Ed Gorman's Blog, page 118

Review Roundup: Ed Gorman's Balancing Act

26, 2013Review Roundup: Ed Gorman's Balancing Act Dead Man’s Gun and Other Western Stories
By Ed Gorman
The Western Fictioneers Library, April 2013
$2.99: Kindle, ASIN B00CLTS6MC; Nook, BIN 2940016582924
128 pages

Though he’s better known for his crime, mystery, and horror fiction, Ed Gorman is no slouch at writing westerns, either. Gorman’s spare style and uncomplicated prose make it easy to imagine the author as a storyteller in the oral tradition, forced to put pen to paper during an attack of laryngitis.

Perhaps nowhere is that better expressed than in the new anthology Dead Man’s Gun and Other Western Stories. The collection of nine short tales and one brief treatise entitled “Writing the Modern Western” provides eloquent evidence of the author’s exceptional range in storytelling. More than range, though, Gorman’s short stories display the author’s uncommon ability to dig into the darkest recesses of the human psyche and expose the thin lines separating good and evil, bravery and cowardice, love and hate, pride and shame. The way Gorman’s characters balance on those lines — always in danger of falling to one side or the other — will make readers alternately shudder and rejoice.

No matter how uncomfortable the thought may be, Ed Gorman knows us all. Gazing into his mirror is undeniably uncomfortable, yet oddly liberating. “Dead Man’s Gun” will resonate with anyone who’s ever wanted revenge. Writers and movie buffs will relate to “Pards,” a bittersweet tale about a middle-aged, unsuccessful writer who finds a spiritual twin in an aging matinee icon. “The Face,” a Civil War story, is an atmospheric, psychological study of men under pressure, inexorably sliding into madness. “Mainwaring’s Gift” is at once sad and romantic and hopeful. “Gunslinger,” “Blood Truth,” and “Dance Girl” are equally compelling, each in its own way.

Though all the stories take place in the 19th century American west, it’s difficult to define Dead Man’s Gun and Other Western Tales as simply “western.” Fans of psychological horror, crime, and mystery will find much to enjoy in this volume, as well.

Read the book.

Pro-File: ROBERT J. RANDISI

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Pro-File: Robert J. Randisi


1.       Tell us about your current novel or project.
      GREAT QUESTION!  It’s been a good summer for my books.  The second book in my ROPER western P.I. series, THE RELUCTANT PINKERTON is out. Also, the 8th Rat Pack book, YOU MAKE ME FEEL SO DEAD, which features not only the Rat Pack, but Elvis. And the book I’ve been waiting for, the first in a new Nashville based P.I. series called THE HONKY TONK BIG HOSS BOOGIE. This book was supposed to be published last August as The Session Man, which means it would have predated the successful Nashville t.v. series, but the publisher went belly up and I had to find someone new to publish it. My thanks to John Boland at Perfect Crime for seeing the book’s merits. I intend to do more.                In addition, a bunch of the westerns Amazon picked up from Dorchester are out, more of the early Gunsmiths (I think they’re up to #12), and three mysteries have been published as ebooks by Crossroads Press (THE TURNER JOURNALS, COLD BLOODED and THE OFFER). Also, my crime anthology CRIME SQUARE is out.
      Just to name a few . . .


2. Can you give us a sense of what you’re working on now? 
     I’m working on the first of three original crime novels I intend to do for an epublisher (they haven’t announced it yet, so I’m sworn to secrecy), also Gunsmith #390, and an original mystery I’m doing for Crossroad Press.  I’m putting some original books out there as ebooks to see what happens. I also have a western anthology I’m working on for Piccadilly Press to do as an ebook.
3. What is the greatest pleasure of a writing career?
     I still get a big bang out of getting a carton in the mail of my new book (a pleasure that will go away if and when ebooks completely replace print books). I love holding it in my hands, especially if it has a great cover.  The three crime novels that Crossroad Press has reprinted have GREAT covers, and I can’t hold ‘em!
4. The greatest displeasure? 
     The way the business is changing. To me the word “Progress” does not mean “better.” I know, I’m an old fart.
5. Advice to the publishing world?
      Don’t be in such a hurry to pronounce the print book dead.

6. Are there any forgotten writers you’d like to see in print again?
           Warwick Downing’s first three books should be read and reread, especially THE GAMBLER, THE MINSTREL AND THE DANCE HALL QUEEN. And I’d like to see all 12 of Ralph Dennis’ HARDMAN books reprinted. It’s an excellent P.I. series that was twice packaged to look like men’s adventure.

7. Tell us about selling your first novel.  
          Much too long a story. It was called THE DISAPPEARANCE OF PENNY, and was supposed to be the first of four Henry Po novels.  However, before I could do a second the publisher asked me if I could write westerns. That lead to the creation of THE GUNSMITH series.  There were no more Henry Po Novels.
     

PART II is here! Be Cool, Elmore Leonard: Paying Homage to a Man Who Proved Hard Work Pays Off, Part II

Ed here: Jeff Pierce posted this Saturday hence the funeral reference. Rich, deep, by turns somber,funny and even wise, the posts here by various writers demonstrate why The Rap Sheet has become the  the most important of all mystery blogs.
The Rap Sheet:A funeral was held earlier today for Elmore Leonard, the acclaimed Detroit, Michigan-area crime novelist who died this last Tuesday at age 87. Detroit Free Press staff reporter Jim Schaefer explains that Leonard’s Mass included “tears and laughter, and military honors for his time in the Navy during World War II.” He adds:

About 325 people gathered inside Holy Name Catholic Church in Birmingham on Saturday morning to say good-bye. The listeners included longtime friend Mike Lupica, a sportswriter and novelist, and Timothy Olyphant, an actor in the FX TV series “Justified,” which is based on Leonard’s works.

“Elmore truly was gifted with creativity, skill and talent,” the Rev. Joe Grimaldi said during his homily. “The twinkle in his eye showed he also enjoyed having fun.”

Fun was certainly had as well by Leonard’s millions of devoted readers. In Part II of The Rap Sheet’s tribute to this late author, posted below, we offer more than two dozen recollections of his work, as well as thoughts on his legacy, contributed by novelists and critics both. Part I of our feature can be enjoyed here.

Again, Rap Sheet readers may add their own thoughts on Leonard’s life and work in the Comments section at the end of this post.

James W. Hall, the author of Dead Last and 12 other novels featuring Florida Keys-based investigator Thorn, including the soon-to-be-published Going Dark:
Back in the early ’80s, before I’d published my first novel, I wrote Elmore Leonard a fan letter. In it I told him about my experience with teaching  LaBrava  (1983) in a university class and how delighted I was to find that a novel I loved also stood up to critical analysis. We’d spent a lot of time in class dissecting the book’s techniques. I mentioned we were particularly impressed with his use of black-and-white image patterns that recurred throughout the novel (which in part has to do with black-and-white movies and black-and-white photographs and black and white people). I was speaking as a fan and as a professor of English, and I really expected no response. However, a few weeks later I received a very gracious note from Elmore thanking me for my comments and expressing his gratitude that someone was teaching his novels in a literature class. But then he went on to say that he didn’t think he’d do very well in that course, because he had no idea in hell what an image pattern was.

Ah, yes, one of Dutch’s classic zingers.

Years later he wrote a wonderful blurb for my first novel, and afterwards we were thrown together on several occasions and got to know each other fairly well. At some point I learned that he’d incorporated my long-ago fan-boy letter to him in his “funny letters speech” that he gave regularly at libraries and on book tours. I was honored to have become a butt of Dutch’s jokes.
Whether or not Dutch Leonard was actually aware of the literary substance of his own work, we’ll never know for sure. But there’s a lot of evidence that he was quite a student of literature and read widely not just in the crime-fiction genre. To retain his blue-collar reputation, though, he couldn't admit to any of that. One of his friends and contemporaries, Bob Parker, had a Ph.D. in literature, but he rarely discussed that phase of his life and was happy to project the leather jacket version of himself. I think Dutch was cut from the same cloth as Parker. Every bit as smart and just as funny, and a writer who based many of his aesthetic values on Hemingway’s muscular, minimalist prose. A writer’s writer. A man who spawned a thousand painfully inadequate imitators.
But as they say in the sports world, you can’t teach quickness. In Dutch’s case, he’d mastered the poetic cadence of speech as only someone with a great ear can do. He often cited George V. Higgins as an influence on his dialogue and you can hear that, of course. But Dutch pushed into new territory. That dialogue in LaBrava and Stickand most of his best books is the heart and soul of the work. The characters come alive and inhabit three-dimensional worlds in large part because they talk with such crunchy energy. No one really talks that way. But everyone, in a perfect world, should.
for the rest go here: http://therapsheet.blogspot.com/2013/08/
be-cool-elmore-leonard-paying-homage-to_24.html

One of The Rap Sheet's greatest-Be Cool, Elmore Leonard: Paying Homage to a Man Who Proved Hard Work Pays Off,

URSDAY, AUGUST 22, 2013Be Cool, Elmore Leonard: Paying Homage to a Man Who Proved Hard Work Pays Off, Part I










Ed here: Jeff Pierce at The Rap Sheet has written so many amazing pieces over the years.  Not to mention conducting dozens and dozens of extraordinary interviews.  I, as a blogger myself, have no idea how he is a) so productive and b) maintains his blog as the true voice of the mystery field. Nobody else could have written and collected and edited this definitive collage of comments on the life and times of Elmore Leonard. I've probably read twenty or so attempts to do something like this but none have come close. And there's Part Two to come.  Be Cool, Elmore Leonard: Paying Homage to a Man Who Proved Hard Work Pays Off, Part ILike so many other enthusiastic readers of crime fiction, I was saddened to learn earlier this week that Elmore Leonard--the author known as the “Dickens of Detroit” (even though he’d long moved away to a suburb of Michigan’s largest city)--had died at age 87, aftersuffering a stroke last month. His novels had for so many years, and so consistently, fed my reading addiction (over the course of the last six decades, beginning before I was born, he’d produced almost a book a year!), that it was near-unthinkable to conceive of his prose spigot being turned off by such a bit player as mortality.

Despite the fact that I resided in Detroit for a while during the mid-1980s, and attended an abundance of literary events there, I never had the opportunity to meet Leonard. However, not long before I moved to the Motor City, I did correspond with him. At the time, I was employed in my first reporting job out of college, with Portland, Oregon’s “alternative newspaper,”  Willamette Week , and as part of my efforts to assemble a special crime fiction-themed edition of that paper’s entertainment section, I sent letters out to a variety of mystery and thriller novelists whose names were familiar to me, even if--as was then the case with Leonard--I had not yet read much of their work. I asked each of the authors for suggestions of recent books in the genre that they’d recommend to others.

Leonard was generous enough to reply in a letter dated April 28, 1981. He specifically recommended Martin Cruz Smith’s Gorky Park and George V. Higgins’ Rat on Fire, and added that “My favorite suspense writers are Ira Levin [A Kiss Before Dying] and William Goldman[ Marathon Man ].” He also sent me a copy of  Gold Coast , one of his earliest crime novels (after he’d made a modest reputation for himself by penning tales of the Old West), andapparently the last of Leonard’s works to be published straight to paperback in the United States. At the end of his letter, he wrote: 

I’m enclosing my latest, which came out in December but was easily missed on the racks.

for the rest go here:http://therapsheet.blogspot.com/2013/...

Pro-File: Margaret Maron

"When a shadowy figure kills a dancer in a Greenwich Village theater before an audience of horrified children, NYPD detective Sigrid Harald is outraged and soon has a gut feeling that passion played a large part in the murder. With no physical evidence, she turns to special dolls used by therapists to help children talk about crimes they've witnessed." -- Good Reads

"This is one of Margaret Maron's most intriguing and elegantly plotted mysteries. Lt.Sigrid Harald at her best." --New Improved Gorman



1. Tell us about your current novel or project.
I just finished re-reading Baby Doll Games, fifth in the Lt. Sigrid Harald series, so that Oconee Spirit Press could reprint it as a trade paperback. Although I don't own a Kindle or Nook, I recognize their portability and their appeal. Nevertheless, I and many of my readers prefer a print-and-paper book and Oconee is doing a lovely job with these. All the early Sigrid Harald books had been out of print for years, but they seemed to find a new audience when I uploaded them as eBooks.  And now my readers who want the print version can have them. Win-win all around. But it was weird to read a book set twenty-five years ago and realize how much the world has changed in those twenty-five years, back when telephones were tethered to the wall and computers were starting to replace typewriters. Still, the old verities remain and the old motives for murder haven't changed all that much, have they?
2. Can you give us a sense of what you’re working on now?
Four projects are in the works:
1) I'm fine-tuning  DESIGNATED DAUGHTERS, an August 2014 novel with Judge Deborah Knott. My editor's copy edit should show up in my mailbox any day now. JoanHess gave me the title, her term for the caregivers who take on the family's dying or invalid member, usually out of love but often out ofduty when no one else will. Designated daughters come in both sexes and may be in-laws, sisters, brothers, nieces, nephews, grandchildren.
2) A  short story for the next MWA anthology. Because it must use Manhattan, I'm making it a Lt. Sigrid Harald story.
3) The next Judge Deborah Knott novel. I'm only at the very, very beginning of plotting it in my head because I want to do flashbacks towhen her parents met and fell in love. I'm curious to know why a respectable small-town debutante type could fall for a disreputablebootlegger with 8 little motherless boys.
4) Another short story set in 197 AD. The first was a Christmas chapbook titled "Yo Saturnalia!" published by Doug Greene's Crippen and Landru.
3. What is the greatest pleasure of a writing career?
Other than the writing itself, when it's going well? I think it has to be the writing friends I've made over the years. It took me a long time to find my tribe, butthey've enriched my life immeasurably.
4. The greatest displeasure?
Well, I must admit that I don't enjoy the letters from disgruntled right-wing readers who take me to task if I let Deborah, who has to runfor office, voice her personal beliefs. They act offended --  as if she has no right to political opinions. I've had several who say they'regoing to quit reading my books and will try to keep  their libraries from shelving them. One of them even wrote that she was burning hercopy of Killer Market, in which I mentioned how Ronald Reagan gutted the nation's mental health system.

5. Advice to the publishing world?
Absolutely none. The whole industry is in such flux I couldn't begin to predict where things are going to come down.
6. Are there any forgotten writers you’d like to see in print again?
You mean deceased writers whose books should be reprinted? I can't think of any. That's another good thing about the Internet. Between Alibris and AbeBooks and the Gutenberg Project, we can now find almost every book. But don't we miss new Westlakes? And in the years to come won't we miss new books from Elizabeth Peters and Elmore Leonard?
7. Tell us about selling your first novel.
Selling? That only took a year or so.  It was writing that first novel (One Coffee WIth) that took forever because I didn't think I couldwrite a real book. I began as a poet (a very bad poet) and progressed to short stories. That's the operative word:  short. My first pass atwhat eventually became a book was about 2500 words long. It didn't sell. I doubled it into a magazine-type novelette.  It didn't sell. Idoubled it into what I hoped was a book-type novelette. It didn't sell but I was advised that book-type novelettes are closer to 25,000 words. So I doubled it again. (Anybody still doing the math here?)  It didn't sell, but it did interest an agent. He liked the characters, he likedthe plot. He even said he liked the writing, "but nobody's buying novelettes.  So if you could double it . . .?"  I went back andinterpolated a long subplot and added lots of adjectives and adverbs to the main plot. It sold.

As for the actual sale, a magazine editor had recommended an agent, who did agree to represent me. It was a dreadful fit. He had absolutelyno feel for what I'd written and sent it around to some of the worst pulp markets. After a year, when all his submissions had been rejected,we agreed to dissolve the relationship (and that, incidentally, was the last time I ever signed a contract with an agent.) A week later, thems. fetched up on a Canadian editor's desk with the last two chapters missing. She wanted to read the ending. This was for Raven House,Harlequin's abortive attempt at a mystery line. She bought the book and published it for their book club, but the line folded before One CoffeeWith made it to the open market, so I was able to take the second book in the series to a new agent, who immediately sold it to DoubledayCrime Club. Eventually, that editor went back and published the first book. I can't say enough about how ethically Harlequin treated me. Theydid not ask for a return of the advance and they immediately reverted all the rights back to me. But it was a huge disappointment to write andsell a novel that didn't see a bookstore till years later.

John O'Hara by Lorin Stein from The New Yorker

“To me, O’Hara is the real Fitzgerald.”
—Fran Lebowitz, The Paris Review, 1993


Ed here: Fine as Fran Lebowitz's piece on John O'Hara is I can't agree with her that O'Hara was Fitzgerald's equal. He wasn't nearly as good a stylist, he lacked the range of skills Fitzgerald brought to the page and his work rarely had the echoes found in even some of Fitzgerald's magazine stories. But how O'Hara has slipped from view, I dunno.  His gifts were extraordinary. He understood America's class system in a way not even Fitzgerald did and despite his braggadocio he did indeed get his time and his generation down without peer. He can still move and delight me over and over; shabby as some of his bestsellers might have been his enormous body of work belongs on the same shelf as Steinbeck, with Appointment in Samarra its masterpiece.Born in 1905 in Pennsylvania coal country, the son of a small-town doctor, John O’Hara leapt to prominence with his first novel, Appointment in Samarra (1934), about the downfall of a car dealer in the fictional town of Gibbsville, Pa. With his second novel, BUtterfield 8 (1935), O’Hara turned his sights on Manhattan and produced one of the great novels of New York in the Depression. For the next three decades, his fiction shuttled back and forth between Gibbsville and New York. Many of his short stories have stood the test of time, but as a novelist he never surpassed his first efforts. His novels of the mid-thirties are his classics, and they deserve to be much more famous than they are.
According to Fran Lebowitz, O’Hara is underrated “because every single person who knew him hated him.” This is an exaggeration, as O’Hara’s biographers (most notably Geoffrey Wolff) have shown, but he could be unpleasant, and his personality sometimes overshadowed his genius. When he was drinking (roughly, from 1919 to 1954), he was notorious for picking fights with whoever had the bad luck to be standing at the other end of a bar. Sobriety curbed his temper, but not his violent yearning for recognition or his self-punishing snobbery. In later life, O’Hara still cadged matchbooks from clubs that wouldn’t have him as a member, and he demanded from his publishers not just high advances but also gifts and lunches at the Ritz. He was addicted to the tokens of success. O’Hara spent particular energy lobbying Yale for an honorary degree, in vain: as then president Kingman Brewster explained, “He wanted it too much.”
Yale comes up a lot in BUtterfield 8 and in much of O’Hara’s later fiction. It was a sort of obsession of his. (Ernest Hemingway once took up a collection “to send O’Hara to New Haven”: O’Hara was in his thirties at the time.) To his lasting chagrin, he never attended college. When he was still in high school, his father died suddenly, leaving the family penniless. From the time he was a teenager, O’Hara supported himself with his typewriter, first as a reporter in Pennsylvania, then in New York, later by writing fiction. Over the years he published 247 stories in The New Yorker (still a record) and a string of best sellers, but he never got over the change in his family’s fortunes, for the O’Haras had lived well when he was a boy, and he never stopped feeling locked out of the upper class. He was morbidly conscious of being Irish American. As his alter ego in BUtterfield 8, the beat reporter Jimmy Malloy explains to the debutante Isabel Stannard: “I am a Mick. I wear Brooks clothes and I don’t eat salad with a spoon and I could probably play five-goal polo in two years, but I am a Mick. Still a Mick … The people who think I am a Yale man aren’t very observing about people.” For O’Hara, this was an ultimate condemnation, both of the unobserving people and of himself.
for the rest go here:http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs...

Pro-File: James Reasoner

35 Years ago today








James' 300th Book


Ed here: James and Livia Reasoner have been good friends of mine for going on thirty years. I'm glad to be posting this celebration of James; 300th novel on the same day as their 35th wedding anniversary. What wonderful writers, both of them, and what wonderful people.
 1. Tell us about your current novel or project. My 300th novel, DANCING WITH DEAD MEN, was just released for the various e-book platforms last week, and a trade paperback edition is in the works. This is a stand-alone traditional Western novel about a hired gunman, Logan Handley, who is struck down by a disease that leaves him partially crippled. The story follows his effort to deal with this condition and also to save himself and some new-found friends from an old enemy who is stalking with him. There's plenty of action and what I hope are interesting characters. >
2. Can you give us a sense of what you’re working on now? 
I'm working on one of the many ghost-written novels I've done, which I can't really reveal. I can say that it's a Western, though.
3. What is the greatest pleasure of a writing career? The best thing for me is that writing has always made it possible for me to spend a lot of time with my family and be there for them whenever they need me. Sometimes it seems like my writing schedule has me chained to the keyboard, but that's not really the case. There's still a great deal of freedom for me to do other things when I need to.
4. The greatest displeasure? Waiting to get paid! I suspect that's a common answer among writers.
5. Advice to the publishing world? Realize that the success of e-books has changed things and the business will never again be like it was before.
6. Are there any forgotten writers you’d like to see in print again? So many of the great pulp and paperback authors are in print again, so it's harder to find truly forgotten writers. Harry Olmsted was a fine author who wrote hundreds of stories for the Western pulps, but he never wrote any novels so his work has disappeared. I'd love to see a collection of his best work. Donald Barr Chidsey was a top-notch historical novelist who also wrote some good mysteries and contemporary fiction. Quite a bit of T.T. Flynn's Western work is available, but he also wrote hardboiled mystery fiction that ought to be reprinted.
 7. Tell us about selling your first novel. In 1979, when I was trying to sell TEXAS WIND, Livia and I lived out in the country (we still do) and hadn't put up a mailbox, so we got our mail at the post office in the little town nearby. Because I was sending out manuscripts all the time and didn't want them bent or rolled up when they came back in their SASE (as they all too often did), we got a drawer at the post office instead of a regular box, so they could lay flat. So for years my address was P.O. Drawer C. The drawers were on the very bottom row in the post office, so I had to bend over to open Drawer C and check it. One day I was doing that when I found a manila envelope in it. That was a common sight, of course (those dreaded SASEs), but I realized right away this wasn't one of mine. Instead the return address was Manor Books in New York, the most recent place I had sent TEXAS WIND. I remember I just stood there for a few seconds looking at the envelope before I took it out, opened it, and found contracts for the book. My pulse was really pounding. I don't even remember the drive home to tell Livia. It was a great moment.

Elmore Leonard’s Novels Make Great Movies

 Jennifer Lopez and George Clooney in Out of Sight
© MCA/Universal Pictures. All rights reserved.Elmore Leonard’s Novels Make Great Movies By Forrest Wickman |FROM SLATE
Back in 2004, the Atlantic’s Christoper Orr called Elmore Leonard, who died this morning, “perhaps the most cinematic novelist writing in the English language.” Not only did his novels frequently follow the Godard recipe for a movie—all you need is a girl and a gun—but he pared down his style to action and dialogue. As he wrote when describing his 10 rules for writing (which included avoiding lengthy descriptions and leaving out “the part that readers tend to skip”), “If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.”

It’s little surprise, then, that more than almost any recent novelist (save perhaps Stephen King), his novels have also made for many excellent movies. Among the best are  Jackie Brown , Get Shorty ,  Hombre , and the two versions of  3:10 to Yuma —though there are about 20 more, spanning almost 50 years, not to mention TV adaptations like  Justified .

How closely do these movies follow Leonard’s words? It depends, of course. But those who only know Leonard through film might be surprised at exactly how cinematic his books can be—and at how much his books and the movies were already in dialogue with each other.

A prime example: the trunk scene from  Out of Sight  (perhaps the best Leonard adaptation), with Jack Foley (George Clooney) and Karen Sisco (Jennifer Lopez) trapped together in the back of a getaway car. You might think the couple’s way of flirting with movie references was added by director Steven Soderbergh and screenwriter Scott Frank. But it’s all there in the novel. Before they get to  Three Days of the Condor , the fugitive and the U.S. Marshal talk about Network  and Bonnie and 

“That part where they got shot? Warren Beatty and … I can’t think of her name.”
“Faye Dunaway. I loved her in Network.”
“Yeah, she was good. I liked the guy saying he wasn’t gonna take any more shit from anybody.”
“Peter Finch,” Karen said.
“Yeah, right. Anyway, that scene where Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway get shot? I remember thinking at the time, it wouldn’t be a bad way to go, if you have to.”

for the rest go here:
http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2...
leonard_cinematic_novelist_comparing_his_best_novels_with_their.
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Best-selling author Elmore Leonard dies at 87

Best-selling author Elmore Leonard dies at 87             MIKE HOUSEHOLDER | August 20, 2013 10:10 AM EST | Compare other versions »
DETROIT — Elmore Leonard, the beloved crime novelist whose acclaimed best-sellers and the movies made from them chronicled the violent deaths of many a thug and con man, has died. He was 87.Leonard, winner of an honorary National Book Award in 2012, died Tuesday morning from complications from a stroke, according to his researcher, Gregg Sutter. Sutter said Elmore was surrounded by his family when he died.His millions of fans, from bellhops to Saul Bellow, made all his books since "Glitz" (1985) best-sellers. When they flocked to watch John Travolta in the movie version of "Get Shorty" in 1995, its author became the darling of Hollywood's hippest directors. And book critics and literary lions, prone to dismiss crime novels as mere entertainments, competed for adjectives to praise him.His more than 40 novels were populated by pathetic schemers, clever conmen and casual killers. Each was characterized by moral ambivalence about crime, black humor and wickedly acute depictions of human nature: the greedy dreams of Armand Degas in "Killshot," the wisecracking cool of Chili Palmer in "Get Shorty," Jack Belmont's lust for notoriety in "The Hot Kid.""When something sounds like writing, I rewrite it," Leonard often said; and critics adored the flawlessly unadorned, colloquial style. As author Ann Arensberg put it in a New York Times book review, "I didn't know it was possible to be as good as Elmore Leonard."Leonard spent much of his childhood in Detroit and set many of his novels in the city. Others were set in Miami near his North Palm Beach, Fla., vacation home.One remarkable thing about Leonard's talent is how long it took the world to notice. He didn't have a best-seller until his 60th year, and few critics took him seriously before the 1990s.
He had some minor successes in the 1950s and `60s in writing Western stories and novels, a couple of which were made into movies. But when interest in the Western dried up, he turned to writing scripts for educational and industrial films while trying his hand at another genre: crime novels.The first, "The Big Bounce," was rejected 84 times before it was published as a paperback in 1969. Hollywood came calling again, paying $50,000 for the rights and turning it into a movie starring Ryan O'Neal, that even Leonard called "terrible."He followed up with several more well-written, fast-paced crime novels, including "Swag" (1976). Leonard was already following the advice he would later give to young writers: "Try to leave out the parts that people skip."In 1978, he was commissioned to write an article about the Detroit Police Department. He shadowed the cops for nearly three months. Starting with "City Primeval" in 1980, his crime novels gained a new authenticity, with quirky but believable characters and crisp, slangy dialogue. But sales remained light.Donald I. Fine, an editor at Arbor House, thought they deserved better and promised to put the muscle of his publicity department behind them. He delivered; and in 1985, "Glitz," a stylish novel of vengeance set in Atlantic City, became Leonard's first best-seller.Leonard never looked back.Hollywood rediscovered him, churning out a succession of bad movies including the humorless "51 Pick-up" starring Roy Scheider. Its director, John Frankenheimer, failed to capture the sensibilities of Leonard's work, and his ear missed the clever dialogue.It took Barry Sonnenfeld to finally show Hollywood how to turn a Leonard novel into a really good movie. "Get Shorty" was the first to feel and sound like an Elmore Leonard novel.Then Quentin Tarantino took a turn with "Rum Punch," turning it into "Jackie Brown," a campy, Blaxploitation-style film starring Pam Grier. But Steven Soderbergh stayed faithful to Leonard's story and dialogue with "Out of Sight."Writing well into his 80s, Leonard's writing process remained the same.He settled in at his home office in Bloomfield Township, Mich., around 10 a.m. behind a desk covered with stacks of paper and books. He lit a cigarette, took a drag and set about to writing – longhand, of course – on the 63-page unlined yellow pads that were custom-made for him.When he finished a page, Leonard transferred the words onto a separate piece of paper using an electric typewriter. He tried to complete between three and five pages by the time his workday ended at 6 p.m."Well, you've got to put in the time if you want to write a book," Leonard told The Associated Press in 2010 of the shift work that was befitting of his hometown's standing as the nation's automotive capital.Leonard had sold his first story, "Trail of the Apache," in 1951 and followed with 30 more for such magazines as "Dime Western," earning 2 or 3 cents a word. At the time, he was working in advertising, but rose early to work on his fiction before trudging off to write Chevrolet ads.One story, "3:10 to Yuma," became a noted 1956 movie starring Glenn Ford, and "The Captives" was made into a film the same year called "The Tall T." But the small windfall wasn't enough for Leonard to quit his day job. ("3:10 to Yuma" was remade in 2007, starring Russell Crowe.)His first novel, "The Bounty Hunters," was published in 1953, and he wrote four more in the next eight years. One of them, "Hombre," about a white man raised by Apaches, was a breakthrough for the struggling young writer. When 20th Century Fox bought the rights for $10,000 in 1967, he quit the ad business to write full time."Hombre" became a pretty good movie starring Paul Newman, and the book was named one of the greatest Westerns of all time by the Western Writers of America.Soon, another Leonard Western, "Valdez Is Coming," became a star vehicle for Burt Lancaster. But as the 1960s ended, the market for Westerns fizzled. Leonard wrote five more, but they sold poorly, and Hollywood had lost interest.Leonard was born in New Orleans on Oct. 11, 1925, the son of General Motors executive Elmore John Leonard and his wife, Flora.The family settled near Detroit when young Elmore was 10. The tough, undersized young man played quarterback in high school and earned the nickname "Dutch," after Emil "Dutch" Leonard, a knuckleball pitcher of the day. The ballplayer's card sat for years in the writer's study on one of the shelves lined with copies of his books.After serving in the Navy during World War II, he majored in English at the University of Detroit. He started writing copy for an advertising agency before his graduation in 1950.He married three times: to the late Beverly Cline in 1949, the late Joan Shepard in 1979 and, at the age of 68, to Christine Kent in 1993. He had five children, all from his first marriage.His son, Peter, followed in his father's path, going into advertising for years before achieving his own success as a novelist with his 2008 debut, "Quiver."In 2012, after learning he was to become a National Book Award lifetime achievement recipient, Leonard said he had no intention of ending his life's work."I probably won't quit until I just quit everything – quit my life – because it's all I know how to do," he told the AP at the time. "And it's fun. I do have fun writing, and a long time ago, I told myself, `You got to have fun at this, or it'll drive you nuts.'"

Favorite Films, Favorite Directors: Day of The Outlaw by Andre De Toth

Ed here: Day of The Outlaw is one of the most powerful and unique westerns I've ever seen. The relationship  between Robert Ryan and Burl Ives puts this in my top ten westerns.  The dancing scene here is one of the most chilling and remarkable sequences ever put to film. The final half hour is worthy of John Ford at his best as a FILM director. Psychologically Ford couldn't have pulled it off.

 Director Andrew De Toth directed many of my favorite B crime and western pictures.  He wrote many major films but always preferred to direct lower-budget because he said big stars defined the film rather than the writing and acting. Jack Warner said he would triple De Toth's budget if he'd put John Wayne in the picture. But De Toth  told him he thought Wayne was "big and stupid." In a rage Warner cut the budget on the film even more and told him he had fifteen days to shoot it. De Toth brought it in in fourteen under budget. It's one of my favorite B crime films "Crime Wave." He was right. Sterling Hayden did a much better job than Wayne would have. De Toth later explained that he liked protagonists who were conflicted, remorseful sometimes, and agitated. So do I. Think of Anthony Mann's protagonists, especially James Stewart.

Here from the U.K.'s Telegraph is reviewer Tim Robey's excellent take on the picture.


Tim Robey recommends... Day of the Outlaw (1959)In his weekly column, Tim Robey recommends a film that is indisputably worth two hours of your time. This week: Day of the Outlaw, a mesmerising Western that continually redefines what heroism might mean.
Every great Western is a unique statement on them all. Consider how many of the best examples are about how the West was lost, not won – and how they like to blur the binary sort of morality we might associate with gunfights at dawn. André de Toth's mesmerising Day of the Outlaw keeps redefining everything it's saying: what heroism might mean, what an outlaw is, how best to deal with one. If your routine matinée Western offers the sure ground of favourite stars trading banter on the same old backlots, this is more like clambering up a rocky outcrop which could tumble at any moment.It was filmed in wintry Oregon, doubling as a tiny Wyoming town with the entirely apt name of Bitters. Russell Harlan was the cinematographer, but it could hardly look less like Howard Hawks's glowing, sunset-hued Rio Bravo, which he shot the same year. Harlan's use of monochrome here is pitiless, frigid, unconsoling. The mountains enclose every exterior shot, and snow is everywhere. Matching the movie's grim visage with a rugged one of his own, Robert Ryan gives a central performance that's ruthlessly tough. As the story begins, he's riding in to air a grievance about barbed–wire fences, and we immediately quail for whoever's on the receiving end.What really stands between Ryan's Blaise Starrett and local farmer Hal (Alan Marshal) isn't the fence. It's Helen (Tina Louise), the lover Starrett missed his chance to marry years before. The movie's first 20 minutes culminate in deadlock, a stand–off, and a bottle being rolled along the bar: when it falls, they'll draw. It doesn't fall. The movie chooses this inspired moment to introduce its real threat: seven army deserters, led by dying captain Jack Bruhn (Burl Ives), who barge in and hold the whole town to ransom.Ryan, hitherto suspected to be the villain of the piece, is suddenly placed in the strange position of being its hero: the only man able to stand up to this brutal incursion of desperate, sex-starved men. All except Bruhn are immediately eyeing up the town's women, and before long de Toth is staging a tense bar-room dance sequence, like some ceilidh from hell. To incongruously jaunty honky-tonk piano, Bruhn's men swing their captive partners around the room like rag-dolls.for the rest go here:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/fi...
/Tim-Robey-recommends...-Day-of-the-Outlaw-1959.html