I Miss Elmore Leonard Already And Forever

Yesterday Elmore Leonard died. It's bad in a eulogy when you say "I" a lot, because it's about them and not you, so if that happens here I don't mean to twist this around to be about me. I'm trying to pay tribute to an author very dear to me. I used to go to a used bookstore near where I lived in the Phoenix area. I think at the time I was in trouble with the libraries, and anyway I had to buy books when I went away to work at summer camp.

One book I came up with was "Unknown Man #89". It is maybe a less-heralded entry in Leonard's long career, but it was the first of his that I read and it remains a favorite. His efficient writing style and way of emulating real-world dialogue as opposed to the flowery stuff that you can write but not say with a straight face were very appealing. He wrote compelling male and female characters and entangled them in phenomenally gripping stories.

He really was great. I admire his practicality. He began his career writing Westerns because they sold well. He started writing crime novels because they were selling well and Westerns were tanking. Crime novels never stopped selling well, but I figure he could have written cook books if he wanted to. He was someone very gifted, and not merely someone who cracked the formula of what can get published and sold to customers.

I am sad as much as anything over the loss of Elmore Leonard because it saddens me to see Detroit's decline and he was a part of that city that worked and that its residents could be proud of. His preferred genre concerned something that Detroit could do with less of, but he told tales of decent people resisting evil forces as well as of colorful bad guys. We must face accounts of both of we are to rid ourselves of the latter.

If you've never read any of Elmore Leonard's work, there's no harm in beginning where I did, or you could look for any of the countless novels of his that spawned popular films and television shows. I don't know that there's a bad place to start, but I know where you're bound to stop: after you've read the last one of them. It's a lifelong pursuit to read them all, but it's a fine way to spend your life, getting to know the works of a great author.