Elmore Leonard profile

Elmore Leonard was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, on 11 October 1925. His father worked as an executive for General Motors Corporation, and from 1927 to 1934, Leonard, his parents and older sister Margaret moved several times to Dallas, Oklahoma City and Memphis, before finally settling in Detroit in 1934.

In the fifth grade, in 1935, Leonard showed the first sign of wanting to write fiction. He wrote a play inspired by the book, All Quiet on the Western Front, recently serialised in a Detroit newspaper; though it was the 1930 film version he recalls more vividly. He staged the play in the classroom, using desks as the barbed wire of no man’s land.

In 1943, at the age of 17, Leonard graduated from The University of Detroit High School and tried to join the Marines, but was rejected because of poor vision. He was subsequently drafted and assigned to the Seabees, the fighting construction battalion of the United States Navy. He served for a little more than a year and a half in the Admiralty Islands and the Philippines before returning home in January 1946. He was assigned to a ship for six and a half months, and was discharged from the Navy in June of that year.

Leonard enrolled in the University of Detroit, and majored in English and Philosophy.

In 1947, Leonard’s father left General Motors and bought an auto dealership in Las Cruces, New Mexico. Upon graduation, Leonard planned to work for him, but his father died of a heart attack six months after the move to New Mexico, ending any thoughts he might have had of selling automobiles.

Leonard married Beverly Cline in 1949 and went to work for the Campbell Ewald advertising agency. He soon became an ad writer but wrote western stories on the side, selling mostly to pulp magazines and to men’s magazines such as Argosy.

He chose westerns because he liked western movies and wanted to sell to Hollywood. Influenced by Ernest Hemingway, he applied the author’s spare style of writing to his stories. For source material, Leonard focused on the Cavalry and Apaches of Southern Arizona in the 1880s. He wrote five western novels and 30 short stories in the 1950s, two of which sold to the movies: 3:10 to Yuma and The Tall T.

In 1961, Leonard quit his job at the ad agency to write full-time. The western fiction market had dried up because of a plethora of westerns on television, and he wanted to write contemporary stories. But the demands of a growing family required him to take freelance advertising jobs instead.

After five years away from writing fiction, Leonard finished his first non-Western novel, The Big Bounce, buoyed by the sale of film rights to his novel Hombre. His Hollywood agent, the legendary H. N. Swanson, read it and told him, 'Kiddo, I’m going to make you rich.'

It would be a long but clearly marked road to success. Leonard began selling his work to Hollywood on a regular basis. When his next novel, The Moonshine War, sold, he wrote the screenplay. Screenwriting would give him the income to pursue his real goal: writing novels full-time. 52 Pickup was published in 1974, the first of several novels set in his hometown, Detroit.

Leonard’s books were now getting glowing reviews. In 1984, LaBrava was voted the best novel by the Mystery Writers of America. The following year, Glitz appeared on the New York Times bestseller list, and Leonard was touted as 'the greatest living crime writer.'

Leonard grew in stature and turned out well-received novels such as Freaky Deaky, Killshot, Maximum Bob and his 'Hollywood' book, Get Shorty - which in 1995 was made into a hit movie by Barry Sonnenfeld and catapulted him to even greater fame. Two more successful film adaptations followed: Quentin Tarantino’s Jackie Brown, based on Rum Punch, in 1997; and Steven Soderbergh’s Out of Sight, in 1998.

In 2001, The New York Times published Leonard’s Ten Rules of Writing, now famous among writers and critics, featuring his axiom: 'I try to leave out the parts that people tend to skip.'  In 2007, the rules were made into a book, illustrated by Joe Ciardiello.

In 2005, at the age of 80, Leonard wrote his 40th novel, The Hot Kid, featuring his iconic marshal, Carl Webster, receiving some of the best reviews of his long career.  He followed up with a 14-part serial novel for the New York Times Magazine, entitled Comfort to the Enemy.  In 2006, he completed the Carl Webster saga with Up in Honey’s Room.

That same year, Leonard received the prestigious Cartier’s Diamond Dagger Award in England and The Raymond Chandler Award at the Noir in Festival in Courmayeur, Italy. More awards followed: The F. Scott Fitzgerald Award in 2008 and the PEN USA Lifetime Achievement Award in 2009.

Still a master of his craft, Elmore received some of the best reviews of his career for his 43rd novel, Road Dogs (2009) – a sequel of sorts to Out of Sight. Stephen King wrote in the New York Times:
'The dialogue crackles; the supporting characters are crisply drawn; and the story achieves almost instant escape velocity.'

Late in 2009, Elmore finished his latest novel, Djibouti, a fun romp through the world of Somali pirates and homegrown Al Qaeda terrorists, seen through the eyes of a documentary filmmaker.  

Today, inspired by the series, Justified, based on his novella, Fire in the Hole (2000), Elmore is writing a fresh Raylan Givens story.  'I can pick up Raylan’s story anywhere,' he said.  'It’s like visiting with an old friend.'