Elmore Leonard Spares A Moment Plain Talk From Author, A Man of Few Ad Verbs by Pete Hamill, New York Daily News 02-06-2002 Here comes Elmore Leonard out of the rain, into a bookstore named Housing Works on Crosby St. He’s lean and gristly, wearing glasses and a tweed jacket. He glances around the crowded high-ceilinged Soho store and eases towards the table with the microphones the way jazz musicians head to the band stand. He is now 76 and just by showing up he becomes the coolest man in the room. Leonard is a writer, which is like saying Michael Jordan is a basketball player. He is a master of a kind of tabloid literature: quick, knowing, filled with perfectly-observed talk, and always with at least one dead body somewhere on the premises. His players are almost all crooks, some of them with great gifts for homicide. There are no master criminals among them, or great sleuths; often the bad guys are dumb, and the cops incompetent or crooked. But in all of his more than 30 books, including the westerns he wrote early in his career, the world he gives us feels real. The occasion of his New York visit (he lives near Detroit) is his new novel, “Tishomingo Blues”, built around a high-dive artist, a black Faustian hustler whose hero is bluesman Robert Johnson, the Dixie Mafia, and the bizarre world of Civil War re-enactments. We started by talking about one of his 10 rules of writing, listed in an essay last year, now part of the ad campaign for the new novel. The rule stated: never modify the word “said” with an adverb. “I’ve always used the word ‘said’ to indicate dialogue, rather than ‘she gasped’ or as Mary McCarthy once said, ‘she asseverated’. That’s what convinced me that the word ‘said’ was the one to use.” Laughter from the audience. “I look at the adverb as the writer’s word. It seems to me that if the character has been developed sufficiently, you know what that character’s style is, you know how the character is delivering the line. You don’t need the adverb…I have a character in a book who said that she wrote historical romances full of rape and adverbs.” Leonard smiled, and the audience laughed. This seemed like a small detail, but Leonard has the master craftsman’s high regard for the intricacies of his work. Part of that surely came from his education among the Jesuits at the University of Detroit HS, where he took Latin for four years, and two years of Greek, and had the notion of excellence drilled into him. In 1943, he carried that education into the Navy, served as a seabee in the Pacific War, then returned to study literature on the GI Bill at the U. of Detroit. Along the way, he picked up his nickname, “Dutch” (after Dutch Leonard of the old Washington Senators) and carries a tattoo of that nickname on his left shoulder. “I wanted to write,” he said, “but mostly I was reading. I remember in the early ‘40s, my mother joined the Book of the Month Club and I began reading all the popular novels. To me, they all had too many words in them. Then I found Hemingway, and I thought, ‘Ah, here’s this spare style…’ I thought, ‘That’s the way to go’. But even with Hemingway, I didn’t see a sense of humor…’” After the war, he discovered the fictions of John O’Hara, Mark Harris (who later wrote “Bang the Drum Slowly”) and the unjustly forgotten Richard Bissell, and learned from each of them. At the same time, he was attending the graduate school that was also nurturing young Evan Hunter : the world of the pulps. These magazines, with their coarse paper and marvelously lurid covers, would die when television triumphed. But Leonard was part of that last generation of American writers who started their writing lives in those pulpy pages. He was supporting his young family as a copy writer at the Campbell Ewald advertising agency in Detroit, but from 5 to 7 each morning, he was writing. The genre he chose was the western. “The first story that got a letter was called ‘Tizwin’, which is the name of Apache corn beer,” he said. “Argosy turned it down, but they liked the writing and said, ‘If you have anything that sounds like this, send it in…’ So I wrote a novelette, and they bought it, paid a thousand dollars for it, and I couldn’t believe it.” The novelette was called “Trail of the Apache” and appeared in the Dec. 1951 issue of Argosy. At 26, Leonard’s professional career had begun. Meanwhile, “Tizwin” went to Ten Story Western, where it was re-titled “Red Hell Hits Canyon Diablo”. “I learned very early,” Leonard said, “what a publisher can do to you to try and mess you up.” By the end of the 1950s, Leonard had published four Western novels, and almost 30 short stories (many of them now in print). Some of them sold to the movies: “3:10 to Yuma”. “The Tall T” and “Hombre”. But the pulps were dying. He wrote three more Western novels, and after selling “Hombre” to Hollywood, gave up his job to write full-time. He began to write screenplays and to direct his attention to the contemporary world. The reconstructed world of the American West was discarded for the streets of Detroit and South Florida. Did this make the writing easier? “No, it was frightening,” he said. “Because now I’m using language that people use, and I’m crossing streets that people know about. At the same time, I was developing a style of always writing from a character’s point of view, with the idea that you would never be aware of me.” The clean style was fresh and original (and often hilarious), owing nothing to earlier crime novelists, nothing to movies. In 1983, with “La Brava” and “Glitz”, Leonard broke out, gaining marvelous reviews, and making best-seller lists everywhere. On this night in Soho, Leonard talked about the way “Tishimingo Blues” developed from a simple image of a diver high about the ground; how he works in longhand on yellow legal pads (“five pages is a wonderful day”); how he never uses an outline (“the idea is develop charactersd, push ‘em around and get ‘em together, and see what happens”); how he has never been able to read Jane Austen; how much he admires such writers as Margaret Attwood and Jim Harrison; how he wishes he had written two of his own novels in a different way (“The Hunted” and “Gold Coast”), how he likes some of the movies made from his books (“Get Shorty” and “Out of Sight”). He took questions from the audience. He signed books. Then he stepped outside and smoked a cigarette and waited for the car that would take him to the next stop. Cooler than the weather.