Remembering Elmore Leonard
August 26, 2013
Elmore Leonard
Elmore Leonard, one of the giants of American crime writing, passed away last Tuesday at the age of 87. Leonard was one of a few truly great writers who kick-started my passion for crime fiction. His characters were tough and yet endearingly odd. His stories were often bizarre but still believable. He maintained a consistently high quality of writing in his prolific output. Over at the Rap Sheet, J. Kingston Pierce has put together a collection of tributes from crime writers, critics and bloggers, to which I have contributed a few words. The tribute is split into two parts. You can read it here and here.
Thank you for the great stories Dutch. We will be reading them for a long time to come.
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‘When you’re really cute that’s all you have to be, you can make a career out of it. Someone asks you what you do and you can say, ‘nothing, I’m cute.’ Elmore Leonard is up there with Raymond Chandler when it comes to quotable lines. What a fabulous writer.
Martin Amis said that Leonard was ‘incapable of writing an uninteresting sentence.’ He was right. RIP the Dickens of Detroit.