Leonard by
Mike Lupica. “St. Elmore’s Fire” originally appeared in the April 1987 issue of
Esquire and is featured here with the author’s permission.
There he is at Tigers
Stadium in Detroit on a September baseball night hanging on to summer. He is
getting ready to watch Jack Morris, the Tigers ace, go for win number nineteen
against the Toronto Blue Jays. Elmore Leonard looks just like what a drunk
mistakenly called him once in his drinking days, back at this joint called
Stan’s in Fort Lauderdale: little Princeton s.o.b. Tweed jacket, highforeheaded,
soft voice, round tortoiseshell glasses, corduroy slacks. Not anything like a
tough-guy novelist who works the street the way Updike works the suburbs.
“You know who you look
like?” says an usher.
He’s stopped next to
Leonard’s seat on the aisle. The usher is from the Bismarck Food Service,
wearing a blue Bismarck jersey, carrying a Bismarck bucket filled with soft
drinks. Name tag says MARK, IRVING. He is fifty maybe.
Leonard says, “Who?” Then
he does what he does about every ten minutes, which is light up a True green
and smoke it down to his wrist.
“Elmore Leonard the
writer.” It is one though to Irving Mark of Bismarck, no commas.
“Well, I am.”
“No kidding?” Mark puts
down the bucket.
“No kidding.”
“I just bought your book, Glitz.
The one in Atlantic City with the cop and the hooker and the crazy guy and so
forth. Five bucks.”
“Well, thank you.”
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/09/13/elmore-leonard-s-rocky-road-to-fame-and-fortune.html
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