{"id":1891,"date":"2014-10-23T02:00:24","date_gmt":"2014-10-23T02:00:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/?p=1891"},"modified":"2016-08-18T17:31:55","modified_gmt":"2016-08-18T17:31:55","slug":"guilty-pleasures-father-of-the-modern-western-king-of-crime","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/guilty-pleasures-father-of-the-modern-western-king-of-crime\/","title":{"rendered":"Guilty Pleasures: father of the modern western, king of crime"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Neil Sammells<\/a>, Bath Spa University<\/em><\/p>\n

Think of what you skip reading a novel: thick paragraphs of prose you can see have too many words in them.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

So said Elmore Leonard, prolific author of westerns, short stories and crime novels. He died last year at the age of 87, still writing, and still leaving out the bits that readers tend to skip.<\/p>\n

Leonard is self-consciously non-literary. Despite this, literature academic as I am, his debt to Hemingway and Steinbeck seems entirely obvious. But you won\u2019t find him on the list of possible Booker prize-winners. You won\u2019t find his novels full of clouds of yellow butterflies. You won\u2019t find yourself bogged down in psychological analysis or descriptions of what characters look like.<\/p>\n

But you will, be drawn into a narrative instantly (go on, see if you can resist the opening page of Freaky Deaky<\/a>). His narrative speeds along, propelled by dialogue that no other writer can match. Leonard\u2019s style is stripped-down, minimal, laconic and effortless. It takes a lot of hard work to write as effortlessly as he does.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The modern western \u2013 be it novel or film \u2013 is unimaginable without Elmore Leonard. He spent the 50s and 60s writing westerns, some of which were turned into films. There\u2019s Hombre<\/a>, 3.10 to Yuma<\/a> (twice), and Valdez is Coming<\/a>, for example. He wrote the screenplay for Clint Eastwood\u2019s Joe Kidd<\/a>. He created the taciturn archetype for the \u201cman with no name\u201d in Sergio Leone\u2019s Spaghetti Westerns<\/a>. It\u2019s film directors and producers that found his work important and interesting, never the literary critics.<\/p>\n

In the 1970s, Leonard turned to crime fiction. Many of his crime novels read like westerns in a modern, urban setting: Detroit or Miami. Raylan Givens, for instance, a central character who appears in multiple works, is a cop in a Stetson who dispenses instant and frequently violent justice with studied insouciance. He adjusts the brim of his hat nonchalantly at moments of crisis, and usually finds a mirror in which to admire himself doing it.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a style to being a criminal as well as to being a cop, and Leonard\u2019s characters try to live and speak it. His crime novels are knowing and self-referential, their moral touchstone a contemporary take on \u201ca man\u2019s gotta do what a man\u2019s gotta do\u201d. Leonard\u2019s women, like Karen Cisco, the cop in Out of Sight<\/a>, gotta do it too. I could call them post-modern westerns \u2013 but I won\u2019t.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Many of his characters are the personification of cool. Leonard is fascinated by cool, as a style of writing as well as being. His own prose is defined by it. His 10 Rules of Good Writing<\/a> are partly about avoiding clich\u00e9 (\u201cNever start a book with the weather\u201d, \u201cNever use the words \u2018suddenly\u2019 or \u2018all hell broke loose\u2019\u201d) and excitability: \u201cKeep your exclamation points under control.\u201d<\/p>\n

These rules also tell us a lot about how he sees his role as author. He leaves space for the reader to imagine, for instance, what characters look like from the way they speak. He wants to be \u201cinvisible\u201d, coolly detached from the action, not sitting in judgement. I could compare him here to the young James Joyce, who sought similar invisibility and crafted a prose of \u201cscrupulous meanness\u201d \u2013 but I won\u2019t.<\/p>\n

The pleasures of reading Elmore Leonard are many (and for me, frankly, guilt-free ). Principal among them is the enjoyment of witnessing a master-craftsman at work (though he wouldn\u2019t enjoy that clich\u00e9). Leonard never tries too hard. That would be very uncool. His most important rule is one that sums up the ten: \u201cIf it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.\u201d It\u2019s advice, I think, that many academics as well as novelists might follow.<\/p>\n

My summers never would have been the same without the latest Leonard packed in my cabin bag. And now I get, if possible, more enjoyment from reading his novels over again. Without skipping a word.<\/p>\n

\n

Guilty Pleasures is a summer series in which academics reveal their most embarrassing cultural inclinations. Over the next few weeks, you\u2019ll find out what literature professors delve into on holiday, when they can\u2019t quite bear to crack into that next classic.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"The<\/p>\n

Neil Sammells does not work for, consult to, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has no relevant affiliations.<\/em><\/p>\n

This article was originally published on The Conversation<\/a>.
\nRead the original article<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Neil Sammells, Bath Spa University Think of what you skip reading a novel: thick paragraphs of prose you can see have too many words in them. So said Elmore Leonard, prolific author of westerns, short stories and crime novels. He died last year at the age of 87, still writing, and still leaving out […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":39,"featured_media":6557,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[10],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1891"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/39"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1891"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1891\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6558,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1891\/revisions\/6558"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6557"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1891"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1891"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1891"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}