Elmore Leonard

THE sign on the door said “Elmore Leonard, Auditions”. A bullet had splintered the pane above it. Writerley paused, then rang the bell.

He was a thick-bodied guy, in a snappy checkered blazer and a broad-brim hat. He smelled of cheap cologne. This wasn’t his part of town. But he had business to do.

He was on a row of dirty brick storefronts on Woodward six miles from downtown Detroit, across from a poolhall and a whorehouse. He happened to know that this wasn’t Leonard’s part of town either: he lived in a big red colonial with a pool up in Bloomfield Hills, had done for years. For some reason he liked to work down here, keeping company with small-time crooks and bank robbers and broads.

Writerley rang the bell again. He felt a sweat break out on his upper lip. Perhaps this return visit wasn’t such a good idea.

“Who’s that?”

“Guess.”

“Writerley, I thought I told you to get the fuck out. I thought I broke your arm and whipped your sorry ass.”

“Just a friendly call.”

The room was dark and full of cigarette smoke. When his eyes adjusted he could see shelves of Leonard’s books lining the walls. There had been 46 novels and nine screenplays, from which had come 21 films which Leonard dismissed as A-grade crap except for “Get Shorty”, “Out of Sight” and “Jackie Brown”. He’d been eager to get into the movie business, like that smooth thug Chili Palmer in “Get Shorty”, but found he hated working with committees. Screenplays weren’t writing. And a man whose every book since 1985 had been a bestseller was not in need of money.

He sat at a desk covered with unlined yellow legal pads, all scrawled on. He was thin, with a straggly beard and eyes that squinted through wire-framed spectacles. One hand held the third Virginia Slim of the morning, as yet unlighted.

“You gonna leave, or what?”

He knew in advance what Writerley would say. He was a peddler of any dope you wanted: prologues, adverbs, adjectives, metaphors, patois dialogue, descriptions of the weather. Even now, as he settled himself uninvited on one of the Naugahyde chairs, he was saying: The rain was falling fast outside, the sky was pelt-gray, and dark clouds were massing over the dismal city like skyscrapers about to topple.

Leonard ignored him and wrote: Another spring day in Detroit.

To Writerley he said, “I told you before I don’t want any of your shit.”

He was a mild man, gentle and clean-living, but his characters were not. They got into his gut and moved into his mind, where Writerley now perched.

“I got a deal on similes, two for one. All the adjectives you can handle.”

“Shove ’em, Writerley.”

“Readers like them.”

“Like a dead leg. All those Book-of-the-Month-Club selections, just way too many words.”

Leonard hadn’t always been such a stickler for spare language. In the 1950s, when he turned out westerns at two cents a word for Dime Western and Zane Grey’s, sitting in the basement from 5am every day before he went to work, his characters said sorry embarrassedly and cussed angrily like everyone else’s. He did a lot of landscape too, dark pine forests and dry arroyos all researched from Arizona Highways magazine. In 1969, with “The Big Bounce”, he had turned to crime and started to strip it all away. Authors should be invisible, he said. Show, don’t tell. One day in 2000 he had scribbled his Ten Rules of Writing on a scrap of hotel paper. They became famous. But Writerley still called by from time to time. He didn’t learn.

“How about exclamation points? A whole spoonful of real blow, only $10.”

“Swore off those years ago. Only three allowed per 100,000 words.”

“These’ll get you a real high.”

“Like my fist.”

Under the Olympia Manual on which he typed his second drafts the desk drawer was slightly open. He had started that habit when he worked at an ad agency in the 1960s selling Chevrolets. He kept a legal pad in there to write his own stuff, so nobody saw. No plot in his stories; he made it up as the characters talked and as he went along. He followed them. If they got annoying, like Writerley, or started drinking too much, he threw them out. But he never stopped writing. It was all he ever wanted to do, apart perhaps from hitting a fastball into the upper deck at Tiger stadium.

Now there was no pad in the drawer. Instead there was a .38 Colt Special fitted with a silencer.

Writerley was whining, “You need a prologue.”

“The hell I do.”

“How about this: As a small, wide-eyed, bookish boy, travelling with his family across the dusty plains from Texas to Memphis in the 1930s on their way to Detroit, Leonard never forgot the misery of the starving, ragged farmers and the stirring tales of desperadoes such as Bonnie and Clyde…

Leonard took time to light his cigarette. Through the smoke, Writerley never saw him pull the gun from the drawer. The first bullet zipped through the Naugahyde chair. The second pinged off a blazer button. Screaming, he dived for the door.

“Don’t call again.”

He never did.