A Blast of Bullets

'Two Guys in a Room'

He still writes as he always has, from 9 to 6, on an unlined yellow pad, then typing up a scene when he likes it. He never has an outline. He thinks of, say, "two guys in a room, talking," usually about some criminal endeavor, and lets them "audition" for leading roles. He shapes them by intense research -- in 1978, he hung out with the Detroit police's homicide squad, an experience that shaped the rest of his writing -- and then lets them wander deeper into trouble. If any passage sounds like "writing," he rewrites it. This nets two to four pages a day. The next morning, he'll read over those pages and "add cigarettes and drinks and things like that" and press forward.

He is not obsessed by crime, says he doesn't have an opinion about crime in America. Maid theft notwithstanding, he has almost no life experience with it.

Sutter's research fills a box for each book. What cops do each day, books on prison culture and slang. The boxes are kept in the basement. Inside, there's a regular schoolboy's notebook, 80 pages. It's the "skinny" for each book, or his essential notes. These are filled with possible character names, addresses of banks that get robbed, snippets of dialogue, and facts like the population of Miami and the number of autopsies performed each year in Detroit.

For "Up in Honey's Room," one of his most recent books, there are Hitler jokes. Hitler asks a fortuneteller when he'll die. "On a Jewish holiday." Which one, asks Hitler. "Any day you die is a Jewish holiday."

He always has an ear for speech patterns, phrases. Like how a call comes in for a detective in Detroit homicide, and they'll say, "He's on the street." A guy so dumb that if he was any dumber, "they'd have to water him twice a week."

Walker Percy, writing in the New York Times more than 20 years ago, noted that in Leonard's books, violence was so offhand that "people get shot in dependent clauses." And that he drops the word "if" at the beginning of sentences and uses hardly any conjunctions: "I had a tire iron we could find out in ten minutes." Note the missing "if" and comma. Percy said it was worthy of a graduate thesis.

Barry Sonnenfeld, the first director to figure out Leonard's dark humor ("Get Shorty"), says his books are "medium camera-shot" stuff with no close-ups for punch lines, no cues to the audience something funny just happened.

"There was a scene in a book of his ("Bandits") where this guy tells a bartender something like, 'You know, every year 100,000 women get battered by their husbands.' Bartender says, 'You wouldn't think that many women get out of line.' In the script, it called for the bartender to say that with a wink. Elmore said, 'No! The bartender would know that he's making a joke.' "

The joke, see, is that the bartender is the stupid one.

"His writing seems effortless, and sometimes people think that it is," says George Pelecanos, the D.C.-based crime novelist often mentioned as Leonard's heir apparent. "Sometimes you'll hear people say, 'I read an Elmore Leonard book, and I just don't get what the fuss is about.' You just try it sometime. Try it, buddy. Nobody's been able to duplicate it."

Right on Target

Here's what Dutch doesn't do: go cosmic, not even at the end. He keeps it spare. He'll let you figure out what happens next, because that's what life is like.

Let's look at two endings here. First, here's the deity himself, Ray Chandler, at the end of "The Big Sleep," one of his signature works.

Private eye Philip Marlowe, musing about homicide:

"What did it matter where you lay once you were dead? In a dirty sump or in a marble tower on top of a high hill? You were dead, you were sleeping the big sleep . . . you just slept the big sleep, not caring about the nastiness of how you died or where you fell . . ."

Life. Death. Deep think.

Now here's the end of "Glitz," a terrific Leonard book from 1985.

Vincent Mora, a weathered Miami police detective, is hospitalized with a gunshot wound. It was incurred when he and his girlfriend, a lounge singer named Linda, were confronted by a very bad man named Teddy. All of them were armed, with Linda holding one of Mora's guns. Lots of gunfire. The bad guy died. Mora nearly did, and has just come out of surgery:

"Vincent, there's something I have to tell you." He waited and she said, "You know the bullet they took out of your butt?"

He said, "Oh, no, you better not tell me."

"I have to," Linda said. "It was from your gun, not Teddy's. I guess it went right through him."

He took a moment, breathed in and out, settled. "It will do that."

"I shot you, Vincent."

"You didn't mean to."

"No, but I shot you. I want you to understand, it wasn't to get you to stay."

Vincent said, "Oh." He said, "Are you sure?"

* * *

That's it. That's the end. Gunshots, dead men, bloody wounds, dames with nice legs but lousy aim, irony and affection. Dutch Leonard's America.

Neely Tucker was the basis and namesake for the "Neely Tucker" character in "Cuba Libre."