Pulp Fiction

Master crime writer Elmore Leonard is shrinking. He used to be 5'9", he says, but not anymore. As the money from his 32 books makes his bank account grow, his body gets smaller. He figures it comes with getting older--he is now 70--and in not getting enough exercise. Sitting at his desk knocking off a novel a year isn't going to stretch his spine. And jogging, as far as he's concerned, is a criminal activity. Unless you're running from the law, he doesn't think you should have to run any farther than it takes to catch a cab.

We're sitting in his comfortable house in Bloomfield Village, Michigan, a pleasant neighborhood with upscale pretensions. Because of the books he writes, books about criminals who rob people who live in houses just like these, you can't help wondering if he's ever been tempted to try it himself, to put his expertise about picking locks and making plastique bombs from hardware store materials to an even more profitable use.

Nah, he tells me. He fumbles with the keys to his hotel room when he's on the road, so he'd never be able to pick a lock, even though he's read plenty on the subject. The easiest way, he says, is to get a fire key that opens all the doors in a building. That's how hotel burglars often do it, a cop once told him.

"Come on," I say. "Surely you have been tempted. If you worked for a bank, you would at least think about getting away with something. That's all your characters think about--how to make a big score. What about hitting your neighborhood? There are doctors, lawyers, executives and professional basketball players here."

"I can't imagine committing a burglary, because it's so scary," he says, "especially if you know somebody's there. Of course, most burglars go in during the day, or at night if no one is home."

"How well do you know your neighbors?" I ask. "Do you spend much time with them?"

"The fellow next door is a cancer specialist who deals only with terminal cases. We were at their house for dinner and his wife asked me, 'Why do you write what you do? You live in this nice house, this nice neighborhood. How can you write what you do about these people?'"

"There you go," I goad. "Critical neighbors--the perfect couple to hit. So, how would you do it?"

Leonard looks at me like I'm crazy but then decides to humor me. If he were the type of guy who was willing to risk his life in pursuit of criminal behavior, he'd go in brashly rather than try to sneak around in a dark house.

"I lean toward the desperado idea," he says. It's an odd image because Leonard looks like an ornithologist who spends a lot of time peering at stuffed birds at the natural history museum. "I'd wait for a party," he continues. "When I see the cars lined up and a couple of guys and I go in with guns, put everybody on the floor, take all their money. Then somebody runs up to the bedroom and grabs the jewels and we get out."

I'm disappointed. His books are so original, his bad guys so imaginative. Surely they'd frown on such an amateur burglary. Of course, it's unlikely that Leonard will ever need money badly enough to resort to crime--except in his fiction. He's a writer who has gone from a $1250 advance for his 1961 Western, Hombre, to a three-book, $4.5 million deal after Newsweek dubbed him "the best American writer of crime fiction alive, possibly the best we've ever had."

As if writing 12 best-sellers in 12 years weren't enough, Leonard now finds himself in a partnership with Quentin Tarantino, Hollywood's hottest writer-director. Tarantino, whose Pulp Fiction reminds many of Leonard's work, and his producing partner Lawrence Bender have optioned four of Leonard's books--Bandits, Freaky Deaky, Killshot and Rum Punch. Tarantino has said that he'd like to write and direct Killshot and oversee the other three.

Leonard claims it's a natural marriage. "Tarantino specializes in set pieces. In Pulp Fiction these two guys are going to kill somebody and they are talking about what you call a Quarter Pounder with cheese in Paris--a Royale with cheese. And that's what I do. He lets his scenes play, his people talk. You keep waiting--what are they talking about? It's so interesting, so natural, so human."

Tarantino admits to "owing a big debt to Leonard. He helped me figure out my style. He was the first writer I'd ever read who let mundane conversations inform the characters. And then all of a sudden--woof!--you're into whatever story you're telling."

After Leonard saw Tarantino's early works, such as Reservoir Dogs and True Romance, he recognized a kindred spirit. "People say how violent Reservoir Dogs is. I don't think so. It's the expectation of violence. As Tarantino says, he has violence hovering over his stories all the time, and you never know when it's going to land on you. He says if you get 20 minutes into a movie and you know what's going to happen, that's not telling a story. You tell a story, you make up stuff as you go along. What has happened with my stuff is that it has always been cut down to keep the scenes moving with action, using just enough dialogue to impart information. But Tarantino is the guy who can draw the names: Everybody wants to work for him. So maybe he'll get it right. He was asked if he'd do Reservoir Dogs again the same way, and he said exactly the same, although instead of doing it for $1.3 million he would do it for $3 million. But it would still be a little picture. I see my books as little, low-budget pictures."

"I love Elmore Leonard," Tarantino says. "True Romance is like an Elmore Leonard movie."

Tarantino isn't the only one currently on the Leonard bandwagon. MGM/UA is behind Gel Shorty, Leonard's jaundiced look at low-rent movers and shakers in Hollywood. Movies about the movies seem incestuous, but this one has attracted the kind of cast that creates a buzz. Fresh off his comeback role in Pulp Fiction, John Travolta will play the Miami loan shark Chili Palmer. Danny DeVito will be the superstar Martin Weir, Gene Hackman the schlock producer Harry Zimm and Rene Russo the B-movie-star Karen Flores.

If Get. Shorty seems like a cynical Hollywood screed, it's not without motivation. All authors have at least one horror story about seeing their work bastardized by entertainment industry dimwits, and Leonard has several, including The Big Bounce with Ryan O'Neal, The Moonshine War with the miscast Alan Alda and Richard Widmark and Stick, which Burt Reynolds starred in, directed and, according to Leonard, destroyed.

Leonard will never forget going to a theater in New York to see The Big Bounce. "I got in late," he says, "and the woman in front of me said to her husband, 'This is the worst picture I've ever seen.' And the three of us left. I still haven't seen the whole thing. It comes on TV once in a while and I'll watch a few minutes, then switch to something else. It's the second-worst movie ever made."

He won't say what comes in first, but Stick has to be a contender. "Stick became a revenge movie," he says, "but it certainly wasn't a revenge book. The departure from the script didn't bother me--you know that's likely to happen. But if you're going to do my book, let's try to get the sound of it, the feeling. Let's try to get actors whom you don't see acting."

As far as Leonard is concerned, Reynolds is history. He's more interested in who's going to be cast in the four movies Tarantino wants to do, or in Pronto, which Stonehenge Co. has optioned, or whether one of his favorite actors, Harry Dean Stanton, will ever get to play the judge in a miniseries of Leonard's book Maximum Bob. "I'm interested in good movies with good actors," Leonard says. "The movie versions of my books have been too theatrical. With the movies I like, I don't know what they're about, what's going to happen. Like Michelangelo Antonioni's L'Avventura. You don't know what's going to happen in that picture. I like the characters, I wonder what they're up to and who's going to end up with whom. In some of my books I have a guy who walks the line. You don't know if he's good or bad, which way he's going to go. That's a problem in adapting for the screen, no question about it. When you bring it down, all the good stuff is gone."

•

By the time Newsweek canonized him with their cover story in 1985 (Time also joined in, calling him the Dickens from Detroit), Leonard was getting weary of being compared to Raymond Chandler or Dashiell Hammett.

"I was never influenced by Chandler or Hammett. I barely read Hammett. Chandler, I've read maybe three of his books," he says. "I've never done a private eye, I've never written in the first person. My ideas come from my head, from real life, from the way I see what's going on with people who are walking the line, who want to get away with something, who get into a hustle. These are the people who intrigue me. Some guy who has been in prison and has come out, what is he going to do now? I'm doing something different and the publishers and reviewers don't know what it is."

Leonard would rather you look to George Higgins' The Friends of Eddie Coyle. "It's the best crime book there is. It loosened me up. After I read that I decided to be freer with the language, use more obscenities, get into scenes quicker without setting them. I noticed how he opened scenes with people talking before you knew where you were or even before you knew who they were. I liked the way that worked."

Leonard also does his research. He writes knowingly of towing barges and building skyscrapers, of wiring explosives to cars and embalming a body. His books detail his knowledge of guns, comparing Belgian FN-FALs with AK-47s, or discussing how to convert an AR-15 Colt into an M-16. ("The best assault guns," he says, "are the H&K MP-5 and the cut-down version, a Steyr Aug 223 30-round magazine. The German light machine gun, the (continued on page 140)Elmore Leonard(continued from page 124) MG-42, is better than the M-60 American version.") His good guys are often caught between ambivalence and temptation, and his bad guys are not without ambition: Some want to con millions from their employers, others want to rob a bank in every state of the Union except Alaska.

The first dead person Leonard ever saw up close was an old black woman "who was turning white in patches where her skin seemed to be peeling off." She was lying nude on a table in a morgue, decomposing. Leonard was there getting background for a book. "She had been found in her bathtub several days after she died," he recalls. "Scattered around the main room were people lying on tray tables the way they died. Some were rigid. They didn't look like people anymore, they were more like mannequins.

"When I was researching Bandits I called a friend who is a mortician, and I spent a day with him. We picked up the body of a woman who had committed suicide. I watched it go through the embalming process. When I saw that the embalming fluid was called Perma-Glo and that the little machine that pumps it in was called a Porta-Boy, I thought, They're playing right into my hands."

That's also how Leonard felt when he finally met county circuit court judge Marvin Mounts in Palm Beach. They had been corresponding for six years, and when Leonard was in town to give a talk, the judge invited him to his house.

"We sat on his patio, and he brought out his box of photographs and legal materials. He told me about different cases: 'Here's a guy who was arrested for bestiality--he raped a chicken. And here's a photograph of the chicken.' I said, 'How do they know he did it?' He said, 'He had chicken feathers on his pubic hair. Here's a guy with a butcher knife in his head.' So he was telling me these stories, see? And I thought, Gee, there's something here. Why don't I do a judge? What kind of judge? A crooked judge or a hard-sentencing judge? A judge who has made a lot of enemies and somebody wants to kill him and attempts are made on his life? And that's how Maximum Bob started."

His latest book is called Riding the Rap and involves a character from the book before that, Pronto, who gets kidnapped. "The kidnappers don't call it that. They call it holding hostage. The idea is, you kidnap somebody who's got a lot of money, who's made the money illegally, like a savings and loan exec who declares bankruptcy but has $30 million stashed away. You keep him blindfolded so he doesn't know where he is or what's going on. And you don't say anything to him for a while. Then you say: 'You want to get out of here? You figure out how to get us so much money, and if we like the idea, we'll go through with it and let you go. If we don't like the idea, you're dead. So it better be the best idea you've ever had in your life.' There's never a ransom note or any contact with people outside. You deal just with him. But of course the three antagonists don't get along, and I have more fun with them than with the good guys."

•

By his own standards, Leonard isn't so tough. He never did brutish work as a boy, never got into fights, never carried a gun into dark places (though he did chase rats with a stick down Detroit alleys). It wasn't like that at all for Elmore Leonard, who was born in New Orleans on October 11, 1925.

His father worked for General Motors, scouting locations for car dealerships, and the family moved between Texas, Oklahoma, Michigan and Tennessee six times in nine years. They settled in Detroit in 1934, when Elmore was nine.

During Leonard's sophomore year in high school, a boy sitting near him told him Elmore was no kind of name for a kid and dubbed him "Dutch," after the knuckleball pitcher for the Washington Senators. The nickname stuck.

In 1942, during his senior year, his father transferred to Washington, but Leonard chose to live with his football coach and graduate from the University of Detroit High School. Leonard tried to enlist in the Marines at 17 but was rejected because of a bad eye. A year later he entered the Navy reserves and spent most of his time maintaining airstrips in New Guinea, drinking beer and watching Humphrey Bogart movies.

When he returned from the Navy he enrolled at the University of Detroit and, in 1949, married his college girlfriend, Beverly Cline. Within a year they had their first child, and by 1965 they had their fourth. Leonard's first job out of college was as an office boy for the Campbell-Ewald advertising firm in Detroit. Eventually he moved up to copywriter and worked on car and truck promotions. For two hours before he left for work he would write stories about the West--a place he had never been.

"I decided that if I was going to write I should go about it in a professional way--pick a genre to learn how to write. I chose Westerns because of movies like Stagecoach, The Plainsman, My Darling Clementine, Red River."

Westerns were also popular in such magazines as The Saturday Evening Post and Collier's and in pulps such as Dime Western and Zane Grey's Western. "Before I started doing research I wrote a couple of Westerns and sent them to the pulp magazines, but they were rejected because they were too relentless, too gray," Leonard recalls. "I didn't have any comic relief, no blue sky. I then began to research the Apaches, cavalry, cowboys, the Southwest. I subscribed to Arizona Highways, which gave me illustrations. If I needed a canyon, I'd go through the magazine, find one and describe it. It was better than being there."

By 1961, with the publication of Hombre, he felt confident enough to give up his advertising job. The Western Writers of America ranked Hombre among the 25 best Westerns ever written. But a funny thing happened: The market for Westerns dried up and Leonard didn't publish another book for eight years.

He kept busy, though. "After I quit my job I freelanced for at least four and a half years, writing industrial movies and films for the Encyclopaedia Britannica, all kinds of advertising stuff, everything but cocktail napkins. Television dried up the market for Westerns. At the height of their popularity there were more than 30 Westerns a week on prime time. And people stopped buying the pulps." Leonard still wanted to write books, so he looked around for a subject he was comfortable with. His mind eventually turned to crime.

He proved to be as prolific a crime writer as he had been with Westerns. Mr. Majestyk appeared in 1974 and became a movie that starred Charles Bronson. 52 Pick-Up (1974) was made into a film starring Roy Scheider and Ann-Margret in 1986. Over the next ten years he wrote ten more novels: Swag, The Hunted, Unknown Man No. 89 (which Alfred Hitchcock had wanted to turn into a movie), The Switch, Gunsights, City Primeval, Gold Coast, Split Images, Cat Chaser and Stick. La Brava, considered by many to be Leonard's finest novel, appeared in 1983 and won an Edgar Allan Poe Award from the Mystery Writers of America, edging out John le Carré's Little Drummer Girl and Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose as the best mystery novel of the year. Glitz, published in 1985, was the socalled breakthrough book, which stayed on the best-seller lists for 16 weeks. It made Leonard a multimillion-dollar writer.

•

He's rich, he's suburban, he's the grandfather of six, he's nothing like his low-life characters. Leonard looks at the con men and killers he writes about and sees a common thread. "They're lazy. They don't want to work, they don't want to do it the hard way. They don't want to have to learn how to do anything. It's like being a drunk: If you devoted as much effort to something worthwhile as you do to drinking, it could be worth money." Drinking is an area where Leonard can write from personal experience. His battle with alcoholism lasted 35 years.

"I got into drinking because I was shy, somewhat introverted, self-conscious, and it brought me out. It was the macho thing to do."

His experience with alcohol brought out some of his sharpest, most descriptive writing. In Freaky Deaky he describes the ritual morning after: "Being sick was part of waking up. Cleaning up a bathroom that looked like somebody'd been killing chickens in it." Elsewhere he described the day's first drink: "Vodka sitting on the toilet tank while you took a shower, something to hold you till the bars opened at seven."

He joined Alcoholics Anonymous, the same year his 25-year marriage to Beverly came to an end. "Admitting you're alcoholic is not necessarily accepting that fact," he concedes. "Once you accept it, if you have any sense at all, you realize you can't drink. It's that simple. You're going to die or you're going to have mental problems if you continue."

It took him nearly three more years (and three more books) to put booze behind him. On January 24, 1977, at 9:30 in the morning, he poured himself a Scotch and ginger ale, gulped it down and never drank again. "I drank from the time I was 16 until I quit when I was 52. And I had more fun when I was drinking than at any other time."

A new woman in his life, Joan Shepard, helped him get through withdrawal and became his second wife in 1979. Leonard grew to depend on her opinion. She read and critiqued all his work before he sent it out, and she often came up with titles. But in the fall of 1992 she began to have trouble breathing, and by Christmas she was diagnosed as having lung cancer. She died just two weeks later.

"I couldn't believe it," Leonard says sadly. "We both thought that we were going to last forever. Her mother died at 95, mine at 94. Joan was only 64." She used to tell him that if she went first, he should marry a younger woman. He said never, but he ended up doing just that. "I hadn't dated in more than 40 years," he says. "But when I met Christine, it happened so fast."

Christine Kent was in charge of the gardening crew that took care of his flower beds. She was 45 and had married twice herself, and Leonard was taken with her knowledge of movies and books. He asked her out in June, six months after Joan's death. Two months later they married. "I think I need to be married," Leonard says. "And she gets along with my kids--she's contemporary with a couple of them."

To amuse his new wife, he sometimes pulls out his file of letters from readers. In a time when faxes, modems and the telephone have made letter writing a lost art, he still hears from his readers in longhand.

Sometimes it's pleasant: "I have never written anyone a fan letter in my life. My husband is getting tired of me spending more time in the sack with a Leonard book than with him, so I told him, 'Get my attention."

Sometimes it's informative, like this one from a convict: "I thought you might be interested in a report on your growing popularity among this prison's hard-core readers. While Harold Robbins, Sidney Sheldon and Lawrence Sanders remain the most generally popular authors here, more and more of our hard-core are discovering you. This group includes a few college-educated whites, quite a few American-born blacks, pre-Mariel Cubans and heroin dealers. Your books don't seem to have attracted the cocaine and crack people yet--they are younger, wilder and less educated. The Italians like you but prefer Judith Krantz and Sidney Sheldon, anything about the lush life in New York City. Jamaicans read Westerns, Africans read nonfiction, Indians and Pakistanis read The Wall Street Journal."

The nastier the letter, the greater the charge. His favorite is this one: "I just finished your book Split Images and it is dull, uninteresting and, most of all, it used such foul language that is unnecessary. Why did I buy it? Sounded like a good mystery with good statements from the Chicago Tribune, the Detroit News and others. How much did you have to bribe them to say such nice things about your book? Maybe they are as low-down as you are. I threw it in the trash so no one else can read it, even my husband. Since foul language is all you understand, you are a fucking shitty half-assed person to write such trash! How anyone can stand you is beyond me. Hell, I'm not a prude, but goddamn! A good book can be written without your kind of foul language. Too bad you don't try it. I will certainly never recommend your book to anyone."

"I just finished reading Bandits, and the ending was so goofy it made me furious," another reader wrote. "What a stupid ending. Roy gets a bullet, and a murderous Indian and a spaced-out rich girl walk off with all the dough. Please, no more stupid books. P.S. The ending of Stick was almost as goofy and unsatisfying. You're a weird guy, dude."

That's OK with Leonard. They may not like his endings, they may not like his grammar or his language, they may think he's weird. But they never write to say they didn't finish reading his books. Because there's one thing about an Elmore Leonard novel: You can't put it down. And as long as even his most severe critics keep reading until the end, Leonard doesn't have too much to worry about.

Here's a guy arrested for bestiality. How did they know he did it? He had chicken feathers on his pubic hair.