Elmore Leonard is a monumental figure. Since his death in 2013 at age 87, the great Detroit crime writer’s reputation and popularity have continued to rise. The Library of America has published a collection of his Western stories from the 1950s, following with a three-volume boxed set of his crime novels. Last year, to mark the centenary of Leonard’s birth, Penguin re-released fourteen of the forty-five novels Leonard produced in his long and fruitful life, when he wasn’t writing dozens of short stories, screenplays, and television scripts.
And now comes an engrossing new biography, Cooler Than Cool: The Life and Work of Elmore Leonard, by C.M. Kushins. The New Yorker has called the book “an anatomy lesson” of Leonard’s life, and that’s not bad as far as it goes. Kushins took a deep dive into Leonard’s writing and into his prodigious archive, which is now at the University of South Carolina, and he has produced a detailed anatomy of how Leonard, after years of grinding labor, managed the tricky transition from writing pulp Westerns to the contemporary crime stories that made him rich and famous. But the biography also fleshes out Leonard as a man, rising every morning before the sun does in his suburban Detroit home to write fiction for a couple of hours before going to Mass, then heading off to write ad copy for Chevrolet, then returning home in the evening to tussle with his five children, just to get up the next morning and do it all over again. Leonard called his iron discipline “the perseverance to just sit there alone and grind it out.”
The result of all that hard work was a style of writing that no one has ever matched, marked by swift pacing, impeccable dialogue, and a gallery of rogues, grifters, and psychos who don’t realize how funny they are. Leonard was both a great listener and a great noticer, with his writing lean, stripped to the bone. He had a good sense of when to get out of the way and let his characters do the storytelling. “I don’t want the reader to be aware of me as the writer,” Leonard told The Paris Review in 2002. He succeeded brilliantly.
The Pittsburgh Review of Books spoke with Kushins on the phone about how he became an Elmore Leonard fan as a boy and wound up writing his life story. The interview has been lightly edited.
PBR: How did you and Elmore Leonard originally hook up?
CMK: This is going to sound funny, but I was a kid when the film Get Shorty was coming out, and I remember being excited about the trailers and the teaser for the film. And my mother is the reason that I love books and became a writer; she was the big cultural guru in the house. I was eleven years old when that movie was coming out. She got the original novel for me from the library, and she said, “This’ll keep you quiet till the movie opens.” It was one of the first adult-age novels that my mother had given me, and I devoured it because Elmore’s style is like a movie in your head.
PBR: So you became a fan.
CMK: I became more than a fan. By the time that movie opened, I didn’t want to be John Travolta, I wanted to be the little old guy in Michigan who put all the cool words in his mouth. That stuck with me forever. His books became my Rosetta Stone.
PBR: You and he actually met.
CMK: We met once, but we corresponded first. When I was fifteen, I wanted to be a writer because of him, and I wrote short stories. They weren’t very good, but I had taken it seriously enough to pitch a story to Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. They rejected it immediately, and I remember being heartbroken. That’s when I wrote a letter to Elmore and sent it to him. Two and a half weeks later, a beautiful thick packet from his house showed up. He had proofread my story, written me a letter, and included a story he had just completed. He told me to pay attention to this, this and this. We corresponded, and when I had my first short story published in 2005, I sent it to him, and I got a congratulatory letter back. Then I met him on a book tour — and I couldn’t speak. When I was in line after the reading, he saw the envelopes he’d sent me, and when I got up to the table he said to me, “This isn’t something I’ve done before, but at your age, you seem serious about learning how to write.”
PBR: The subtitle of your book is The Life and Work of Elmore Leonard. For me, the operative word is work. The man took it seriously, it was a job, and he worked really, really hard for years, getting up in the dark to write fiction before going off to write ad copy for Chevrolet.
CMK: It was by design. It wasn’t until I got to meet with Elmore’s children that I was told their grandfather, Elmore Leonard Sr., was a painter who had to give it up in order to contribute to the household. I have no doubt he instilled in his son that if you want to be an artist, that’s fine, but you’ve also got to have a sustainable source of income if you want to also have a family. And I think Elmore Leonard Jr., Dutch, his work ethic came from the fact that “I want to be a writer, but I’m going to take it seriously because I want this to be my profession.” And that to me is why he’s such a great American writer. That’s not putting down the work ethic of other authors, but there’s was something very much like “I’m starting my own business,” in how he approached writing. That’s very unique to me.
PBR: Elmore started off writing Western pulps in the Fifties while working a day job writing ad copy in Detroit. Then he gets turned on to George V. Higgins’s novel The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1970). Was that a turning point for Elmore that got him writing the crime novels that made him famous?
CMK: That’s the book everyone goes to as the big pivot, but going through his stuff I realized he was already trying desperately to pivot into contemporary crime fiction. The concept of joining into a new genre didn’t have the same guarantee of readership (as Western pulps), and you could see there was some nervousness. His first contemporary crime novel, before he discovered Higgins, is The Big Bounce (1969). It’s still fun, but by comparison he went through so many drafts of that that you can see not writer’s block, but you can see frustration in finding a new way of telling the story. When his agent at the time, the great H.N. “Swanie” Swanson, told him to go out and buy a copy of The Friends of Eddie Coyle,he told Elmore it was going to solve his problems. What that did was it freed him. He already knew how to switch POV and do indirect discourse, but when he read Higgins, he saw how you can put that succinctly into a narrative much, much, much faster.
PBR: You mention Swanie Swanson, his agent. That was a stroke of luck that a writer would hook up with a powerful agent like that and they would stay together for years and years. That was a big boost to Elmore, wasn’t it?
CMK: Oh, it was huge. But I have to give credit where it was due. Elmore was actually discovered by his first agent, Margeurite Harper, a little Jewish businesswoman who had a small office all to herself, and she represented the boys’ club of the pulp Western writers. So he got scooped up by Margeurite Harper almost from day one, and she groomed him on how to talk with editors. Swanie took credit for discovering Elmore, but he didn’t. What he did do was take someone who was a diamond in the rough and turn him into a millionaire. He understood Elmore’s writing very well. He represented Raymond Chandler!
PBR: Another important figure in this story is Gregg Sutter. Along comes this guy who’s kind of a fan and tells Elmore he’d like to be his legman and do research for you. When you look at the amount of writing Elmore produced in his lifetime, no man could have done that alone. He got a lot of help from Gregg Sutter, didn’t he?
CMK: Oh, yes. I give Gregg all the credit in the world because he’s the guy who researched all the books I loved as a kid — and I’ve told him that. The distinction I would make is people have to remember that Elmore had to do all of his own research, which is pretty amazing, up until he met Gregg is 1979. Elmore had just gotten sober and his children were grown and he was getting remarried — and having a really competent, amazing fan who could do research, again, set him free.
PBR: You’ve written a couple of books about musicians — Warren Zevon, Led Zeppelin — and they tend to live more colorful lives than writers, who spend most of their time alone in rooms. Was writing about a writer a daunting challenge for you?
CMK: That’s an interesting word, daunting. If it was about any other writer it might have been daunting, but it was my hero so it was just fun. Even the hardest pressure to meet deadlines and condense and all that, it was always fun because these were things I wanted to learn about Elmore my whole life. Zevon was a huge Elmore Leonard fan, and when he was dying of cancer he had two books with him when he went to doctor visits: the Holy Bible and he was re-reading Elmore’s Rum Punch. I’m not joking. They were fans of each other.
PBR: By my count, there were three earlier biographies of Elmore Leonard before you came along. What made you think you could add something new to that existing pile?
CMK: There hadn’t been a biography that went into the nitty-gritty of his work process. No one had really gone into the books he had read or had access to his research, to see his notes and to see on a daily basis how he created characters, and information that wouldn’t even go into a draft. You can’t really do an analysis like that until the endpoint of the artist’s life and work. For that, the University of South Carolina was one of the best friends I ever had, and the other one would be the Leonard family, who wanted to tell me these stories since he’d been gone almost a decade. I couldn’t believe the open arms I got when they heard the story about how I corresponded with him when I was a kid.
PBR: So the family was a big help?
CMK: It was more or less an authorized biography. It’s the only time I ever did this, but I gave the family chapters as I went along, and they checked it, they vetted it for me. So it was as accurate as I could get it.
PBR: The Leonard archive at the University of South Carolina is pretty extensive, isn’t it?
CMK: It’s a hundred and eleven boxes. It is so cool! If you’re a George V. Higgins fan, his archive is here too. I can tell you, the man got the idea for Eddie Coyle from all the wiretapping he did when he was in the attorney general’s office in Boston. You’ll lose your shit if you see the cool stuff Higgins saved. And it’s open to the public.
PBR: Are you working on a new book?
CMK: Thanks to my deep dive into Elmore, I’m tinkering with my first novel. My next nonfiction book is a study of esoteric and occult influences on certain self-made gurus in the U.S. from World War II until the present day. It’s their personal beliefs and their effect on media and politics and what we’ve got going on now. It’s seems a little James Ellroyesque, with the 1940s and the Red Scare and the cults that were in California.
PBR: Is your novel a crime novel?
CMK: Yes, it is.
PBR: I’m sure it’ll have some Elmore Leonard influence in it.
CMK: Always will. Even the nonfiction has his influence because I always took his life lessons to heart.
Image courtesy of the Detroit News.
