detnovel.com 
William Marling,Ph.D. Professor of English, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, OH, USA
Elmore Leonard Jr.
Classic Writers
Ross Macdonald (Kenneth Millar)
Development of Hard-Boiled Narrative
Early Female Authors of Hard-Boiled Writing
Chester Himes and Early Afro-American Detectives
Major Works
Red Harvest (1927) by Dashiell Hammett
The Maltese Falcon (1929) by Dashiell Hammett
The Glass Key (1931) by Dashiell Hammett
The Big Sleep (1939) by Raymond Chandler
Farewell, My Lovely (1940) by Raymond Chandler
The Long Goodbye (1953) by Raymond Chandler
The Galton Case (1959) by Ross Macdonald
The Underground Man (1971) by Ross Macdonald
Cotton Comes to Harlem (1965) by Chester Himes
Characteristics of the Genre
Imagery in Hard-Boiled Detective Fiction
Criticism, 1930 to the Present
Detective Fiction in Comics, Radio, and Television
Film Noir
Reactions against Early Crime Movies
More Film Noir (brief takes on The Glass Key (1942), Murder, My Sweet (1944), Farewell, My Lovely (1975), The Big Sleep (1946), The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946, 1981), The Lady in the Lake (1947), The Lady From Shanghai (1949), Criss Cross (1949), D.O.A. ((1950), The Asphalt Jungle (1950), Sunset Boulevard (1950), Kiss Me Deadly (1955), Touch of Evil (1958), Chinatown (1974), Taxi Driver (1976), Body Heat (1981), and The Ususual Suspects (1995).
A writer of westerns in the 1950s, who turned to the crime novel in the late 1960s, Elmore Leonard (1925 -- ) is noted for his extraordinary dialogue and quirky characters. Leonard says that he has been more influenced by his study of Hemingway, Steinbeck, and O'Hara than by his contemporaries, but that his goal in writing is to efface "style."
Though born in New Orleans, Leonard is associated with Detroit, where he grew up and where many of his novels are set. His father was an auto executive, and Leonard has lived and worked in Detroit almost continuously. After serving in the Navy from 1943 to 1946, Leonard married his first wife (of three) in 1949. He graduated from the University of Detroit in 1950, becoming an advertising copywriter for the Campbell-Ewald Agency, a job he held for eleven years. Though he disliked copywriting, Leonard found time to do his own writing by rising at five a.m. "Sometimes I would write a little fiction at work, too," he told an interviewer. "I would write in my desk drawer and close the drawer if somebody came in." 1
Intending to become a popular rather than a "literary" author, Leonard began to write 
Westerns, because he read them and he liked Western movies. His first sale was "Apache Agent" to Argosy magazine in the early 1950s. He published five novels and thirty short stories in the Western genre, eventually winning acclaim for Hombre (1961), which was selected by the Western Writers of America as one of the twenty-five best westerns of all time in 1977. Two of his westerns were sold to Hollywood: 3:10 to Yuma (starring Glenn Ford, 1957, Columbia) and The Tall T (starring Randolph Scott and Richard Boone, 1957, Twentieth-Century Fox).
The Western genre dried up the early 1960s, however, and Leonard became a freelance copywriter. He specialized in Hurst gear-shifters for hot-rods and educational movies for Encyclopaedia Britannica. In 1965, movie rights to Hombre sold for $10,000, and Leonard was able to devote himself full-time to writing; he chose crime fiction because it was hot. After this eight-year gap, his first crime novel -- The Big Bounce (1969) -- was rejected by eighty-four publishers before being accepted as a paperback original. Then Doubleday accepted The Moonshine War (1969), which sold to Hollywood. But Leonard was doubtful about his future in hard-boiled fiction and returned to the western with two novels in the early 1970s (Valdez Is Coming, 1970; Forty Lashes Less One, 1972). Only when movie rights to The Big Bounce sold for $50,000 did he commit himself. His next two novels were among his best – Mr. Majestyk (1974) and Fifty-Two Pickup (1974). Leonard also wrote the screenplays for The Moonshine War (1970) and Mr. Majestyk (1974), but he gradually distanced himself from movie work.
For City Primeval: High Noon in Detroit (1980), one of his best-known works, Leonard camped out in the homicide squad room for months to pick up the slang and speech rhythms of police, lawyers and criminals. Dialogue had been a strength, but now it became his distinguishing feature. "Peculiarities of speech mark each of his characters as a one-of-a-kind individual," writes scholar Thomas Wiloch. 2 In fact, Leonard has said that he begins with the character's name and phrases that will define each character's speech. "Usually it's the name. If I get the name right, the character will talk." He adds, "I may very well write down a character's background or the way the character talks. Or, for example, in Bandits
Besides his hometown of Detroit, Leonard's novels are sometimes set in south Florida, where he vacations and his mother owns a motel, and New Orleans, his birthplace. His seedy characters inhabit the seedy sides of these towns and fall into a plot that, as Michel Kernan wrote in the Washington Post, typically involves "guns, a killing, or two or three, fights and chases and sex… And, just below the surface, an acute sense of the ridiculous." 6
After writing for twenty years, Leonard was "discovered" with Stick
Besides his eight westerns, Leonard has now written thirty-some crime novels, nine screenplays and contributed to a non-fiction book on alcoholism. The most recent are A Coyote's in the House (2003), Mr. Paradise (2004), The Hot Kid (2005) and Up in Honey's Room 
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1. Elmore Leonard, Contemporary Authors New Revision Series, vol. 53, 286. 2. Ibid. 287. 3. Elmore Leonard, interview, Contemporary Authors New Revision Series, vol. 28, 285. 4 Contemporary Authors, New Revision series, 53, 287. 5 Contemporary Authors, New Revision series, 28, 284. 6 Ibid. 283. 7 Grover Sales, Contemporary Authors New Revision Series, 53, 286; Martin Amis, ibid, 289.
