Elmore Leonard’s Art of Cool

You need a cool head to read Elmore Leonard. In his world, staying alive requires watching. Observing with keenness. Getting a laugh out of the dumb curveballs hurled at you. One of the primo scholars on Leonard and his books, Charles J. Rzepka, puts it best: with Leonard, it’s “less about being yourself than about letting yourself become whatever it is you are doing in any given situation.”¹ Chill, and if crazy shit’s about to go down, work the situation to your advantage. There’ll be some stealth way of doing so. Find it, and you’ll survive.

Leonard’s first books were set in the arid Wild West, and many of them—as in 3:10 to Yuma (1957) and The Tall T (1957)—were optioned by Hollywood studios. His books set in Detroit led to him being dubbed the city’s Dickens. Yet other books are set in Las Vegas, Los Angeles, and—important for our purposes—Miami. Elmore claimed to have learned his craft from reading books like Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940) and George V. Higgins’s The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1970).² From there, he crafted a body of work that spurred Martin Amis to hail him as “as close as anything [we] have here in America to a national novelist.”³

Leonard perfected a style that is lean and expressive, yet grounded in the real, the factual, in no small part due to the ace work of his longtime researcher Gregg Sutter, gatherer of the materials and incidents out of which Leonard’s imagination took flight. In a 1996 New Yorker article, we learn that Sutter “drove up Worth Avenue [in Palm Beach, Miami], where [he] once made a videotape at a rally of Klansmen and Nazis and bikers because he thought that such an event in such a place contained sufficient irony to make it interesting to Leonard.”⁴ And indeed it was. He made it into the opening sentence of one of his finest novels, Rum Punch (1992): “Sunday morning, Ordell took Louis to the white-power demonstration in downtown Palm Beach.”⁵ Rum Punch, for those who don’t know, became the foundation for Quentin Tarantino’s Jackie Brown (1997), although the movie omitted the Nazis-in-Miami bit. Can’t have it all.

Born in 1925, Leonard came of age at the same time as jazz music and Hollywood cinema. In 1998, he explained to Martin Amis that “the reason I’ve been able to sell all my books [to movie studios] is because they look like they’re easy to shoot. They’re written in scenes, and the stories move through dialogue.”⁶ But although many Leonard novels have indeed been made into films, very few of those films have succeeded at preserving his taut, half-bitter-half-cheery wryness. In that same interview, Amis, remembering and perhaps projecting his disastrous experience cowriting Stanley Donen’s sci-fi Saturn 3 (1980), was quick to trot out clichés to explain this: “I feel the movies are still an immature form, a young form, that they’re still in the adolescent stage. It will take a while before they can challenge the internal nature of the book.”

But any film-and-book lover with an awareness of Bill Gunn, Luis Buñuel, Barbara Loden, Alain Resnais, or Edward Yang will bristle at the idea that cinema is only capable of surface—that it has nothing on Joycean-Proustian-Shakespearean interiority. In Leonard’s case, perhaps the difficulty in adapting his work comes in the notable dearth of standard plot beats or rising and falling action arcs, as any typical Hollywood screenwriting class insists upon. Rather he luxuriates in a dawdling, wandering vibe after a wild event. To stay at Leonard’s pace, you must be prepared to sprint from a raging fire, then shift just as quickly into an erratic, gliding, curious meander, entering, say, a model shop or a bail-bond office, a tennis court or a warehouse where snuff films are staged. The fire blazes on. And you glide, keeping chill.

Few filmmakers can keep up. Well, maybe one: Quentin Tarantino. I must admit Tarantino is not generally to my taste; I blame his much-vaunted postmodern innovations (in Reservoir Dogs (1992) and Pulp Fiction (1994)) for the infantilization of Hollywood movies, divesting cinema of its power to be more than just escapist entertainment of an imagistic boom-bang-boom order. That said, there’s one area in which Tarantino excels, and that is dialogue. While putting the “fun” back into movie violence, he’s (also) made a career of turning well-oiled yapping into well-paced plotting. And these tricks he picked up from the master Elmore Leonard, as he himself acknowledges: “I owe a big debt to figuring out my style from Elmore Leonard. He was the first writer I’d ever read . . . that just let mundane conversation inform the characters, then all of a sudden, whoosh! You’re into whatever story you’re telling.”⁷ The moment when the characters are trying to play spot-the-celebrity in W magazine in my absolute favorite Leonard novel, 1979’s The Switch, translated directly into the iconic Royale with Cheese tête-à-tête in Pulp Fiction (1994).

I would argue that Leonard-ian jabber powers much of Tarantino’s work, and nowhere is it blended more harmoniously with time, space, and a sense of stakes beyond violence for its own sake than in Jackie Brown. It wasn’t until I read Rum Punch that I realized how much Jackie Brown owes to Leonard’s plotting, his world-weary maturity (all that driving around Palm Beach?), his melancholic glee (or is it gleeful melancholia?).⁸ Tarantino did make a lot of his own changes to Rum Punch. He shifts the action from Miami to Los Angeles. He removes the white-power-demonstration subplot (understandable, I guess, even if this is the most obviously “Tarantino-esque” part of Leonard’s book—as over-the-top, absurd, and well scripted as Pulp Fiction’s Gimp scene). Most effectively, though, Tarantino turned Leonard’s Jackie Burke, a white fortysomething airline stewardess, into Jackie Brown, a Black powerhouse played by Pam Grier, icon of 1970s Blaxploitation cinema. All these changes work to squeeze Leonard into Tarantino’s voice. A great script helps enormously in making a good movie, and a great book to adapt into that script is a great boon. That’s what Tarantino had. The situations. The Miami-based nostalgia. The corrosive-bitter view of the now. These came from Leonard.

It’s central to the Tarantino legend that he was arrested as a teenager for shoplifting an Elmore Leonard novel, namely The Switch, which features the same odd throuple of Ordell, Louis, and Melanie that would migrate from Detroit (where The Switch is set) to Miami in Rum Punch. Tarantino rerouted much of Leonard’s emotional investment in The Switch and Rum Punch into Blackness, Pam Grier’s star status, the soulful love songs that fuel the fleeting romance between Grier’s Jackie Brown and Robert Forster’s cool bail bondsman Max Cherry. (Forster nabbed a deserved Academy Award nomination for his excruciatingly lovely performance.) A defining moment of Tarantino’s childhood, as he narrates in his ungainly memoir Cinema Speculation (2022), was being taken by his mother’s Black boyfriend to see the Jim Brown–starring Black Gunn (1972) on its opening night in Los Angeles, with an otherwise all-Black audience. The cheers, the roars of approval, the applause, and the overall atmosphere in that cinema: it fired up his imagination. He wanted that for himself.

I won’t get into Tarantino’s subsequent identification with and fixation on Black culture. Suffice to say that it helps fuel his most elegant, weirdly autobiographical film, Jackie Brown. Its stately 150-minute pace to my mind harmonizes with Leonard’s own, as do its perfectly realized characters, deep love of the city in which it is set, and understanding that love is like the movements captured by cinema: not always where you think it might be. Everything about it that seems quintessentially Tarantino—the dialogue, the drift, the touching feelings of something about to be lost, coolly accepting it on the surface, but laden with intense memories and emotions—echoes Leonard.

Over Leonard’s long writing career, his pop-culture references gained a poignancy of memory: remembering movies and music, but not mourning them. The Black blues-rocker hero of (my other favorite Leonard) Tishomingo Blues (2002) would rather be in his hotel room watching All That Jazz (1979) on Turner Classic Movies than dealing with kill-crazy Dixie-obsessed Mafiosos.⁹ LaBrava (1983) is an especially moving tribute to a lost figure: the noir femme fatale. The co-lead of the novel, Jean Shaw (an amalgamation of Jane Greer, Lauren Bacall, and 1950s Anne Bancroft), is a once-prominent, still-gorgeous silver screen star who is rehashing the plot of one of her most underrated film noirs in order to extort some has-beens in Miami. Sutter, while researching this novel for Leonard, said that “for me, doing research on the film noir was as easy as opening my file cabinet. After all, I was a fanatic. I had already collected most everything written on the subject, and just turned it over to Dutch [Leonard’s nickname].”¹⁰ Meanwhile, photographer Joe LaBrava, the other main character, lives with Miami’s past marvels and its palpable present simultaneously: “[LaBrava] felt himself attracted to street life. It was a strange feeling, he was at home, knew the people; saw more outcast faces and attitudes than he would ever be able to record, people who showed him their essence behind all kinds of poses . . . and trapped them in his camera for all time.”¹¹

LaBrava’s process is not so different from Leonard’s. They remember. Sutter helped. (Sutter once gave Leonard a copy of Nixon Smiley’s Yesterday’s Miami (1973), a photographic history of the city, whose street scenes and geographies were thoroughly mined by Leonard for his own imaginative Dizzy Gillespie–esque runs of clean prose.) And Leonard used his memory in the service of declaring, over and over, This once existed. These people once existed. I once existed like this. Abiding. Persisting. Surviving. Living to tell the tale.