Having just finished two more Elmore Leonard books, on top of the six or so I've read over the years, I've been wondering what's his special sauce? One explanation is that we read crime fiction for much the same reason we eat popcorn: it's effortless and gratifying---no special sauce required.
David Baldacci, who's written some fifty crime novels observed that: "When times are stressful and it looks like the bad is winning out over the good, crime novels put the balance back in life. People inherently don’t like folks who do bad to get away with it. In crime novels evil is punished and all is right with the world. At least fictionally.”
That's only slightly true, as you'd wouldn't read a second crime novel if all you thought it would deliver, simplistically, was another triumph of good over evil. And people read crime all the time, not just when in times of stress. Or maybe times are always stressful, and I haven't been paying careful enough attention.
Violence erupts, but only occasionally in Leonard's novels. You can't have a crime book without it, but the guns are essentially props in his books. They're around but mostly kept inside someone's belt, or in the glove compartment. You know they'll be fired, but you're not waiting for those scenes.
Leonard's a master of the two-sentence quip. "Do you know what happens when you play a country tune backwards? You get your girl and your truck back, you’re not drunk anymore and your hound dog comes back to life." Compare that to Raymond Chandler's Marlowe telling us in Farewell My Lovely: "It was a blonde. A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained-glass window." Chandler's quip is a theatrical flourish, a big splash of paint. That blonde must have been a knock-out, but that's all those lines tell us. It's witty, but not informative, much like Marlowe's line in The Big Sleep: "How do you like your brandy, sir? In a glass." Leonard's quip about country music sinks in more, revealing a layer of Raylan Givens character, his take on the world---- this former U.S. Marshall from Kentucky who in Fire in the Hole has returned back home to deal with an anti-tax white supremacist who's planning on blowing up the IRS office in Cincinnati.
Free indirect speech is the technique by which a character's first-person thoughts are revealed through a third-person narrator. In crime novels, a math-oriented critic tells us that FIS makes up about twenty percent of the text. The technique is essential in crime novels as it breaks up what might otherwise be paragraph after paragraph of dialogue. Dialogue needs to be broken up, as a novel is not a play. Another number cruncher reports that in Leonard's novels around half of the texts are dialogue. (Agatha Christie's percentages are higher; as much as three-quarters in her later books).
We have FIS in the first line of Leonard's Killshot, where we're introduced to the delusional alcoholic Armand Degas, "The Blackbird," a half-Ojibway hit man from Toronto. What’s the other half?
"The Blackbird told himself he was drinking too much because he lived in this hotel and the Silver Dollar was close by, right downstairs...Try to come along Spadina Avenue, see that goddamn Silver Dollar sign, hundreds of light bulbs in your face, and not be drawn in there. Have a few drinks before coming up to this room with a ceiling that looked like a road map, all the cracks in it."
If FIS and dialogue make up seventy percent of what we're reading in an Elmore Leonard novel, the balance must be observational narrative. That's information moving the story forward without getting inside the mind of any of the characters. For instance, this description of Richie Nobles, a menacing rent-a-cop: "He was the kind of guy---LaBrava knew by sight, smell and instinct---who hung around bars and arm wrestled, Home-grown jock who pumped his muscles and tested his strength when he wasn't picking his teeth." You have to love that line about picking his teeth.
Leonard has been called the Dickens of Detroit, "the poet laureate of wild assholes with revolvers," as one critic put it. He wrote some sixty books over that many years---Westerns at first, then the famous crime novels, plus several collections of short stories. About his writing Leonard once said, "I leave out the pieces that people skip." The reader won't want to skim because he’s right that what's left in is worth reading. If you skimmed you might miss what Daryl said in Be Cool: "What do you tell a man with two black eyes? Nothing, he's already been told twice."
However, we don't read Elmore Leonard for his mastery of convincing dialogue or for his skill with other story-telling devices, but to spend time following people like Teddy Magyk, a psychopath who carries a man purse that holds a camera and a 38. (Several of Leonard's characters, good guys and bad ones, are photographers, reminding us that you can shoot people in more ways than one). Teddy's recently been released from the Florida pen where he was sent for raping a 70-year-old woman in her Miami condo. Glitz follows him as he seeks vengeance on the Miami detective who busted him for that crime. The scene moves from Miami to San Juan and then to Atlantic City, so there's a definite downhill trend here. Teddy's mom lives in Brigantine, an AC suburb, and he's bunking back in his boyhood bedroom trying to get her to give him money. Mom's tight with her limited cash, so Teddy preys on older women, in for the day from Pennsylvania to play the slots.
Leonard's range goes beyond weaving people like Teddy Magyk into big roles in his books. Another pleasure of reading him is to listen to some high-concept dialogue that comes across the page unexpectedly. Joe LaBrava is a former Secret Service agent, now living in Miami and mostly working on his art photography. He also finds himself protecting an ex- Hollywood actress, Jean Shaw. She's seen some of his pics and is curious about his work.
"When you're shooting, what do you see? "
"I wonder if I have enough light. Or too much."
"Come on. Tell me."
"I see images 'whose meanings exceed the local circumstances that provide their occasions."
"Who said that?"
"Walker Evans. Or somebody who said he did."
David Baldacci may be right that what draws so many readers to crime books is they satisfy a psychological need to have order prevail over chaos. Another explanation of their allure is that they give readers a sense of mastery. As these novels (though rarely so in Leonard's) are often filled with plot twists, readers who accurately predict those turns feel smart, accomplished. My wife D is a black belt master at this. When we watch a crime series, she has clairvoyant capabilities to predict where the twists are going.
Yet, I think the most convincing explanation is that crime novels allow us to explore dark places from a safe distance. A vicarious experience of danger and violence happens on the page and it resonates with the reader's fears, accumulated over a lifetime. Richie Nobles, the rent-a-cop, gets keys to Jill's apartment. She's the social worker who can tell him where Jean, the Hollywood star, is now living. Richie makes himself a Scotch and sits on the sofa waiting for her to return. We've seen that scene countless times in books and movies. We don’t think that some Richie is ever going to turn up in our living room, but we all have home invasion fears lodged somewhere in our psyche. As we read we're on edge, waiting for Jill to open the door and turn on the light. We're standing at the island in the kitchen watching what's about to happen in the living room when the light goes on. We enjoy living dangerously....from a distance.