Charles Rzepka's Interview with Elmore Leonard: 1
Crimeculture is delighted to be able to offer substantial extracts from the first
of a series of interviews that Professor Charles Rzepka conducted with Elmore Leonard in 2009-10. Click here to read the second extract, posted in February 2011.
Elmore Leonard is a crucial figure in any
consideration of the development of crime writing in the twentieth century, and
he is arguably, as Martin Amis suggests, the closest thing America has to “a
national novelist”. In a career
that spans sixty years, over forty novels and numerous screenplays and short
stories, he has established himself as the best-known crime fiction writer in
America and as so vigorous a creative presence that he transcends the
categories of popular generic fiction. When he was awarded USA PEN Lifetime Achievement award, PEN praised the
“distinct literary style” Leonard has created, suggesting that “books like Swag, LaBrava,
Freaky Deaky and Tishomingo Blues are not only classics of the crime genre, but
some of the best writing of the last half century.”
Charles Rzepka,
who is working on study of Elmore Leonard provisionally entitled Being Cool, has had the opportunity to
conduct many hours of interviews. Professor Rzepka has established a strong
reputation as a critic of crime and detective fiction. His Detective Fiction (Polity, 2005) offered a penetrating analysis of
the development of detective fiction in England and America from the eighteenth
century on; this was followed by co-editing (with Lee
Horsley) the Blackwell 
Companion to Crime
Fiction (Wiley-Blackwell, 2010). In 2009, towards the end of the period in which he was working
on the Blackwell Companion, he
approached Leonard for an interview and secured not one but a series of
meetings, with interviews ranging over the writer’s life and work in
extraordinary depth.
The questions posed in these interviews are
astute and probing: after the
first of the interviews, Elmore Leonard told him, “It's a good interview,
boy, it's really -- I had to think of, you know . . . things I never thought of
before.” Crimeculture is privileged to be able to post monthly extracts from this exceptional series
of interviews, and wants to thank Professor Rzepka for giving us the opportunity.
The first extracts posted here include
discussion of Elmore Leonard’s childhood, his Catholicism and education, and
such novels as Touch, Mr. Majestyk, Pagan Babies and Big Bounce.
Elmore
Leonard Interview #1.
In
Bloomfield Village, MI. 8/12/09 (edited)
[I
arrive at the front door and Elmore Leonard welcomes me into the living room of
the house, which he uses as his study. He is working on his next book, Djibouti.
]
CR: You’re working on a typewriter and I thought I heard that you --
EL: Well, first I write longhand. Like that [points to loose sheets], and then I reached page
200 [of Djibouti] about five minutes
ago.
CR: Well, congratulations.
EL: Thank you. It’s
a big, big step. It’s so hard to
get to 200, and then 200 to 300 goes pretty fast.
CR: You’ve got everything sort of set up at this point or . . .?
EL: Once I get to this point, I have a pretty good idea up until the ending,
and I’ve been fooling even with the ending, which I never do. I’ve never done it before. I mean [with] things that are set. I don’t know if it makes sense to [do
so] at this point, but Dara [the protagonist] says,
“We missed shooting the movie, whatever happened?” in the book.
CR: She’s the one making the documentary [about Djibouti and the Somali
pirates]?
EL: Yeah. And her assistant,
Xavier, says [consults the MS], . . . no, he says, “We missed shooting the movie,” all this that went on. And she says, “If it’s the kind of
movie you honestly don’t know what’s going to happen, you don’t know what to
shoot.” He says, “You go back and
set it up.” She says, “’Then it isn’t
real,’ Dara said, ‘I only shoot reality.’”
So
that could be an ending, although I think the ending will be more about wanting
to go back to Djibouti, because Dara’s fascinated by
Djibouti. I mean it’s a horrible
place, but she loves it. She can
do an entire documentary on just the native quarter.
CR: I want to get back to this book eventually
because, first of all, I find it interesting that your protagonist is a woman
documentary filmmaker, and I can’t remember a book where a woman is the major
protagonist. Except for, I guess, Karen Sisco --although that’s really Jack Foley’s book.
EL: Yeah. [thinking out loud] Killshot. Killshot.
CR: Well, that’s true, because Carmen starts out not looking like the
protagonist. It looks like a book set up for a sort of mano a mano faceoff --
EL: It was.
CR: -- between Wayne and --
EL: He’s an ironworker, so he’s got to be the hero.
CR: He’s named after John Wayne, too, which is…
EL: Is he, was he?
CR: I think you said he was. Could we just begin earlier [in your life] and --
EL: Yes. Yeah. Start anywhere you want.
CR: As I think I told you, I’m interested in your Catholic education and
background. And I understand that
you went to Catholic parochial schools and University of Detroit High School
and the University of Detroit. Is
that right?
EL: Mm-hmm.
CR: Did any of this begin before you moved to Detroit --your Catholic
education?
EL: Well, I suppose it did. It
must have started in Memphis, when I was probably in the . . .
, well, I was in the first grade here when we were in Detroit for a very
short time before we moved to Memphis. So then, I must have been in, say, second and third grade in Memphis,
and I’m sure it was a Catholic school, and I don’t remember the name of
it. Then, we came back to Detroit
and I was in the fourth grade at Blessed Sacrament, which was about a mile from
the house. The cathedral . . .
it’s a big cathedral on Woodward Avenue. So I was always a good Catholic, and it
seems to me that when I was in about the eighth grade I thought of becoming a
brother. Once. I mean for a very
short time, because I saw pictures of their seminary, and they were playing
baseball and I thought, oh, ah, you know this could be fun.
CR: Which seminary was it?
EL: I don’t remember, but I think it was Holy Cross Fathers. Or Brothers. It
was just a picture, pictures in a book. But then about the same year or the next year I discovered girls, so
they . . . .
CR: Sort of cancelled that idea?
EL: Yeah.
CR: Do you remember anything of your
Catholic experiences at that early stage [before settling in Detroit]?
EL: No. It was finally when we came here [to Detroit] and I was in the
fourth grade, certainly by the fifth grade, [when] I was in the choir and I had
the nicest looking cassock and surplice, because my mother had it made. And
[the others] were given leftover cassocks and surplices. So I had a very neat one, and we sang
and that was it.
CR: Did you sing a particular part, or at that age were you too young?
EL: No, we were just, we marched in and lined up in a line. We did all the usual songs.
CR: So you were at Blessed Sacrament through grade school and then?
EL: And then I went right next door to Catholic Central, ninth grade. Catholic Central isn’t there
anymore. Well, neither is Blessed
Sacrament. And they were all Basilians, from Canada. Then we moved out towards Seven Mile Road and a block from U
of D High, and I switched over in my sophomore year. And there was quite a difference in the feeling of the
school, the fact that they were a little more serious about it.
CR: The Jesuits are, aren’t they?
EL: Yeah.
CR: Intellectually more.
EL: But they’re also, they have more things to talk about if you want to get
into that.
CR: Like what kinds of things?
EL: Well I mean they’re interested in stories, or they might even start
reading a book to you in class. Michael Strogoff [by Jules Verne] was
one. But in the fifth grade was when I first started to write and I wrote a
play, influenced by All Quiet on the
Western Front. I had seen the
movie, and the book was published in the Detroit
Times at that time, and I started to read it for the first time. I’m sure I didn’t read the whole
thing. But then I wrote a play and
we put it on in the classroom with the World War I scene with the desks as
“No-Man’s-Land,” the Germans over there, and the Americans on this side, and
somebody gets caught under a desk and somebody goes and saves him. I can’t
remember, there was a coward in it. I don’t know if the coward was who was
saved or did the saving. I hope he
was the one who did the saving to redeem himself, if I
was that far ahead.
CR: So you were encouraged by a teacher to
write the play?
EL: No, not until high school was I ever encouraged. No.
CR: Didn’t you [once] say you had a Jesuit teacher who encouraged you and
thought you could be a writer?
EL: Yeah.
CR: And who was that?
EL: I can hear and I can see him, but I can’t . . . I know he was in
California later and did make a reference to me after some publicity that I had
received about a book then. He
spoke up [when I was in high school], he thought I had
a chance of making it.
CR: What made him think that?
EL: Just compositions that I wrote, class papers. Then when I was at U of D
I did pretty well on tests and the instructor said, “Why don’t you just come to
my office instead of coming to class and we’ll discuss different works,” and at
that time it was the, I forgot what poets in England, before Byron and Shelley,
just before them.
CR: Sam Johnson, Thomas Gray, those poets? Or you mean the early Romantics like
William Blake, Wordsworth?
EL: Early Romantic. But then also, though, in there for him I was reading Plato’s Republic.
CR: Do you remember being particularly interested in Plato?
EL: No. I thought Aristotle was the one, because the Jesuits liked [him] so
much. What is at Boston U, an
order?
CR: It originally was a Methodist Seminary --
EL: Really?
CR: -- back in the nineteenth century, and then it went secular, I forgot
when, 1870s or ‘80s. So it still
has a school of theology, which is where Martin Luther King got his doctorate.
It’s no longer Methodist per se, and the University itself is entirely
secularized. Didn’t you say you
had a grandchild who went there?
EL: Alex. Alex Leonard. He designed this [points to T-shirt
he’s wearing].
CR: So is he a graphic artist?
EL: Yeah. He has a job as a
graphic artist, he’s the only one I know in the family
working right now.
CR: You don’t consider yourself working?
EL: Well, I don’t, no I never use that word.
CR: I see.
EL: But my son Peter, Alex’s dad, had an agency with two partners, and
Volkswagen and Audi, almost everything they did except the national ads. Then the clients took the work away
from them. They were going to try
somebody else. They had left
Detroit and now they’re wherever they were, and they’ve decided to use some
more local people. So my son had . . . they had eight people in their employ,
and they’re all immediately out of a job. And my son-in-law worked for them and
my oldest one, my daughter, whose birthday is today, she’s 59, she worked for
them. And then another son who was
at Campbell-Ewald while doing Chevrolet stuff, he was let go, lost his house
and went to Atlanta to live with her sister, in a very big house.
CR: Well all those closings and bankruptcies must be really devastating to
this region right now.
EL: Yeah. Terrible.
CR: You mentioned Michael Strogoff -- this was influential?
EL: No. It was just something that was read to us.
CR: Oh, I see.
EL: In our classes, we had pretty good discussions about things, and I took
four years of Latin and two years of Greek, and we had good teachers who would
reference a certain use of the word in a clause from something else from an
important work in Latin, say, and he’d give us that, and we thought maybe he
was just showing off, but he’d give us a page and the line and things like
that.
CR: I see. You mentioned
Aristotle: were you influenced by the Nicomachean Ethics?
EL: No. I don’t remember
anything, I don’t know anything about Aristotle now. I possibly did back in the late ‘40s.
CR: Could I ask, I want to get back to your Latin eventually, I’m fascinated
by this aspect of your education, but how did you lapse from Catholicism? I mean how did you get away from it?
EL: When I joined AA, where the direct line you have is to your higher
power, and I thought, well, we don’t need all the rubrics and all the things
and the smoke and the goings on. I’ve always thought it was overdone, I didn’t know why [there were] all
these vestments and so on historically. Well finally, when they turned around, when the priest turned around [to
face the congregation] everything changed. A lot of people left, a lot of
priests left.
CR: That’s an important theme in Touch isn’t it, the dissatisfaction of a lot of traditional Catholics with these
changes out of the Second Vatican Council? There was somebody leading a whole group of militant
conservative Catholics in Touch.
EL: Oh, exactly. Who loved the
Latin masses, [didn’t] like guitar masses. They were
very strong about that, the traditional. I forgot the Archbishop’s name who was in that
movement keeping the old styles.
CR: So you were pretty devout up to like
the late ‘70s if we’re talking about AA?
EL: Well AA I joined in ’77. Finally I saw the part of it that I understood and I didn’t fall off
[the wagon] anymore, that was the thing, because in the early ‘70s or mid ‘70s
I would go [abroad] on business, I mean to write a screenplay, go to Marrakech,
talk to some actors, and went to Tel Aviv twice, once to write a screenplay,
and another time to research a book the next year. And that was, I think ’74-75, and I got in with an Israeli
who had been in the [Six Day] War, and who always carried a pistol with him
when he thought he was ever going to meet an Arab. Didn’t trust them. Zohar Bar Am.
CR: And this affected your Catholicism?
EL: Well the fact that I felt freer, and I was going to mass, not mass, but
to receive communion almost every morning through the ‘50s and ‘60s before
going to work. It was me and a half-dozen old ladies.
CR: So you’d get up and you’d write, and then you’d go to mass, and then
you’d go to work?
EL: Yeah.
CR: That’s a pretty rigorous morning
schedule.
EL: I’d just go to take five minutes to receive communion and come out.
CR: So that must have been a radical change in your life [in the 70s]?
EL: I didn’t think of it as a radical change. It was just sort of an awakening [to the fact] that I don’t
really need all this, and where are all these people, if this is Christ’s body
and blood, where is everybody? So
like now, I wake up in the morning and I think about--it’s the 12th step really about handing yourself over to your higher power and not worrying
about this, leave it up to him, whatever he wants to do. Whatever he wants to do with me.
CR: But you’re a strong believer in free will as well, right?
EL: Oh yes, of course, that’s not an excuse. Good things aren’t necessarily going to happen to you,
you’re just equipped to handle anything that does happen. And it’s not that important.
CR: You have a character, Ben Webster, who is Carl Webster’s grandson in a
short story you wrote called Tenkiller, and at one point a character asks him about his
fundamentalist childhood, he says he was a fundamentalist Baptist because Carl
was into Jesus, and his friend says, “So what are you now?” [and] he says,
“I’m closest to a Unitarian.” Does
Unitarian Universalism resonate at all with you?
EL: Hmm-mm. At that moment, I
thought that it was a good idea.
CR: Sounded like he’s the closest to what you understand to be Unitarian.
EL: Yeah. Because when I did use Carl Webster then as the hero of a couple
of books, I did him entirely differently than his father. Who was having trouble with women, and
they were leaving him.
CR: Or dying.
EL: Or dying. Yeah.
CR: It’s an interesting story. So could we talk about some of the more Catholic books that you’ve
[written], like Touch.
EL: Yeah, based on a real person who I wrote a movie about, The Man Who Has Everything, to recruit
brothers for the Franciscans, and he, the fellow I was working for, Bill Dineen, was in Brazil doing one for the PIME fathers,
Pontifical Institute for Mission Extension, and came across this guy, this
Juvenal. And he brought him up to
Detroit, got permission to use him in the movie. He was 30 years old, but he
looked 18 and he was just a free spirit, really a good guy, and he never really
questioned you or what you were saying, or doing, or he never tried to argue
with you, he’d just laugh and say, “Just take it easy.” I think he was the Franciscan in his attitude, the way I saw it at the time. He even let a friend of mine use his
brown robes one time when we went to the beer store to buy some beer.
CR: So he had a real sense of humor?
EL: Yeah. And he would come
home for a while, I mean a visit, and he would leave his coat at the airport
when he went back home, when he went back to Brazil. And
he had an influence on my life, I mean as far as being relaxed about what you
believe and how you see it, what’s important, your attitude, when you’re in an
attitude of a negative kind, think about it and is this helping you at
all? Do you have to be this
way? I still do it today, I mean right yesterday for example.
CR: What happened yesterday?
EL: Well if Christine and I have an argument, but she’s always right, and if
she’s decided and she doesn’t care for the way I do something, then we’ll
discuss it, I mean we’ll have an argument about it, but then that’s when I try
to realize, what a minute, this isn’t that important, what are you talking
about? Let her handle it.
CR: So Touch you wrote in 1977,
but it wasn’t published for 10 years?
EL: I don’t know if it was that long.
CR: But there was a long period there right?
EL: There was. Yeah.
CR: Did the real person named Juvenal go on a talk show or was that part of
the fictionalized version?
EL: No he didn’t. And he died
two years ago.
CR: Was the talk show host based on Howard Cosell?
EL: No. He’s based on somebody
though.
CR: The two other books I was interested in
were Bandits and Pagan Babies, which both seem to have more of a focus on issues of
Catholicism and organized religion, more invested in these questions of
doctrine and faith and so forth than many of your other books.
EL: Yeah, that’s right.
CR: [The sense of] touch in
general is something that I notice coming up again and again, people touching,
particularly [at] tender moments, of course, but also the miraculous aspect [in Touch]. Even in Out of Sight, when Foley and Sisco are
locked in the trunk together, touch seems to be important. Then the first time they’re making
love, she says, “You like taking risks,” touching his face with her hand, and
then [she] kisses [him]. Something
about the sense of touch seems important to you. Does that sound right?
EL: I suppose it is. Yeah. It’s one of those things that it’s so
important to touch someone. But I
didn’t say [to myself], “I better get some touching in.”
CR: No, I wouldn’t suggest that at all. I just wonder if when I say this back to you it sounds
familiar to you?
EL: Yeah. It is.
CR: You have a character that I find fascinating in Pagan Babies, Chantal, who’s the
victim of the Rwanda massacre. She loses her arm, and there’s a moment at the
end where she’s using the [healed] stump to [hold] a bottle of Johnnie Walker
[against her side], and knowing she’d be using it this way again and
again. It’s also in the tenderer moments with Terry Dunn: he strokes the end of her
amputated arm, and that too struck me as having to do with this importance of
touch.
EL: I think yeah, right, the fact that he would touch her arm and caress it.
But you know, in the end, she’s willing to now go back to him, but before that,
she was going to go [to] this other guy who was curious about him and she’s
ready to go either way, because she’s a survivor.
CR: Right. Mary Pat is a real surprise character in that book.
EL: Yes.
CR: She’s sort of a sleeper and then she turns out to actually speak common
sense and speak truth to Terry Dunn and say, “What the heck are you doing?”
EL: When I began to write her, I felt, well, she won’t understand at all
what he’s doing, she won’t want to understand it, and she’s going to be tough,
and I thought why? Why not just
make her a sympathetic character? I think smoking entered into that too, the fact that she smoked.
CR: Which was a surprise.
EL: Yeah.
CR: She didn’t seem from the outside to be
that kind of person. In the late
‘70s early ‘80s it seems to me there’s a topic that comes up over and over
again: it’s the person inside another person.
EL: Yeah.
CR: In Split Images, there’s a
moment where Angela Nolan tells Bryan Hurd there’s
another person inside Robbie Daniels. And Bryan even thinks this about Robbie Daniels, “There’s a guy with a
sword born a hundred years too late inside Robbie Daniels,” and this comes up
several times. I’m wondering, do you see people that way in general?
EL: No, but I think about people and their personalities, and what’s the
real personality? What’s the real
person talking? Because most often
than not, at least certainly in a crowd, you’re trying to entertain a little
bit, you want to be funny, or critical, or something, but you want to know,
well, who’s the real person here who’s talking? Now that was the thing about Juvenal: he was always real.
CR: There aren’t many people like that.
EL: I don’t think so.
CR: Could I ask about, to go back to your Catholicism in your childhood, was
your family very devout, your father and your mom?
EL: No. Well we went to mass
every Sunday. Yeah. But no, they weren’t especially
devout. On Good Friday we would go
to the Stations [of the Cross] and things like that, but there wasn’t any
aspect of the religion that my mother was [stuck on], and certainly not my dad,
although he went to mass every Sunday. But in the early part of my first marriage, we would say the Rosary
Novenas all the time for things.
CR: Was this your first wife’s influence more, or…
EL: Well no more than mine, but I believed
it, and often it worked.
CR: You seem to have become more devout than [your parents] at some point.
EL: Yes.
CR: And your your sister, did she become more
devout than your parents?
EL: No, she didn’t.
[. . .]
CR: When you were in grade school did you have friends who were not
Catholics, or were all of your friends Catholic?
EL: Well the neighborhood friends weren’t. They couldn’t have been Catholic, because I don’t remember
them going to the same school I did. I remember in Oklahoma City I had an imagined friend who I called “Boyee,” and I was always talking to Boyee,
and talking about him and all. My
mother would tell me about it [in later years].
CR: This was when you were in preschool?
EL: Yeah.
CR: What kinds of conversations did you
have with Boyee?
EL: I don’t know.
CR: Your mom just told you you did?
EL: Yeah. And I was always talking to him.
CR: Did you have close friends that you remember when you were in grade
school that were important influences?
EL: I would say good friends. At Blessed Sacrament, having just come up from Memphis, I had
friends from working families and the [father] was [working] on the line somewheres, and they were very
close friends of mine. We were
together all the time playing baseball and football, and going on trips. I mean we’d hitchhike up north, not
far, to pick strawberries or something like that.
CR: Is that where you became familiar with migrant workers?
EL: No, it was later. Just reading about them. What’s his name, Chavez?
CR: Cesar Chavez?
EL: Cesar, yeah. Reading his works.
CR: Did that have an important influence on Mr. Majestyk? You have a labor organizer there who, I think, isn’t her
last name Chavez, but not related to Cesar Chavez?
EL: Right. And I wrote another one, it was [for]
a producer who wanted a [movie about the] migrant labor problem, and so I wrote
about 100 pages. I forgot what I called it, but then I sent it to him and he
said, “Oh, this isn’t what I want.” And I was [describing] a real migrant worker strike, they’re lined up
along the road and the car of the boss comes flying by, and doesn’t care if he
gets close to anybody or not. There was a lot of stuff. So I just took those 100 pages and hung them out for parts and used, I
think, some of it in Mr. Majestyk.
CR: There’s an element of migrant worker culture in the Big Bounce, right?
EL: The opening. Yeah.
CR: Jack Ryan comes up with the migrant bus. Then he gets in a fight with --
EL: In the baseball game, he got in a fight with this, what, crew chief or
someone?
CR: That’s right, with the baseball
bat. They've got it on
camera. Someone was shooting a
documentary in that book.
EL: And that picture, that was done twice as a movie. The first one with
Ryan O’Neal and Leigh Taylor-Young, I said this has got to be at least the
second worst movie ever made. Condemned by the Legion of Decency, which would be maybe a PG today, not
even an R. And then it was made again about, I don’t know, five years ago set in
Hawaii and it made no sense at all. When I said, well, the first one’s at least the second worst movie ever
made, now I know what the worst one is because no one in the picture looked
like he knew what he was doing, or why he was there.
CR: I’m wondering if part of the problem is that in movies, [viewers] don’t get all that free indirect discourse or interior monologue
[that’s in your books], where you have the character thinking. It’s not just seeing from the point of
view of a character, it’s thinking in character. You often have characters saying,
“I wonder what it’s like to be that
person or to think like that person,”
and you get that in your books, I think, in a way that movies can’t really
convey.
EL: I think in my earlier work I did a lot more thinking, character
thinking, which I got from Hemingway. Lately, I’m not doing that so much. Every once in a while, I’ll think, “he thought, I thought,”
that’s a little awkward, isn’t it? Think of it a different way.
CR: Well I like the way your voice just blends in with the character. You don’t even have to say he thought
anymore, you just --
EL: Yeah. Right. I never think
of myself sitting away from what’s going on and writing. I’m there, I’m
right in there. Always.
CR: You say in your books or in interviews
your characters are kids, and even in the books you’ll have characters say
other characters are kids, or they’re behaving like kids. Your most explosive,
intense scenes seem to come from schoolyards, bullies bullying other kids in
the playground. Do these scenes
come from memories of your own childhood?
EL: Well I imagine, but I think of the way characters act as either childish
or childlike, and there’s quite a difference. Childish is selfish and childlike
is open and honest, and wanting to learn.
CR: And they somehow all get together.
EL: Yeah. Cundo Rey, I saw his name in the International Page, I think it was, of Time Magazine, a guy named Cundo Rey somewhere in a Latin country doing something, and I thought, “God, Cundo Rey, I love it. Gotta use that." He comes out more in this one.
CR: Hmm. Okay. I’m looking forward to reading it and seeing the DVD of Killshot.
[I rise to leave]
EL: It’s a good interview. Boy, it’s . . . it’s really, I had to think of things I’ve never thought of before. It’s a good interview. Very good.
CR: Thank you.
*
[ . . .]
..............
1 Detroit was in the middle of a major recession at the time of this interview.