[♪ Upbeat Western Music ♪] [♪ Soft Sentimental Music ♪] Elmore Leonard.

He wrote about the good.

The good bad.

And the evil bad.

[News Announcer] Crime novelist Elmore Leonard who died today... Master of crime fiction.

The king of crime.

Elmore Leonard ... Dead at the age of 87.

The enormous public outpouring at his death.

All this for a crime writer.

A guy who wrote Westerns?

A husband pauses to reflect on his bedridden wife's plea to bring her pills.

Unique to Leonard this singular style.

Or is it?

Absence of style?

Leonard is often referred to as a crime writer who transcended the genre.

Meant, of course, as a compliment.

I don't really like the genre.

You know, break down ... Oh ... Elmore Leonard.

He's a crime novelist or ...

I kind of know what people mean.

Helps you find it in the store.

But if you're saying ... if somebody says that Elmore Leonard is a Crime Novelist you're not really.

It's kind of like saying Miles Davis is a trumpet player Uhm Technically accurate ... misses the point.

Elmore Leonard's Detroit.

His Florida.

Arizona.

Elmore Leonard's America.

An America as real as Mark Twain's Missouri.

William Faulkner's Mississippi.

John Steinbeck's Monterey.

The beauty of reading an Elmore Leonard novel for me, one that's based in Detroit, is that I feel like, yeah ... Did he grew up here?

He must have, because maybe he grew up in my neighborhood, because he's getting the details so right, I feel like I'm there.

And also of South Florida, a real grasp of the environment.

You can you can nearly ... uh .. nearly feel the humidity.

You can feel the emptiness, the hopelessness of that environment.

Those wackos, those oddballs, those eccentrics in South Florida.

He can use the ... uhm ... the sociological strangeness of this particular place.

And it and it feels absolutely natural and of a piece with the story he's trying to tell.

Elmore Leonard's America.

Ordinary men and women.

Leonard's people ... upstream against the current.

The actual violence itself was never really the story Elmore was telling.

He was telling the story of men or women faced with it.

And what do they do?

What do they say?

How did they get out of it?

He's really not writing crime novels.

He's writing character studies of people involved in crime.

Elmore Leonard, otherwise known as Dutch.

We were in our sophomore year.

There was another student called Bill Risdon, who at the beginning of the ... our junior year came up to Elmore and said, You know, there was a baseball player back in the 1920s called Dutch Leonard.

And he said from now on, we're calling you Dutch -because you like baseball and you are carrying forward the legend.

And already a storyteller at the age of ten.

Lives of a Bengal Lancer is one is a story that I used to tell my friends.

We would go to a movie, to the movies, come back, and that day or in subsequent days.

We'd sit down ... and I'd tell them the story again of the movie.

Leonard began writing short stories Westerns in 1950.

Even with all those magazines rejections piled up.

And then along came Hemingway.

When I started to write, that is seriously considered writing.

Hoping that I could make a career of it.

I had been reading for years.

I mean, I was ...

I was reading all my life.

By the time I was in high school I was reading Book of the Month selections.

And so I was reading contemporary novels.

and I would turn a page and I would look at it and I think, Oh, my God there are a lot of words on that page.

And finally, it was toward the end of the forties ...

I found Hemingway, I discovered Hemingway.

Now, all of a sudden, there's white-space on the pages.

There's a lot of dialog in the stories.

He would get up at 5:00 in the morning and write for 2 hours before he went to work every day.

Work was the Chevrolet account at Campbell Ewald, an ad agency in Detroit.

When I got up, he was already up and he was already writing because he wrote at 5 a.m..

So I always encountered him in the morning writing.

Leonard's agent, Margaret Harper, sold his story Apache agent to Argosy in 1951.

It appeared under the title Trail of the Apache.

More sales followed.

But selling a story every few mo didn't cover a growing family.

Leonard stayed at Campbell Ewald holding to his 5 to 7 a.m. routine.

He had a subscription to Arizona Highways, and that's where he got all his information about the climate and the terrain and everything.

And that's just that was his research, really.

I was reading For Whom the Bell Tolls at the time that I was writing Westerns, and I would just open the book anywhere for a little inspiration for to get into the beat, the rhythm of the writing ... and I thought of For Whom the Bell Tolls as a Western.

It's out in the mountains with guns and horses.

You know, that's a Western to me.

By the mid-fifties ... Leonard's Western stories had drawn the attention of Hollywood.

Leonard had his ups and downs with Hollywood.

But the Tall T ... and especially 3:10 to Yuma are fine examples of how to do it.

Both open up their short story sources while remaining anchored to Leonard.

As the sixties kicked in, the Western was no longer a Hollywood staple, though they were dominating television.

By the end of the fifties.

There were so many westerns on TV, but now this is a different kind of a western This is a TV Western.

I didn't like any of them.

There were 30 ... more than 30 westerns on primetime television during the week, and I didn't care for any of the because they were all alike.

Western pulps began to close shop by the mid 1950s.

Leonard tried writing non-Western stories ... but couldn't find a market.

He had stopped writing Westerns short stories.

Sensing that the Westerns demise was due to more than saturation on television, as author Brian Garfield suggested.

Brian Garfield said that the Western died when Gary Cooper died, and there were actors that could do it, perhaps not quite as stylishly though, as ... as Gary Cooper did.

That's an interesting observation, though that Garfield makes that Westerns died with Cooper.

And that's I think that's ... that's yeah.

That's something to think about.

Cooper had an influence when I started writing Westerns.

When I think of The Plainsman, I think of the Westerns that I liked the best ...

The Plainsman.

Jean Arthur was Calamity Jane wearing a union soldiers kepi and jacket and carrying her whip.

Drove a stagecoach.

Yeah.

I thought that was a terrific movie.

That inspired me.

1936, fifteen years later.

Then I'm writing Westerns.

You know?

In The Plainsman.

When he's on the ... on the riverboat and Porter Hall is standing next to him at the rail, and he says to Porter Hall, who is Jack McCall, who kills him ... Mr..

Your toothpicks on fire.

He says, no, this is a 'cigareete'.

And I love the hat that that Cooper had on in that.

With a stiff brim and just a round crown, which I thought was ... was very authentic.

Hard brimmed hats.

To be continued ... Leonard's major Western novels contain provocative themes and character.

Long before he dealt with it in his later novels.

Leonard explored racism in his Westerns, against Native Americans, against Mexicans, against Blacks.

The Western inherently is a genre that lets you look at racial identities, and particularly the mixing that occurs geographically in terms of borders and in terms of bloodlines.

So for a novelist who's drawn to that kind of subject matter, the Western is a good genre to work in.

One of my go to quotes is the twin evils of American capitalism, right .. are genocide and slavery.

hmm ... One of the things Elmore did in his Westerns, was that he would explore the Indian experience as well.

It was ... it was interesting to me.

I ... every time he went there, whether it was an Indian character or something about the spiritualness of that nature and infuse it into his Westerns, I found that fascinating.

I couldn't stop reading that.

Again.

Hollywood came calling.

Hombre and Valdez is Coming, were made into very good and very popular films.

Both remain true to Leonard.

In Hombre you've got Paul Newman playing; really what for all intents and purposes ... is a kind of Apache Indian, even though the story makes it quite clear that he's a white man.

Sometimes I watch a Western and I think, well, that's, you know, that's of that time or that that point of view doesn't resonate with me anymore.

But, uhm ... there was something about ... there was another level of consciousness, I think, that he had about that particular genre.

He was aware that the genre itself, could continue to be morphed and changed into something that could feel just as fresh today as it did, you know, 60 years ago when those stories came out ... uhm ... and he was aware of that when he was writing them.

So, I mean, he was so far ahead of his time.

...

Drinking ...

In the office.

I remember walking around looking at stuff and I'd pull bo and look at all the things.

And he got up to go to the bathroom and I opened the drawer and there was a gallon of Almaden white wine with the ring in the neck like a jug of wine, and it was half gone.

And I thought to myself, I wonder if he's just drinking away while he's writing You can't write drunk.

You can write somewhat hung over, but you can't write drunk.

Doesn't work.

It was some years before Leonard confronted his drinking, even as he struggled to hone his voice.

I had to find a looser ... a looser style.

I had to find someone who kept it as simple as Hemingway did, but still.

Didn't take himself.

Very ... as seriously as Hemingway.

Elmore Leonard and Clint Eastwood would seem an ideal pairing.

But much of Joe Kidd Leonard's original screenplay was tossed aside, replaced with over-the-top action and muddled characterization.

Leonard grew frustrated with the constant intrusion ... 'the notes'.

That's what really disgusted him about Hollywood, is all the notes that you would get.

Leonard found script notes intrusive, 'make work nonsense'.

During the making of Justified four decades after Joe Kidd ...

He didn't like getting notes and so he extended that courtesy to people he worked with.

If you optioned his book and you were going to adapt it .

that's your job.

And he wasn't going to give you notes.

And he really gave us no notes.

He was just supportive.

Joe Kidd was an original Leonard screenplay.

No surprise.

The Plainsman's flat brimmed black hat made its return.

Leonard was struck by the similarity between Eastwood and Gary Cooper.

Cut from the same cloth.

Clint Eastwood comes along ... uhm closely in ... in Cooper's steps ... footsteps.

Yeah, it's the same effect.

Standing at the bar in the saloon, delivering the lines.

He's that type of character.

Same as Gary Cooper.

Eastwood asked ... asked me to do.

Called me up one time.

It was after they had produced Joe Kidd.

And he called me up and said, Do you have a story that is kind of like Dirty Harry?

Only different?

And I said, I don't know.

Let me think of one.

So I call him the next day.

I thought about an idea that night.

Then I called him the next day with the idea for Mr. Majestyk, which he seemed to like.

And.

And I worked it up.

25 page treatment.

... uhm But within the next few weeks, he had acquired High Plains Drifter.

So then he lost interest in Mr. Majestyk And along came George Higgins.

Elmore's, agent at the time.

H.N.

Swanson a legendary guy, said to Elmore one day.

Hey, have you have you read The Friends of Eddie Coyle?

By George Higgins ... and Elmore said, I've never heard of it.

And Swanee said, Kiddo, before you write another word, go buy this book and read it.

Hemingway and Higgins are both very important to Dutch in two slightly different ways that overlap.

Hemingway establishes the universe that ... that Dutch decided to work in.

Hemingway is very spare, very pared down.

This reshaping of the American language by very clear cinematic sentence that are very short.

That's how Dutch decided to write.

That establishes the larger world of Dutch.

In the very specific world, though, you get George V. Higgins, specifically a book called The Friends of Eddie Coyle, which is about a very low guns deal that some guy is trying to get off on get off of from a crime.

Right?

And the interplay in that book, the dialog that you would associate with being Elmore Leonard, starts with George V. Higgins.

Under the sway of Higgins, Leonard refined his dialog driven character's point of view style through the rest of the seventies.

It cut him loose.

It gave him a new freedom in the language that he could use in the and, you know, the type of stories he could tell.

But Leonard was still drinking.

When Elmore was drinking, he was ... he was hugely funny.

He was not a sloppy drunk.

He was not offensive.

He was just plain, simply fun.

In fact, many people claimed he ... once he had a drink or two, is when he really started getting funny.

So we never thought much about him being a heavy drinker.

And after 26 years, his marriage to Beverley had collapsed.

He was going downhill.

And I said, Well, I'm going to come and we're not going to talk business or friendship.

I want to talk with you about all this drinking because this is terrible.

And he said, Well, okay, I need help.

I do need help.

Fifty-Two Pickup came out in 1974.

Swagg in 1976.

Unknown Man Number 89 in 1977.

All the while ... Leonard drinking ... on the wagon, attending AA ... off the wagon.

Struggling.

He had become an alcololic at that time.

A severe alcoholic.

No longer a funny one.

Divorced in 1977, Leonard had met Joan Shepard, whom he would marry in 1979.

And on January 24th, 1977, Elmore Leonard took his last drink.

Write what you know.

As Hemingway advised.

You go back and read Unknown Man Number 89 that came out 77,which is the year he stopped drinking.

It's one of the great understated treatments of alcoholism because the female lead in the book ... that you will ever read.

But it wasn't preachy.

It wasn't judgmental.

It was just you could see that he had made this turn in his life.

In 1978, Detroit News Magazine hired Leonard to do a feature on Detroit Homicide Squad Seven.

Two and a half months with Squad Seven gave Leonard an insight into homicide, how it works, and made him realize how important it would be to get the how and why and what of police work correct.

Elmore Leonard was really able to capture, I think, the essence of what police work is, is really all about in the characters.

Gregg Sutter met Leonard in 1979.

He wrote an article on Leonard for the August 1980 issue of Monthly Detroit.

Not long after, Leonard asked Sutter to do some research.

Sutter remained Leonard's close friend and researcher for 30 plus years until Leonard's death in 2013.

Elmore, is his own, was his own best researcher.

He, you know, he did massive amounts of research on ... on his early books.

And that's one of the reasons he eventually would hire a researcher or have a full time researcher because it was so distracting and it was keeping him from writing.

Leonard had written Unknown Man Number 89 before Sutter came aboard.

Ten years later, in the late eighties, Leonard met novelist Jim Born.

At the time, Born was a drug enforcement agent.

They got around to discussing Unknown Man Number 89.

It's an excellent book, and Dutch said, Did you see anything wrong with it?

I said no, it was a great book.

He said, Come on.

Did you see any problem with the book?

And there was a technical problem in the book that didn't affect the story for me.

Where the hero reaches for a Smith and Wesson .38 revolver and fumbles with the safety on it.

And that's why he doesn't shoot this one person.

And there's no safety on Smith and Wesson, but no one really cares.

I mean, I knew it, but I kind of blew past it.

And Dutch just kind of smiled.

He said, I got more letters on that .

Than I've gotten on anything.

It was very refreshing to read about characters that were very believable, that were people that I think I may have worked with during my 20 years on the Los Angeles Police Department.

The banter was real.

The camaraderie is certainly something that I've experienced.

The closeness of those working in specialized, coveted positions is something that happens all the time.

And so it was very nice to read and see something that depicted police officers as just regular people.

You know, we don't have capes.

We're not superhuman.

Elmore Leonard liked movies, pictures, genuinely liked them.

He used actors, iconic stars as a jumping off point when fashioning characters.

I said, Look who's the guy like?

George Clooney.

So he was already thinking of George Clooney before Out of Sight as a ... as a potential star from for one of his movies.

No, he ... he would.

He would cast movies in his head while he was writing the book.

There were certain characters that Elmore, every day of the week he'd go, okay, you know, Harry Dean Stanton, Sam Jackson, you know, just people that he ... that he loved, you know, and would put them in anything.

He would use that archetype of a Gary Cooper, of somebody who was a little laconic, a little laid back, a little easy, whereas somebody who's just slightly at the edge.

Just a little bit quirky.

[His leg was broke.]

[Three legged horse would bring a price down here.]

[He was suffering.]

[Soft spot, huh?]

[Only for horses.]

With City Primeval and Split Images in 80 and 81.

Novels with a Detroit homicide cop as hero and Gold Coast in 1980, set mainly in South Florida with a working class hero.

Elmore Leonard had set the table for his approach to America over the next 30 plus years.

Elmore Leonard's America was more than the description of an actual place.

He rarely described Detroit, South Florida, places, rooms, streets.

Place was more than just the physical setting, the background, the buildings, the trees, the smell of the air, the look of the light.

He was not really interested in that.

Getting the soul of the place.

Is a whole different thing.

And Dutch is able to do that because he gets the people there and has this unstated sympathy for them, whether they're white or black or on the right or wrong side of the law.

But again, he has this sense of basically what America is.

It's sort of a hustle.

And he got to work to get by.

And the American dream is for other people and other places.

And all we're trying to do right here is get by.

Leonard fought the pull of the omniscient author.

I never cared that much for Fitzgerald.

I didn't read that much of him because.

Because of his style.

He was the omniscient author.

He knew everything.

And he told ... and he had ... the ... the language in which to write about what he ... what his subject matter was.

And that didn't interest me.

The thing I took away from Elmore was his ability to jump perspective for characters, which I quite loved, and we were able to do some on Justified.

It was like he had a camera that ... that shifted from point of view to point of view, to point of view.

But the sound and the attitude would seamlessly change from character to character.

And and believe me, ask any writer, I've tried to do it.

It's hard to do.

I am used to reading paragraphs that go on and on and on about description.

And yet here he is, just cutting it all out and making it so lean and fierce and funny.

Just tell the story.

Tell the story from the point of view of a character.

Get inside the character's head.

You see, the reader sees what this character sees.

But don't try to write.

Though plot was paramount, center stage in Leonard's early novels of crime and Detroit.

That had changed by the early eighties.

Leonard's characters were driving the plots.

He told me many times.

There's never a plot.

I don't know what's going to happen.

I'm writing and it just comes out.

Whatever happens, I don't even know until I'm done writing it.

And then I often times look at it surprised.

Oh, that's how that scene ends.

I remember one day we were on the phone, he was talking ...

He says ... Otto, I don't I don't know what to do.

I said, What do you mean?

He said.

I'm up to page about 150 or so and my heroes in a barn.

He just got shot and he's dead.

And he was my hero.

I don't know what to do now.

I'm like ... uhm ... Rewrite that scene?

He said, No, no, no, no.

I can't do that.

These guys do what they do.

But this is the way I write.

Making it up as I go along.

And what's going to happen?

Who's going to come out on top?

I don't know.

You know, but to me, that's that's the interesting ... way to write.

It's just more fun.

The mid-eighties.

And along came the game changer.

All of a sudden, he was on the cover of Newsweek and had a level of fame.

But anybody who wrote or anybody with taste knew that before he ended up.

He didn't need to be validated by The New York Times.

But what was good was the world finally figured out that, you know, this guy had been in their midst for a long time.

He never really cared about all that.

You know, he just ... all he wanted to do was write.

And wanted to be admired for his writing.

But he didn't care about the fame.

That first year of Justified.

I was the only black woman on the staff, and I could tell when he met me how excited he was to see a black female writing his characters, doing an adaptation of his work.

I said to him one time, You know, when he finally made the New York Times Bestseller List, and I said, Why was it Glitz?

And he said, I have no idea.

He said, It could have been La Brava, could have been two books later.

It's like I always say about sports.

There's no timetable for anything.

You know, there's no timetable for somebody like Tiger Woods to come along.

It just sort of happened and it happened for him.

And all of a sudden, he was on the cover of Newsweek.

Amid the overnight success.

Along came Hollywood again.

None of them worked.

Each failing to capture the Leonard sound, the Leonard sensibility.

But it was Stick, which proved most dispiriting.

Burt Reynolds was Stick.

I mean, Burt Reynolds was that character.

Just as Tim Olyphant is Raylan.

I mean Burt, you know, perfectly personified Stick.

-Ernest Stickley.

But.

All sorts of red flags should have gone up with the idea that he was also the guy that should direct the film, because he just made a complete mockery of Elmore's work.

Elmore wrote the screenplay, and, you know, he he insisted that this Joe Joe Stinson, you know, get his name put on there.

The guy that had added the what Elmore called the machine guns and scorpions.

In the novel, we see the smug white male world of South Florida through Cornell Lewis's wry point of view Cornell, who is black, was paired down for the film.

Especially egregious was downgrading Kyle McLaren.

Kyle is introduced early in the novel and on page four in Leonard's screenplay, his script rewritten.

The film is almost half over before Kyle is introduced, and then she's merely generic female support.

[Hi] Dutch's women are fantastic.

And the reason they're fantastic is because they're probably the smartest people in the room.

He doesn't make it like this big pause where she's smarter than the man.

It's just this natural.

We recognize that women are smarter than men That was a certainly a recurring theme in his work.

The women that are smarter than the guys.

Out of Sight.

Deputy U.S.

Marshal Karen Sisco I remember reading that book and reading about Karen Sisco and thinking ... uhm ... wow, you know, this woman is ... is a badass.

Karen Sisco is but one among a deep roster of Elmore Leonard, smart, independent females.

These women, they're cops, secretaries, con artists, druggies, nuns, U.S.

Marshals, scammers, lawyers, parole officers, models, housewives, bombers, actors, producers, flight attendants, killers.

One of the first influences in my work that I took away from Elmore was writing female villains, especially, or antiheroes that had lots of different facets that could be both mother and sister and you know, the woman you want to hate but you love.

And she could be hugging you one minute and stabbing you in the back the next.

You see them as being sort of long suffering, but they're not victims, right?

She's not helpless, right.

She is operating in the universe She has to, which is just makes her just about like everybody else in Dutch's Universe.

They're just trying to get by.

When the sadistic killer in Gold Coast, Roland Crowe, threatens Karen DeCilia, a woman with some mileage, she gives him fair warning.

Of course, Roland ignores her warning.

I love how Elmore allowed his female characters to be women, not necessarily girls.

They ... they ... they had some good experience.

They had a ... they had some mileage on them.

They had they ... they were able to stand up for themselves.

They were smart.

They they'd been around the block.

The sequence in Out of Sight when Karen Sisco is hassled by three tiresome businessmen.

Could have been a statement moment.

The film captured the novel.

It just felt ... it felt very every day.

And that's a compliment.

It felt mundane in the degree to which she didn't make it.

A thing that you were supposed to get up in arms about or feel was a grave injustice.

It was just ... this is what her life is like.

And I think that's what most woman's life is like at some point.

And the book is really full of moments like that.

The way that scene kind of plays out, I think, is really indicative of his skill as a writer and the character development that I think you see him develop over the course of his career, which is like an understanding of ... [I'm Andy] You know, this wasn't a rare thing for her, but it wasn't even particularly noteworthy.

But it is notable.

[Andy ...

Really?]

[Who gives a ... ] In many Leonard works, two women just sit around and talk for pages with wit, intelligence.

I love any time.

I am reading a story with two women who are doing their thing, who are in that negotiation, who are plotting something, who knows a secret about the other.

I love that because we just ... American culture especially we don't get enough of that female to female energy.

Cause it allows the females to be very different.

It allows them to be very smart.

You know, Alfred Hitchcock said that for for a hero to be strong, a villain has to be strong.

Right.

For the hero to be good and stand out and be an interesting character, you have to have a villain who is equally seductive and interesting and fun to spend time with.

And Leonard certainly knew that.

I was surprised upon his death.

The number of women that.

We're fans of his.

And I don't really know why I was surprised about that because, you know, I'm a fan.

Why wouldn't other women be a fan?

And over the years, he has done a lot for female characters in making them relatable and complex and interesting and fun.

And the same goes for his black characters.

Those voices were way more complex than a lot of voices you would see by white writers writing black characters.

Leonard never shied from America's deep racial fissure, yet never is there a sense that he had a social agenda.

That he was preaching.

Race just part of the American tapestry.

Essentially in America, it's sort of my personal point of view.

I don't think this is original to me that everything in America comes down to race.

He describes a young guy.

He says a young black guy with shoulders.

What more is there to say?

A young black guy with shoulders That tells you everything.

I appreciate that he doesn't make his white characters try to sound black or hip or like they know that inside world of what it means to be black.

And he also allows his black characters to just be who they are.

It obviously suggests that people are who they are.

They're different in a lot of ways, and they're similar in a lot of ways.

And you can just reader, interpret who they are based on what you see in the world that's being created.

And I ...

I find that rare, to be frank, in a white writer.

Take Lloyd, 71 years old.

In the novel, Mr. Paradise.

Leonard does this beautiful thing, and I want to quote what he has one of his black characters say.

'It was all right, but you had to talk on their level' 'and laugh at things that weren't funny'.

'Jesus, but he was tired of that'.

Wow ... Because it means this ... this line that Leonard wrote, that he understood how blacks saw whites.

He understood how tiring it was to have to basically, like, pander to their needs.

The neediness of White Folks.

Oh, my goodness.

For a white writer to recognize that.

That's something black people talk about among themselves.

It's exhausting.

And here he's aware of it.

A line like that, you know, growing up black in America especially, you hear you think that a lot.

And for this white guy from Detroit to parrot ... to not even parrot it, but to say it and it's so convincing.

You want to see something difficult in life.

Have a white author writing about black folks who is beloved by black people.

Elmore Leonard is one of the few.

And one of the reasons why is because it's so understated.

He doesn't really call attention to it.

Blacks, we speak in code to each other all the time and we say things to each other that we never say to any other race.

You know, we ... we have our it's called, you know, code switching, that kind of thing.

And for Elmore Leonard to, you know, to capture, you know, part of the black experience in that one line.

Elmore Leonard, post Newsweek.

Mainstream critics punching his ticket.

New York Times Bestsellers.

Newfound celebrity.

Critical comparisons to Hemingway and Faulkner.

Leonard was now exploring an America beyond Detroit, beyond Florida.

Arizona.

Far afield of his apparent comfort zone.

Some critics ... remained dismissive.

Some felt his focus on crime and criminals working stiffs and lawmen undercut his ability to explore character and add depth.

However, through genre fiction Leonard was exploring America.

So in the novel Split Images.

Leonard has this incredible moment that takes place between a Haitian man.

A character who is Haitian, and a police officer, and the ... a The Haitian man, he's been shot.

He's dying.

He's actually dying.

And, you know, when I read that, I thought, oh, ouch.

That's so cold.

And yet there's a world within that exchange.

Right?

Whether you look at it in terms of what it means to be an immigrant in this count a black immigrant specifically, or what it means to be a working class cop.

And how these two very different individuals are all are both doing the same thing.

They're chasing the American dream.

Where does it take you?

There are a lot of policies that we could talk about, federal and state policies that keep us from pursuing and acquiring our dreams.

But Leonard isn't interested in that.

He's interested in the human element.

So he just gives us that exchange and we infer the rest.

We know, we know about each of those men's lives and what did happen and what didn't happen and what they hope for and where their hopes were crushed.

It's all there.

It's right there ... in that simple exchange.

That's pretty masterful.

And he does it so effortlessly.

You can tell that Leonard wasn't trying to get accolades or prove what he knew, or prove that he understood racial dynamics and he knew what immigrants went through.

He was just like understanding human nature.

This is this man's life and point of view.

And this is this man's.

And I'm putting them in the same situation, the same moment, and I'm letting it unfold.

The guys in his books, whether they're the kind of good guy or the kind of bad guy, they still got a day job, they got an ex, you know, and the carburetors screwed up on the car and they got to get that out of the shop.

And look at this.

I'm late for dinner for, you know, that I was supposed to make for my girlfriend whose kind of a pain.

It's just this universe that everybody knows.

By the nineties, Leonard's unique voice was championed far beyond the usual critical outlets.

Elmore Leonard's style driving the discussion.

Many, many writers who were influenced by Hemingway and who never really removed the stink of that influence from their work, so that you read their ... their novels or stories.

And you can you can hear Hemingway.

You can hear a parody almost, of Hemingway.

So even though I got my ...

I developed a style from Hemingway, it finally it became my own style.

Tight sentences off angle.

Jazz Riffs.

When the homeless ... homeless man is standing outside the church, he said, They stand at the bottom of nowhere on a spring day.

It looks so simple and it's sort of when you read it aloud, it sounds so simple, but it's actually very complicated.

Describing the girl, he says she was a pretty thing till her life closed on her.

Dutch's ... a ... work ...

I'd say is more like Miles Davis because Miles always played in the middle register mostly, right?

He wasn't really all that showy.

He just figured out a way to make that playing in the middle register be universally important and so influential.

And that's kind of what Dutch did with literature, with his version of literature.

That it looked so simple.

She knew how to walk into her dreams.

That's a beautiful ... beautiful line.

She knew how to walk into her dreams.

Leonard's second wife, Joan, died in 1993.

His third marriage to Christine Kent would end in divorce in 2012.

In the nineties, Hollywood came calling again, but this time a Grand Slam.

Rum Punch on which Jackie Brown is based is an ideal example of Leonard's getting it right approach.

When Leonard asked bail bondsman Mike Sandy about helping with a novel about a bail bondsman.

My answer?

Absolutely not.

Why?

Because everything I've seen or about bail bondsman in past work, whether it be movie, scripts uhm ... dialog or on television, was very negative.

At that point, I was president of the State Bail Bond Association trying to professionalize an industry that had a bad rap.

Leonard persisted.

And persisted.

That said, Mike, I would ask you Let me take four or five or six that you might find interesting Let me just look at them and try to develop them.

If, I promise, he said.

And I remember almost specifically the words ... to keep everything in a positive light, so the ball industry won't be.

I think he was being facetious and the bail industry won't be marred.

I said it was pretty difficult to marr the bail industry at that time.

Though still hesitant.

I went to the files and pulled a couple of situations that I remembered might be interesting to him.

Stewardess getting off a plane in West Palm arrested for trafficking.

Pulled up a career criminal who had just committed a murder.

Pulled up one file where one of the guys I had on bond a week later was found dead in the trunk of a car, which I think he incorporated in the book and the movie Leonard knew a good moment when he heard it.

I started getting calls from Detroit.

I knew it was serious because he was developing things and would ask, have I got this right?

Would he have said that?

Would you have done this in that situation?

Pertaining to Max Cherry, the .. my counterpart in Rum Punch.

I said, I think you hit it right ... you hit a homerun.

Leonard stayed hands on.

He would go out once or twice with me when he was in town and I would make a pickup.

Sometimes you have to make an arrest on a forfeiture for a bond that you execute.

And he was just enthralled by that.

The film was faithful to the novel, but for one major change, Quentin Tarantino took the white Jackie Burke from Rum Punch changed her name to Jackie Brown and cast Pam Grier.

I can't even think of Jackie Brown as not being a black woman now.

She was always black.

You know, the whole book is kind of an exploration of what is a woman of a certain age who isn't making a ton of money who doesn't have a husband supposed to do.

How is she supposed to take care of herself?

How society is not particularly easy on women, even if they are beautiful.

Like many a Leonard female though, underestimate at your own peril.

[What do you think it is? ]

[I think it's a gun pressed up against my ... ] To those filmmakers willing to listen.

The roadmap was laid out.

[Take your hands from around my throat ... ] [What he hell's wrong with you, Jackie?]

Out of Sight serves as another example of Leonard's approach.

Getting it right.

Jack Foley breaks out of prison early in Out of Sight.

The film followed the novel.

Early ... relatively early in my career with FDLE.

There was a prison escape, a large scale prison escape.

Actually, six people tunneled out, but five made it away from the prison in Belle Glade -Glades Correctional.

Just like it's dramatized in the book, Out of Sight.

They dug from a chapel underground underneath the wire and then came out.

Three excellent films.

Back to back to back.

Made by people with a deep trust in the Leonard sensibility.

They are very good adaptations of ... of the ... of the kind of scaffolding that Leonard had constructed in his writing.

So much of Leonard's post-seventies work is research dependent and yet ... there's never a sense that research exists for its own purpose.

Most writers.

It's as though the story stops.

And then the section of information comes in, in a big dollop all at one time.

That's not the case with Dutch ... Dutch's work.

Case in point, Tishamingo Blues.

Like so much of later, Leonard.

What plot exists is driven by its characters.

Here's a guy that could write the same book over and over again.

And and do quite well financially.

He didn't have to take any risks but he wrote something that was almost completely different in ... in a certain way than any of the other books.

It wasn't just a little small story that's set in a small location about some particular little con in somebody's backyard.

This was about ... people coming from all over the United States who have this shared weirdness and commitment to re-fighting a war that never went away.

Awards were now piling up across the literary spectrum.

The Library of America has honored Leonard with three volumes and counting.

Greg Sutter has contributed the editors notes for each volume.

2012, also saw an exceptional honor for Elmore Leonard.

He received the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters from the National Book Foundation.

Previous honorees included, among others, Toni Morrison ... John Updike .. Joan Didion and Norman Mailer.

And then ... along came Justified.

Elmore loved Justified.

I mean the whole thing was a love in start to finish.

I mean, he gets this script, you know, this untitled Elmore Leonard project and it's Fire in the Hole and Right away.

He realize that they're just.

They're doing my story.

Raylan Givens, the Elmore Leonard lawman.

Out of his time.

One of the great joys of working on Justified for six seasons was getting the freedom to write in the spirit of Elmore that we got to approach characters that way, dialog that way, scenes that way, stories that way.

Justified paid tribute to the bedrock of Leonard's lawmen.

[So how about at 6:00 this PM?]

[I put a little limp in that Gary Cooper walk.]

[That Marlboro Man was the Marshal that] [Gary Cooper'd up some bad ass] [in Miami a few weeks ago.]

[Get them all spun up before I swoop back down on] [my white horse.]

[That's actually how you see this going down, isn't it?]

[Why not?

Worked for Gary Cooper.]

[That your thing, Randall, your weak spot?]

[You want her spinning up the boys.]

[Keep them pixilated like Longfellow Deeds.]

2013.

Justified in its fourth year.

Elmore Leonard on another novel.

Elmore, at age 87, was still enthusiastic about his writing and he was describing a scene that he'd written.

And it was about a bull rider named Kyle McCoy.

And Elmore talking about it.

He was so excited.

And he still had that at age 87, which I find astounding.

Though still writing.

Leonard's health was failing.

I remember when he was working on Blue Dreams.

The last conversation I had with him was a few hours before he had the stroke.

And and he was like a kid, because he finally decided for sure that Raylan was going to be in the book, that he was going to bring Raylan out of the bullpen.

And and it just sort of liberated him.

And now he was seeing, you know, he was seeing where the book could go, but he even then that day, he he read to me from the book and and he didn't need me to validate it.

But you could'nt not react.

Elmore Leonard died on August 20th, 2013.

Less than two months from his 88th birthday.

Justified.

Still in production.

Unfortunately, Elmore died, you know.

You know, before the fifth season.

And so he didn't see them bring it home.

But they definitely, I think, brought it home in a way that he would have approved of.

But I would hope that his ... his approach to character; dialog scene in particular is something that never leaves me.

Um, you know, it's just, there's ... there's a wit, there's a spark to it and really there's a great humanity because he he loved his characters.

Elmore Leonard, dead at the age of 87. Who was Elmore Leonard?

This man who wrote about crime and criminals.

This man who wrote such high literature.

At Dutch's Funeral.

People had gotten up ... his sons and been very, very funny in eulogizing him.

And it was all, it was all very moving and very touching.

But then at the very end, he ... there was a military ceremony.

That was the very last thing in the funeral in which they celebrated his military service, and they did the formal folding of the flag to be put on the casket.

And when they talked about his military service and what he did and the medals that he won.

I and the movie stars, sitting around me were just moved beyond tears.

Here was this guy ... that ... this unassuming.

Quiet, non heroic kind of guy.

Who had lived a life unbeknownst to -you know, people that cared about him and thought they knew him.

But he had lived a life of this dignity and heroism and ... and bravery and grace under pressure.

That he was writing about.

Those ... his heroes are ... grow, I think, naturally out of who he was himself.

Elmore Leonard's impact.

I think Hemingway inspired more contemporary writers ... writers today than ... than any other writer.

By far.

Perhaps it's time that Leonard's mentor make room on his pedestal.

Elmore Leonard is one of the most influential authors in American Lit in the late 20th Century.

For a guy who wrote about lowlifes as much as he did, it was extremely high literature.

I think his books more honeestly represent America than any one else I can think of.

In the end, if it really matters maybe literature is just another genre.

I have a framed photograph of my on the wall next to my desk.

I feel ill more looking over my when I'm working.

I can hear him say: 'But don't try to write'.

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