Skulking

I was skulking around the mystery/thriller/crime section of my local public library the other day.  I had a couple of good reasons for doing so.  One, I’m too cheap to buy books I can borrow. Two, I like detective fiction, the more noir the better.  And three? The other novels I was hoping to find all had holds on them:  I was like #43 on the waiting list for Michael Connelly and Robert Crais.  So, I picked up an Elmore Leonard – a first for me – and was glad I did.

The one I ended up taking home was titled “Mr. Paradise.”  The cover had a pretty blue background with nice gold lettering.  Those shades of navy and maize are, in fact, school colors for the University of Michigan.  And it turns out this fact figures prominently in the book’s plot, as does the topless cheerleader holding pom poms over her naughty bits on the book’s lurid cover.  Hey, no one ever claimed the guy was Hemingway or Tolstoy.  But more about all that later.

 

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Elmore “Dutch” Leonard lived most of his life in the Wolverine State.  After serving in the Pacific during WW2, he went to the University of Detroit and majored in English and Philosophy.  Upon graduation he became an advertising copy writer for Chevy.  He only wrote fiction in his spare time, early in the morning before his first cup of coffee.  After becoming famous, when asked why he didn’t move to LA (his stories such as “Get Shorty” and “3:10 To Yuma” were often adapted into movies) he answered, “Why would I want to live there? Everything I need is here.” Gotta love a man who sticks with his roots.  No need to go skulking around the Hollywood Bowl with all those other would-be screen-writers…

Influenced by Hemingway’s spare prose, but finding his idol a bit too humorless for his own tastes, Leonard started off writing quirky westerns.  Later he turned to crime fiction which became his bread and butter, adding his own signature darkly comic twist to the genre.  Over the course of a career in which he produced 45 novels, Leonard won numerous awards including the Edgar for best mystery in 1984.  Near the end of his run as one of America’s most popular thriller writers, he was dubbed “The Dickens of Detroit” by Time magazine.  In response he said, “What would they call me if I lived in Boston or Chicago?” Living in the Detroit suburb of Bloomfield Hills, hard at work on his last novel in 2013, he collapsed near his writing desk and – no mystery – he was dead of a stroke at age 87.

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“10 Rules For Writing” by Elmore Leonard