Elmore Leonard, macho man

A few weeks ago I shared a post on Ursula LeGuin’s sly dig at Elmore Leonard in her excellent little book on writing, Steering the Craft. You can read that whole post here, but for the sake of this one here’s the section I quoted, from a chapter on syntax and sentence length:

“Rules” about keeping paragraphs and sentences short often come from the kind of writer who boasts, “If I write a sentence that sounds literary, I throw it out,” but who writes his mysteries or thrillers in the stripped-down, tight-lipped, macho style—a self-consciously literary mannerism if there ever was one.

Again, you can read my response to what I think is an unfair dig in the previous post. But a few days ago I happened to run across an interview with Leonard that I hadn’t seen before, from a 1984 episode of a program called “First Edition” hosted by literary critics John Leonard (no relation) and Nancy Evans. Leonard’s most recent novel at the time was LaBrava, which won the Edgar Award for Best Novel in 1984.

Here’s part of the interview that, with the macho accusation in mind from LeGuin’s book, caught my attention, part of a discussion that flows out of talk about influences and the kinds of writers Leonard reads:

John Leonard: What were you looking for, say, in a Richard Bissell? What did you feel the need of—you’re a working writer. You’ve worked all your life as a writer in one form or another. Did you read a particular writer to solve a problem? What’d you read Richard Bissell to solve for you?

Elmore Leonard: No. I started to read Richard Bissell—I read, uh, what was it, 7 1/2 Cents, was that the, uh, Good Bye, Ava, A Stretch on the River—

JL: Yeah.

EL: Mark Harris, Bang the Drum Slowly, The Southpaw, uh, one or two others. I like their attitude. I like the way they viewed life. I liked the way they handled their characters. I liked the way Bissell’s lead would take his girlfriend for a ride and take her down to the Mississippi River to show her certain plants. I mean, factories. He shows her what the industry is there along the river on a date. You see. Things like that appeal to me.

JL: The attitude.

EL: Yeah, the attitude. I write with my attitude, which becomes my style, my sound. I’ve finally—I read in a review that I’m a stylist, that you can tell my writing.

JL: Oh, for sure.

EL: In fact, now that I’ve been parodied in National Lampoon—

Nancy Evans: Right.

EL: Yeah, and it wasn’t bad! It did sound like me. And when I read it, when I see the string of participle phrases preceding the verb, then you see the Hemingway influence. You see—but I took, I took construction from him, um, without taking his attitude, thank God.

JL: No. There’s no machismo rubbish in your books, that’s the odd thing.

EL: There is machismo, but not on the part of the hero. The other—

NE: Well, also, the guys are, uh, sensitive. I mean, any woman would swoon over one of these guys, and the women are also a surprise. I mean, my picture of a woman in one of these so-called hardboiled detective fiction is she’s a broad and you’ve got these women who are gorgeous and blonde but they’re smart.

EL: Well, I worked hard on my women. There was a review in the Detroit Free Press said that my sensitivity toward women was about on a par with Mickey Spillane, and I didn’t think, uh—

NE: Hey.

EL: I took exception to that but at the same time I looked a little more closely at my women characters and I worked a little harder on them and my wife has helped me a lot, an awful lot, on bringing to life my women characters and using different kinds, different kinds of women.

NE: Will there ever come a day when you will make a woman your central—

EL: The next one was going to be, but it isn’t. Now it’s going to be one or—she’s one or two books away.

NE: But she’s coming.

EL: Uh huh.

NE: That’s good news.

All of which corresponds well to what I laid out in the previous post, including everything from voice or style as “attitude” to the aforementioned macho-man style.

The interviewers cut Leonard off before he can expand on his thoughts about machismo, but I suspect he was about to explain that there is often plenty of bluff, phony masculinity in his novels on the part of the bad guys and minor characters. I’ve observed that the villains in Leonard’s books—starting in his westerns and carrying on right through his crime novels—tend to fall into two categories: physical threats who are often powerful but dumb and backbiting sneaks, wannabe masterminds who are often the main antagonists. Most of the former kind behave in the Hemingwayish macho manner Leonard avoids for his heroes.

Watch the rest of the interview to see him explain how the protagonists of his novels are often underestimated and severely tested by the villains. The heroes of Mr Majestyk, Last Stand at Saber River, Valdez is Coming, and Tishomingo Blues—which I read after first beginning this post—come immediately to mind.

That female lead, by the way, would be Jackie Burke of Rum Punch, which I read this fall. The book was eventually adapted into the film Jackie Brown by Quentin Tarantino.

You can watch the entire episode of “First Edition” in two parts on YouTube, here and here, with a wrapup segment featuring only the hosts here. I wasn’t able to find out much else about “First Edition,” which isn’t even listed on IMDb, but apparently the New Criterion’s reviewer wasn’t a fan. What a lineup of guests, though.