{"id":3435,"date":"2012-06-02T18:56:39","date_gmt":"2012-06-02T18:56:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.crimeculture.com\/?page_id=3435"},"modified":"2021-04-11T13:57:14","modified_gmt":"2021-04-11T13:57:14","slug":"the-elmore-leonard-interviews","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.crimeculture.com\/?page_id=3435","title":{"rendered":"The Elmore Leonard Interviews"},"content":{"rendered":"

In Memory of Elmore Leonard. \u00a0Charles J. Rzepka writes, 20th August 2013:\u00a0A sad day for all who knew the man and his work, but especially for\u00a0his Detroit fans.
\n“Elmore Leonard, the Homer of Detroit: A Eulogy” is now up at JHUP<\/a><\/h4>\n

See Charles Rzepka’s excellent study of Leonard’s work,\u00a0Being Cool\u00a0<\/em>(Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013)<\/a>; and also his\u00a0tribute to Elmore Leonard for NPR’s “Cognoscenti”\u00a0–\u00a0“Circumference Everywhere: Considering Elmore Leonard’s Legacy”<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

Crimeculture\u00a0is honoured to be able to offer substantial extracts from a series of interviews that\u00a0Professor\u00a0Charles\u00a0Rzepka\u00a0conducted with Elmore Leonard in 2009-10. \u00a0There were four separate interviews, arranged here in nine parts. Professor Rzepka’s study of Elmore Leonard,\u00a0Being Cool,\u00a0<\/em>is published this year by Johns Hopkins University Press and is now available on Amazon<\/a> to pre-order.<\/p>\n

Parts: \u00a0Aug 2009<\/span>\u00a0\u00a01<\/a> \u00a0 \u00a0\u00a02<\/a> \u00a0 \u00a0 3<\/a>\u00a0 \u00a0 Sept 2009<\/span>\u00a0\u00a04<\/a> \u00a0 \u00a0 5<\/a>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0Jan<\/span>\u00a02010<\/span>\u00a0\u00a06<\/a>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a07<\/a> \u00a0 \u00a0 June 2010<\/span>\u00a0\u00a08<\/a> \u00a0 \u00a0 9<\/a><\/p>\n

\"Elmore<\/a>Elmore Leonard<\/a>\u00a0is 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 \u201ca national novelist\u201d.\u00a0\u00a0In 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.\u00a0\u00a0When he was awarded USA PEN Lifetime Achievement award, PEN praised the \u201cdistinct literary style\u201d Leonard has created, suggesting that \u201cbooks like\u00a0Swag,\u00a0LaBrava, Freaky Deaky\u00a0<\/em>and\u00a0Tishomingo Blues<\/em>\u00a0are not only classics of the crime genre, but some of the best writing of the last half century.\u201d\u00a0Photo by Linda Solomon<\/a>,\u00a0HarperCollins site<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Charles\u00a0Rzepka<\/a>, who completed his superb\u00a0study of Elmore Leonard,\u00a0Being Cool <\/em>(Johns Hopkins University Press) in 2013,\u00a0has had the opportunity to conduct many hours of interviews.\u00a0\u00a0Professor\u00a0Rzepka\u00a0has established a strong reputation as a critic of crime and detective fiction.\u00a0\u00a0His\u00a0Detective Fiction<\/em>\u00a0(Polity, 2005) offered a penetrating analysis of the development of detective fiction in England and America from the eighteenth century on;\u00a0this was followed by co-editing (with Lee Horsley) the\u00a0Blackwell\u00a0Companion to Crime Fiction<\/em>\u00a0(Wiley-Blackwell, 2010).\u00a0\u00a0In 2009, towards the end of the period in which he was working on the\u00a0Blackwell Companion<\/em>, he approached Leonard for an interview and secured not one but a series of meetings, with interviews ranging over the writer\u2019s life and work in extraordinary depth.<\/p>\n

\"BeingCool\"<\/a>Professor Rzepka explains the origins of this series of interviews:<\/p>\n

“Several years ago Lee Horsley and I co-edited Blackwell\u2019s\u00a0Companion to Crime Fiction, to which I contributed a piece on Elmore Leonard. It crystallized for me a recurrent pattern in his work\u2014the apprentice\/professional relationship\u2014that became the seed for a book on his fiction.\u00a0Being Cool: Elmore Leonard and the Work of Writing\u00a0will be published by The Johns Hopkins University Press later this year. In order to write it, I felt compelled to contact Leonard himself to ask him questions about his early life, his education, and his work habits. The result was several interviews, in person and by phone, comprising some ten hours of recorded conversation. I\u2019ve edited these interivews for Crimeculture because I think they reveal some aspects of Leonard\u2019s fiction, and his attitude toward it, that don\u2019t appear elsewhere. Along with the book, I hope they will encourage other scholars of detective and crime fiction to take up Leonard\u2019s work as an object of serious study.”<\/em><\/p>\n

The questions posed in these interviews are astute and probing:\u00a0\u00a0after the first of the interviews, Elmore Leonard told him,\u00a0\u201cIt’s a good interview, boy, it’s really — I had to think of, you know . . . things I never thought of before.\u201d\u00a0Crimeculture\u00a0is privileged to be able to post extracts from this exceptional series of interviews, and wants to thank Professor\u00a0Rzepka\u00a0for giving us the opportunity.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In Memory of Elmore Leonard. \u00a0Charles J. Rzepka writes, 20th August 2013:\u00a0A sad day for all who knew the man<\/p>\n

Continue readingThe Elmore Leonard Interviews<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":779,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.crimeculture.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/3435"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.crimeculture.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.crimeculture.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.crimeculture.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/779"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.crimeculture.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3435"}],"version-history":[{"count":44,"href":"https:\/\/www.crimeculture.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/3435\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7494,"href":"https:\/\/www.crimeculture.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/3435\/revisions\/7494"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.crimeculture.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3435"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}