Born 100 years ago this month, the great American crime writer Elmore Leonard left behind more than 40 novels, dozens of stories, his own screenplays, and numerous screen adaptations. His centenary has generated a flurry of activity, including a series of Penguin Modern Classics reissues and a new biography by CM Kushins, Cooler Than Cool: The Life and Work of Elmore Leonard, which carefully details the remarkable discipline Leonard brought to his craft.
After years writing westerns, in 1972 Leonard read George V Higgins’s The Friends of Eddie Coyle – “I finished the book in one sitting and felt as if I’d been set free” – and everything changed. Armed with a new sense of expressive dialogue, ambiguous characters and contemporary settings, Leonard turned to the place he knew best and set an unmatched run of novels in his hometown of Detroit, beginning with 1974’s 52 Pickup.
A decade into this creative burst, Time bestowed a moniker so enduring it’s on his tombstone – “the Dickens of Detroit”. Less snappily, a later interviewer called him a “scribe of the downside of the American dream”, which neatly captures his characters’ disappointments, their often desperate desires to be someone (or someway) else. Because his characters don’t speak in such terms, Leonard’s writing doesn’t say such things directly. Instead, even at their funniest, his novels’ persuasively untidy storytelling reflects the characters’ turmoil. Few places could have provided a more hospitable setting for such turmoil than Leonard’s Detroit, which has repeatedly withstood the most acute extremes of America’s 20th century.
As Kushins shows, Leonard really broke through in his fifties, winning an Edgar Award for 1983’s LaBrava and becoming a bestseller with 1985’s Glitz (which garnered his second Irish Times review, deriding him as “fashionable”). Ever since, his peers have bowed to Leonard’s writing, particularly to his characters and dialogue.
RM Block
That dialogue is hard to quote briefly – its joys are in slight phrasings, grace notes, or pay-offs to a page and more of build-up – but it dazzles writers you might not expect, such as Nora Ephron, the patron saint of romantic comedies: “Even the not-great Elmore Leonards are redeemed by great, punchy, pitch-perfect Elmore Leonard dialogue and great Elmore Leonard sentences, long, looping, twisting strings of words that turn around and back up and go the other way.” Elsewhere, his influence is unsurprising: try imagining Quentin Tarantino without Elmore Leonard. (Charmingly, Kushins notes, teenaged Tarantino was caught shoplifting Leonard’s The Switch.)
In quieter ways, Leonard’s work influences crime writing very different from his own, such as the haunting novels of Megan Abbott, who has praised his unwillingness to write characters as heroes and villains. That’s both an aesthetic strength that allows his characters to surprise on the page, and an ethical one, displaying a fundamental generosity toward people backed into corners not always of their own making.
His career is full of representative highlights, each offering a different entry point.
Hombre (1961)
Although Leonard’s trademarks are still veiled, Hombre – remarkably taut, even for a western – foreshadows the voice he’d later find. It’s not the place to start reading him, but if you’re already a fan, the storytelling’s sharp – corrupt exploitation of the indigenous, a slow-motion chase through a dangerous landscape, scorn for those who’d accommodate segregationists – and it’s worth seeing how he wrote before he became “Elmore Leonard”.
Valdez Is Coming (1970)
After shooting Rincón, a black man falsely accused by white cattleman Tanner, Mexican constable Valdez tries to get reparations for Rincón’s widow from Tanner and his lackey RL Davis: “Bob Valdez did not like RL Davis or any of the RL Davises in the world. He was civil, he listened to them, but God, there were a lot of them to listen to.” Brutally contemptuous, Tanner refuses to pay, and a war of attrition ensues. Complex and rough around the edges, Valdez Is Coming signals Leonard’s taste for not quite providing the expected resolution.
52 Pickup (1974)
Businessman Harry Mitchell thinks he’s meeting his young girlfriend only to find armed blackmailers waiting. When he rejects their demands and confesses to his wife Barbara, the violence escalates and the couple must find a way out. Leonard would later recognise 52 Pickup, his first Detroit novel, as a real leap forward, as “the beginning of the voice that I’ve developed”. That voice is suddenly recognisable as Leonard: this is where the lights all come on. His ear for dialogue is apparent even in glances, such as when a blackmailer describes his cinematic aspirations to make “not just a dirty movie, a dirty film”.
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City Primeval (1980)
Leonard’s work on this novel began with “Impressions of Murder,” a powerful 1978 essay for which he embedded himself with the Detroit police. Capping a career-defining run of Detroit titles – Swag (1976), Unknown Man No 89 (1977), The Switch (1978) – City Primeval isn’t just set in Detroit, it’s also about living there through the city’s worst crises. When antagonist (and repeat offender) Clement opens the novel by shooting someone, he doesn’t realise he’s just killed a judge, albeit a corrupt and wildly unloved one. After homicide cop Raymond Cruz gets the case, his cat-and-mouse with Clement displays a real intimacy with the city’s sweep. Leonard gives his secondary characters affecting depth, whether they’re righteous, pathetic or just getting by, making this dark story deceptively light on its feet.
LaBrava (1983)
It’s easy to see why LaBrava won the Edgar Award, even against a shortlist that included Umberto Eco and John le Carré: the dim-but-dangerous criminals, the vivid dialogue that’s simultaneously lean and happy to take its sweet time circling a point. The slyly paced plot sneaks up on classic noir films, like the ones Jean starred in before retiring to Florida, where this novel is set. Her neighbour, Detroit expat and photographer Joe LaBrava, is an ex-Secret Service/IRS agent whose capacity for observing is crucial to the story. His antagonist, disgraced cop Richie, is inept but still dangerous: “I know his development was arrested. He probably should be too.” Unusually for Leonard, this has something like an actual twist, delivered with wonderful concision through characters complex enough to be surprised by their own decisions.
Freaky Deaky (1988)
A dark story with a satirical edge, this Detroit-set novel – long Leonard’s favourite – is a great place to start, full of thwarted ambitions and coulda-been-contenders addled by nostalgia (plus steady tabs of LSD). The main action revolves around Robin, a writer of sexually violent historical romance novels but formerly a 1960s radical, in it for kicks more than principles. Now, “tired of waiting for a time to come ... tired of remembering”, she’s out to extort money from the millionaire brothers she thinks grassed her up back in the day, while suspended bomb squad cop Chris tries to stop her. As it picks up speed, Robin’s plan draws in lapsed revolutionaries, bystanders and catatonic millionaires, each bearing complications she never sees coming. Throughout, Leonard’s plotting gives them all roles to play, while keeping the pacing tight and the stakes clear.
Get Shorty (1990)
Familiar though the 1995 film is, the novel is a revelation. All the filmmakers had to do was get out of Leonard’s way: everything that sings on screen is already dialled in. The storytelling and dialogue are such marvels that writers as different as Ciaran Carson and Maeve Binchy listed it among their books of the year in this paper. As often with Leonard, everybody here wants to be something else: a studio exec instead of an actor, a high roller instead of a dry cleaner, a producer instead of a debt collector, a “real” film-maker instead of a third-rate B-movie director. These are characters and themes perfectly suited to the setting and plot, making this a sharp story smartly told, full of twists and detours that are their own reward.
Out of Sight (1996)
The excellent Steven Soderbergh adaptation was burnished by David Holmes’s bouncy score and Jennifer Lopez’s and George Clooney’s charms, but this novel is surprisingly melancholic. Leonard conjures a deceptively loose vibe while setting up the pieces for a long pay-off, a structure that veils how deeply his writing understands the sadness of disappointing lives spent “listening to sociopaths offering their credentials, misfits trying not to sound like losers”. Even during their memorable love scene at a Detroit hotel, Jack and Karen never really think things might work out. Among the best of Leonard’s work, this is a sexy, funny, moving novel that finally belongs to Karen, who, like many of Leonard’s women, is smarter than most men around her.
When the Women Come Out to Dance: Stories (2002)
This collection includes Leonard’s novella Fire in the Hole, the starting point for the TV series Justified. US marshal Raylan Givens is on the hunt here and crosses paths with the most violent of far-right racist groups in the US, making this compact story among Leonard’s most socially explicit works, and not even a little out of date. From the same year, Tishomingo Blues became Leonard’s enduring favourite, drawing a long, glowing review from Margaret Atwood.
Picket Line and Other Stories (2025)
This new release presents a previously unpublished novella, written (as Kushins details) for a movie that never came together, its sympathetic depiction of strikers bearing traces of progressive 1970s Hollywood. Penguin has also included the last two stories Leonard published in his lifetime, Chick Killer (featuring Out of Sight’s Karen) and Ice Man, a section of Blue Dreams, the novel left unfinished on his death.
Penguin’s centenary reissues include Hombre, Valdez Is Coming, 52 Pickup, Swag, The Switch, City Primeval and Picket Line and Other Stories. Cooler Than Cool: The Life and Work of Elmore Leonard is published by Mariner
