Farewell to an out of sight writer

Like a lot of writers who experience “overnight success,” Elmore Leonard says his took decades to achieve. Yet his prose style has spread so pervasively through Hollywood and literary culture, you can see it in everything from Quentin Tarantino (who filmed Leonard’s Rum Punch as Jackie Brown) to Steven Soderbergh’s character-heavy movies (Out of Sight, Ocean’s 11). He could have written exclusively for the movies: his wisecracking, way-cool heroes and offbeat minor players could have provided enough work for generations of character actors. But he preferred typing out about one novel per year in his Michigan hideaway because, he liked to say, “It’s fun.”

It must have been gratifying to see his US marshal, Raylan Harlan, turn up in a series of acclaimed novels and a hit TV series (Justified, starring Timothy Olyphant) in the winter years of his career. But Leonard, who passed away last week at 87, was always in it for the writing.

Raylan turns out to be Leonard’s last completed novel, and like so many of his books, it’s pure pleasure to read: Raylan is a rather cocky but occasionally naïve US marshal who tangles with beautiful women, pot growers, mining company executives, stripper/bank robbers and kidney thieves in three interrelated stories. You’ve got to love a marshal who tells suspects exactly what they’ve done wrong right to their faces, even without a shred of evidence. Then goes ahead and nails them later, Q.E.D.

Raylan begins with the marshal investigating a pot dealer found in a motel bathtub, missing both kidneys. The twist is: someone is doping victims, stealing their kidneys and then selling the organs back to the unwilling “donors” for top dollar. Kind of a kidneys-for-ransom scheme.

Rachel stood by the Audi watching Raylan, Raylan the show.

Watched him facing Coover holding the bright-metal at his leg. Watched Coover swing the dead rat by the tail and let it go, landing on the hood of the Audi. Rachel didn’t move. Raylan didn’t either, didn’t glance around.

But said, “Coover, you throw a dead rat at my car. What’re you trying to tell me?”

Rachel unsnapped the holster riding on her hip.

Coover said, “Take it any way you want, long as you know I’m serious.”

“You’re telling me you’re a mean son of a bitch,” Raylan said to his face. “You know how many wanted felons have given me that look? I say a thousand I know I’m low. Some turn ugly as I snap on the cuffs; they’re too late. Some others, I swear, even try to draw down on me. All I’m asking, how’d you come to take Angel’s kidneys?”

The second story involves strip coal mining and the devastation it brings to mining towns. Coal mining companies no longer drill the ground, employing thousands of local workers; they simply chop away the tops of mountains — denuding them in the process — and use technology to extract the coal. The resulting debris seeps into groundwater; the coal dust coats everything in sight. There’s a murder, and Raylan is called in to see what happened.

A third story involves 23-year-old Jackie, gambling  her way through college. When she’s arrested during a raid on a college poker game, she jumps bail and is mistaken for a female bank robber. Raylan is on the case.

Each story unspools at the rate of a quick one-hour TV episode. This is not a criticism: Leonard knows how to tie the stories together so deftly, they don’t feel piecemeal. But what really pulls you along is his tight, focused writing — writing that “doesn’t sound like writing,” which was his holy grail.

Raylan doesn’t exactly reinvent the wheel for Leonard. He created Raylan Harlan during a period when he was starting to write “modern westerns.” Like old western heroes, Raylan draws his weapon quicker than anyone else in the room. But it’s the verbal tics and witty, offbeat lines that really knock you over. And those lines don’t necessarily come from Raylan, who’s guided by instinct and skill; it’s the side characters who make you smile. Leonard always had a peerless ear for dialogue, whether his novels were set in Kentucky (like Raylan), Miami, Detroit or Hollywood. It’s because that ear was set close to the ground, able to find the poetry and humor in the way people really spoke.

Leonard has said writers should “audition” their characters early in a story, to see if they want to develop them later or get rid of them. He apparently kept a “constellation” of characters in his head from book to book. They would stay up with him even when he wasn’t writing.  “I finish a book and I wonder what they’re doing now. Like they’re mannequins left in some position, waiting to be moved.”

It’s sad to think those mannequins will now be stuck there forever, in some literary cosmos, waiting for Elmore Leonard to set them in motion again.