A Blast of Bullets

The couple divorced in 1977, the year he had his last drink -- Scotch and Vernors ginger ale one morning while shaving.

There is a way that recovered alcoholics have of looking at the world -- beginning, say, about an hour and half after the last drink -- that is a straight ahead take on life. The absolute beat-down of denial. The reservoir of belief in a higher power.

This is what Elmore Leonard found. His characters took on some of that same self-confidence.

He met his second wife, Joan Lancaster, at a country club. He got rich and famous, and she came up with the title for "Get Shorty," and they were happy, and because life can be cruel, she died of cancer in 1993.

Alone in the house, he hired a gardening service to take care of the shrubs and such. They sent Christine, a master gardener. They married a few months later. She's 23 years younger. Then Christine's daughter was killed by a drunk driver. Her name was Geraldine. The guy went to jail, but it didn't matter much. It was devastating.

"It's still just unbelievable," Christine is saying. "It's like being handicapped."

Leonard deals with all this so far out of the public eye that nobody knows. He's been pushing out one well-reviewed book every year for so many years that it seems effortless.

"I'm doing exactly what I want to do. There is no better situation. I sit and look out the window when I'm writing away; I look out, and I don't believe it. I'm sitting here all by myself, doing this story, getting all excited about it and getting paid for it -- a lot of money. I'm not bending to a certain commercial way to fit a commercial need. I can't do that. I have to do it my way, and thank God, it's salable."

You want to know something about Elmore Leonard, what it would be like to be stuck with him on an elevator for a couple of hours, here it is: Leonard wrote the preceding paragraph in the early 1980s as a contribution to "The Courage to Change," a book by and for recovering alcoholics.

It was before he hit the bestseller list and became a household name.

Everything else has been gravy. He loves his kids and they love him. He gets paid millions of dollars. He just finished his latest book, "Road Dogs." Now he's hanging around the house, revising the book.

"I just don't know many writers who are as loose, as mellow, as Dutch," Sutter says. "It's not like he's one of these literary guys sitting there with the weight of the world on their shoulders, going 'God, I've got to be profound!' Or one of those tragic noir types. He has an Ozzie Nelson-like calm about him."