Review by Booklist Review
He was supposed to be a car dealer. Except he hated cars--he liked to read, and was discovering that he might be a good writer. Maybe there was a career in that? Elmore Leonard (1925--2013) became one of the most respected and popular writers of crime fiction, particularly pulps and westerns. Known for his bare-bones writing style and pitch-perfect dialogue, he influenced generations of writers who came after him. In this new biography, Kushins (who's also written books about Warren Zevon and John Bonham) draws on previously published sources, new interviews, and unpublished material including letters, excerpts from an unfinished novel, and snippets from a memoir-in-progress. Kushins isn't the first to give Leonard the biographical treatment--see, for example, Paul Challen's Get Dutch! (2000)--but he may be the first to really get inside the author's mind, to show us not just who Elmore Leonard was but how he got that way. For Leonard's legion of fans, the book is a must-read, but you don't need to be a Leonard fan to enjoy this beautifully crafted life story.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Reporter Kushins follows up Nothing's Bad Luck with this solid biography of crime novelist Elmore Leonard (1925--2013). Tracing Leonard's development as a writer, Kushins recounts how newspaper accounts of Bonnie and Clyde enamored a young Leonard with the seedy criminals who would populate his fiction. In 1950, he took a job at an ad agency and began writing westerns in his free time, selling his first piece (the novella Apache Agent) to Argosy magazine the following year. Kushins covers Leonard's alcoholism and marital woes (two of his three marriages ended in divorce), but the focus is mostly on Leonard the writer. For example, Kushins explores Leonard's influences by discussing how reading George V. Higgins's The Friends of Eddie Coyle in 1972 inspired him to pivot to crime fiction and adopt a more naturalistic prose style. Kushins sometimes indulges in a surfeit of detail, as when he explores at length the creative disputes that led Dustin Hoffman to withdraw from a film adaptation of Leonard's LaBrava. However, Leonard's fans will appreciate peeking behind the curtain of his creative process, as when Kushins describes the tortured composition of Get Shorty, for which Leonard took the unusual step of restarting the book from scratch several times. A strong overview of a towering crime novelist's career, this satisfies. Agent: William Clark, William Clark Assoc. (June)
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
For most of his adult life, Elmore Leonard (1925--2013) wrote complex stories about complex characters, with a special eye for realism and dialogue. Journalist Kushins's (Nothing's Bad Luck: The Lives of Warren Zevon) meticulously researched biography of Leonard fills in what was happening behind the scenes of his writing. Kushins had access to copious documents from throughout Leonard's career and does clear and concise work to reconstruct the trajectory of his life and career. After a start as an advertising man, Leonard began his fiction-writing career with Westerns, shifting to crime novels and thrillers when Westerns appeared to be on their way out. He also worked on numerous screenplays as well as having his novels and short stories adapted into films by others (experiences that ultimately led to Leonard's well-known novel Get Shorty). Kushins delves into the ongoing publicity around Leonard, unearthing profiles and reviews from throughout his career to further illustrate the novelist's impact on popular fiction and the reading public at various points in time. VERDICT A thoroughly researched chronicle of Leonard and his literary career. Likely to be popular where Brian Jay Jones's and Walter Isaacson's biographies circulate well.--Amber Gray
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A lively, eventful biography of the eminent--and undeniably cool--writer Elmore Leonard. Leonard, nicknamed "Dutch" as a teenager in honor of a then-current baseball player, had other heroes as a kid: As biographer Kushins notes, Leonard wrote that his boyhood idols were the "desperadoes…roaming the Midwest and holding up banks" during the Depression era. As he grew up, the son of a General Motors executive and a mother who aspired to write, he became a model student who, for a brief time, entertained thoughts of priesthood but then "discovered girls." He saw action in the Pacific in World War II, though he later joshed that "his military service had accounted for little more than distributing beer and taking out the trash." Back home in Detroit, he went into advertising while trying his hand at writing, concentrating on genres "where I could learn how to write and be selling at the same time." He began with Westerns, encouraged by the postwar boom in pulp Western fiction, turning in stories such as "Three-Ten to Yuma" that would rank at the top of the canon. By the mid-1950s he was writing more novels than stories while taking "stabs at the type of satirical domestic vignettes associated with John O'Hara, Roald Dahl, and John Cheever." Soon he found a new niche in crime, taking the point of view of the street-smart hustler and desperadoes of his youth and saying, "I'm not all that interested in the way educated people think." Yet, of course, after the success of books such asFreaky Deaky andGet Shorty--books intensely researched and planned out to the last comma, with those exact outlaws at their heart--Leonard's work is now standard among those educated people, and not even as a guilty pleasure, enshrined in the library of America. A welcome celebration of a writer who, word by word and page by page, earned every bit of his fame. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
