A Blast of Bullets

Dutch lives in suburban Detroit, but his world is off-kilter America, primarily a vision of the lower end of the post-Vietnam era, when the margins got thin, the morals of the nation got cloudy, and irony became a survival mechanism. It's populated by cops who aren't exactly good, crooks who aren't exactly bad, and women who have an eye for the in-between. There is no judgment. Bad guys don't know they're bad. They brush their teeth and call their moms and then go rob a bank. Cynicism is on view, as is a vast detailing of bars, alcohol, prison cells, loan-sharking operations and gun runners. There is usually a lot of cash in a small container. People get shot. Self-confidence is a requirement. It's a place where getting dead isn't funny, but if this lounge singer shoots a would-be rapist and the bullet goes through him and hits her detective boyfriend right in the butt, well, you have to see the humor in the situation.

"This one time, he ran into a bull semen salesman at an opera," says Greg Sutter, his researcher of 25 years. "A bull semen salesman! At an opera! You think Dutch Leonard is going to let that go by?"

(No. See "Mr. Paradise.")

In October, Leonard will receive the 2008 F. Scott Fitzgerald Award for Achievement in American Literature, from the Fitzgerald Literary Conference in Rockville. Some previous winners: Norman Mailer, E.L. Doctorow, Joyce Carol Oates, John Updike, Jane Smiley and William Kennedy. Books by some of those: "The Naked and the Dead." "Ragtime." "Rabbit Is Rich." "A Thousand Acres." "Ironweed."

Hey. Wait a minute. This is good fun, Grand Theft Auto and all, but when did bull semen salesmen get to be art?

Leonard isn't Raymond Chandler, the designated crime writer allowed to perch upon Mount Literature. He was a copy writer for an ad agency who started writing for pulp western magazines in the 1950s, getting up at 5 a.m. to crank out a couple of pages before work. He didn't have a bestseller for 30 years.

"It came down, on the final ballot, to Elmore and John Irving," says John Moser, the conference president. "Elmore won."

Dutch himself is elated to get the award but pretty unimpressed by it all.

"Lately I've been getting more acknowledgment that I'm a literary writer, not a pulp writer," he says. He stands up. Christine has come down for dinner. He has that sneaky grin. "But I don't know how many people really believe that."

Few Clues of Celebrity

Walk through his house, a two-story thing on a nice-but-not-ostentatious street in this leafy 'burb, and you'll be hard-pressed to know you are in the house of a writer, much less a famous one. He works at a regular desk with an IBM Wheelwriter 1000 typewriter at the side. It's in a nice room with some wooden bookcases and a television at one end. He doesn't own a computer. Then there's a family room with pictures of his five kids and 13 grandkids and three great-grandchildren and a lovely oil portrait of Christine. The kitchen opens onto a sunroom, and there's the back yard with 40-foot fir trees and a small swimming pool and a tennis court with a sagging net.

He drives a VW Jetta.

There is no glory wall, no photographs of him with stars in his movies: Cheadle, Clooney, De Niro, Eastwood, J-Lo, Newman, Travolta. He doesn't go to the Oscars. Until you get to the "business room," a tiny thing off a hallway by the garage with a couple of bookcases lined with copies of his books, the only sign he's in the business is in a wet bar off the kitchen: the iconic Annie Leibovitz photograph of him on a hard-backed chair on Miami Beach, all in black, wearing a beret and typing away.