I’m an Elmore Leonard aficionado. I love the late, great crime writer’s novels, such as Get Shorty, City Primeval: High Noon in Detroit and Raylan.
He never wrote a novel about Philadelphia, but there is a Philadelphia connection in Glitz, his novel about Atlantic City. His cop character Vincent Moro in Glitz goes up against “Frank the Ching” and “Ricky the Zit,” two South Philly wiseguys. Leonard, who liked to use local color, had Moro bribe a doorman with a cheesesteak. I got a kick out of that.
I met Elmore Leonard briefly in 2009 when he came to Philadelphia to promote his novel, Road Dogs. I attended the event at the Philadelphia Free Library in Center City with my friend and former editor at the Philadelphia Inquirer, Frank Wilson. Frank introduced Leonard to the packed house.
Elmore Leonard struck me as having the cool insouciance of an elderly jazz musician. So I thought C.M. Kushins’s title of his biography of Elmore Leonard, Cooler Than Cool: The Life and Work of Elmore Leonard, was spot on.
I reached out to C.M. Kushins and you can read my Q&A with him below:
Davis: Why did you write a biography of Elmore Leonard? And why did you use the title “Cooler Than Cool?”
Kushins: Elmore has been my personal hero since I was a child; in fact, when I was fifteen, I sent him a short story I’d written and asked for advice. He was incredibly generous to me and even took the time to write back to me and proofread my work. I was, as you could imagine, a fan for life. As I got older and transitioned into a professional author, too, I’ve always went back and re-read Elmore’s books for both enjoyment and inspiration. And, well, the centennial of his birth was coming up and, since my admiration for his work and style have only grown, I really felt that a comprehensive and definitive biography of his life and work would help to celebrate and solidify his place as an important American writer. And as for the title, I admit it’s from a line in Elmore’s first contemporary crime novel, The Big Bounce.
Davis: How would you describe Elmore Leonard? How did he get the nickname “Dutch?”
Kushins: The impressions that I got from studying Elmore’s life is that he was always playful and curious about the world — even from a young age — but knew the value of hard work and persistence, whether in his day-job or, later, as one of the world’s most successful writers of fiction. I think he was an incredibly generous person who liked to entertain both himself and his audience with his stories but also used his writing to say the things about the world that required a creative outlet. I’m fairly certain that writing was also the true love of his life.
He got the nickname “Dutch” in high school when he was on the baseball team; he shared the name with a famous ballplayer and his buddies gave him the same name, so “Dutch” Leonard stuck for life.
Davis: How did Leonard first become a writer? What and where did he publish his first stories?
Kushins: Elmore had a love of reading and of movies even from a very young age; his mother and older sister would read to him when he was child. Although he liked to tell stories, he didn’t make a true stab at writing fiction until he returned from military service during World War II (he was a “Seabee” in the U.S. Navy).
When he returned, he went back to college and studied English and Philosophy and soon started submitting short stories to the school paper and an annual short story contest affiliated with a school literary club. It wasn’t until a few years later—then married and working full-time at the Detroit advertising giant, Campbell-Ewald — that Elmore made the decision to use all his “spare” time devoted to fiction.
Famously, he began getting up at five o’clock in the morning and wrote for two hours before getting ready for his office job, as well as his responsibilities as a husband and father. With diligence, however, he got his first short story published on his own steam in 1951 and attracted the attention of his first literary agent. For the next decade or so, he was a professional author of Western pulp fiction and an advertising executive.
Davis: Why did he switch from Westerns to contemporary crime fiction?
Kushins: As far back as his earliest success with Western fiction, Elmore’s first agent, Marguerite Harper, advised him to “branch out” as a writer, since genres are a fickle thing. Elmore, however, had truly devoted himself to learning the “sound” of crafting a good Western, as kept a comprehensive ledger of his research and self-education on the time period and — in particular — of the Apache indigenous nation.
Only later, after his massive mainstream success, did Elmore admit that he’d had trepidations about writing contemporary stories, since that particular market already had so many wonderful authors he’d be competing with. Instead, when he made the conscious leap to contemporary fiction, he “relearned” aspects of his storytelling tools, and leaned much heavier into dialogue and used much less exposition. That right there set him apart from his peers, and deservedly so — as he’d completely reinvented his “sound” in order to keep telling the stories he wanted to tell.
Davis: Who influenced him?
Kushins: Well, if you mean pragmatically, Elmore himself always held up three specific authors as the ones who shaped him the most: Ernest Hemingway, Richard Bissell, and George V. Higgins. And as different as those authors may seem, their respective use of authentic spoken language seems to have been the biggest “draw” for Elmore’s attention.
Davis: How does his crime fiction differ from other crime writers?
Kushins: For many years, Elmore struggled with how the mainstream critics and his own early publishers publicly presented him. Both seemed to pigeon-hole him into being the next Dashiell Hammett or Raymond Chandler, yet his writing didn’t even remotely resemble either of them. It was only in, perhaps, the mid 1980s that his signature literary sound got the full critical attention that it deserved — making him more of a “stylist” than a paperback writer of crime tales.
Personally, I would have to say that Elmore’s emphasis on characterization over basic plotting is what continues to separate him from any other American author that you’ll still find on the “crime and mystery” shelf. His stories always have a fantastic ending — but that’s only because he spent so much time making his characters seem real that their decisions and ultimate denouements seem logical.
Davis: How and why did he spend so much time with Detroit cops? What did he learn there that he used to good effect in his fiction?
Kushins: Stories seem to differ as to what drew Elmore towards working with law enforcement for his mid-career works. According to his now-deceased lifelong friend, the private investigator Bill Marshall, Elmore had a form of “writer’s block” just prior to his writing of City Primeval: High Noon in Detroit. But to be honest, I don’t think Elmore suffered from “writer’s block” a day in his life. I think following a successful decade and a half of writing Westerns, it occurred to him that modernizing his sound would have to include expanding his narrative horizons, including his native Detroit and key parts of Florida.
More accurately, I’d say that his assignment writing about Detroit Squad Seven — his only work of genuine journalism — got his creative wheels spinning in ways that hadn’t happened since he’d dedicated himself to full-time fiction.
While covering the Homicide Department in his own city, Elmore witnessed the full gamut of human emotions on a nightly basis — and then got to discuss the events with both the police and the criminals themselves. The experience was invaluable. His storytelling was never the same, and both his modern law enforcement and criminal protagonists seemed to become more human, more riveting—and both more relatable. I think, as a serious author, he couldn’t resist using that atmosphere as his career’s creative playground.
Davis: Why did he use researcher Gregg Sutter?
Kushins: Gregg is an incredible researcher and proved himself to Elmore very early on in Elmore’s own transition towards mainstream fame at the end of the 1970s. Prior to that, Elmore had had to conduct all his research himself — including “field trips” to different U.S. states and even to Europe and Israel. But remember, by then, Elmore was in his fifties, a recovered alcoholic, and newly married; I think he wanted a semblance of balance and normalcy to his life by that point, and having a professional researcher who doubled as a devoted fan was the best possible option. Ultimately, Gregg’s research would lead to deeper trust, and, by the final decades of Elmore’s life, Gregg was making invaluable research contributions to the final works.
Davis: You spend a good bit of the book covering his book deals and his book to film deals? How important to his fame and legacy were the films and TV series?
Kushins: Thanks for asking that — much appreciated! Aside from the appeal of reading all the fun Hollywood stuff within the book, I think putting an emphasis on Elmore’s multimedia work is crucial to evaluating his full canon as an author. From his earliest beginnings as a pulp writer in his twenties, Elmore was advised that he’d make a much more lucrative income on his writing through film and television sales — so it was always a goal. (Remember, it wasn’t overtly commercial to Elmore; as a kid, he’d loved film adaptations of his favorite books, as long as the movies were good!)
But I think Elmore’s story is a truly American one. His father — who died very early in Elmore’s adulthood — had aspired to becoming a fine artist himself, until circumstances led him to the job market before high school graduation.
Davis: What novel of his do you believe is his best work? Do you have a personal favorite?
Kushins: This is a tough one, since I have my own personal favorites and, as I’ve gotten older, new favorites based on a deeper appreciation for his style and growth.
On a personal level, Get Shorty was the first one I read and remains special — as does Out of Sight, since that was the one I read just before writing to Elmore himself. But looking at his work retrospectively, I think Elmore hit a serious “traditional” high watermark with, say, his Western, Last Stand at Saber River. To me, that’s the best of the Westerns, since Hombre — which followed next — was written in the first-person narrative and doesn’t really display his expanding style. For crime enthusiasts, I can’t recommend Stick, LaBrava, and Glitz highly enough — or his later historical works, The Hot Kid. With that, I feel like Elmore’s literary style came full circle.
