And We Wish You Many More

Author Elmore Leonard (Djibouti) celebrates his 85th birthday today.

Killed in the Ratings: “Karen Sisco”

(The 14th entry in a month-long series about American TV crime dramas that debuted with fanfare, but are now largely forgotten.)

 

Title: Karen Sisco

Starring: Carla Gugino, Robert Forster, and Bill Duke

Original Run: 2003-2004 (10 episodes), ABC-TV

Premise: Taking on a character created by novelist Elmore Leonard and previously portrayed by Jennifer Lopez in the 1998 film Out of Sight (trailer here), Sarasota-born actress Gugino played Karen Sisco, a feisty, sexy, and independent young U.S. deputy marshal working out of Miami, Florida. Sisco spent most of her time locating and apprehending well-armed but often not terribly bright fugitives who tried to hide out in the glitzy, glamorous environs of South Beach, or elsewhere in the southeastern Florida district. And she was extremely good at her job, though some of her male colleagues needed to be taught that through experience--oftentimes to their embarrassment. Although she didn’t have much luck with men on a social basis, she was backed up professionally by two able males: her boss, U.S. Marshal Amos Andrews (Duke), and her father, an ex-Miami police officer turned private eye with the unlikely name of Marshall Sisco (Forster of Banyon and Nakia fame), who frequently served as her confessor. Speaking with the South Florida Sun-Sentinel back in 2003, Gugino--who had co-starred with Michael J. Fox in the first season of Spin City before launching a big-screen career--said: “I wasn’t looking to do a series. But I wanted this character. ... She’s very much a woman yet functions a lot like a bachelor. She has an incredible relationship with her father, which is one of the things I also found to be so great.” The show’s opening episode, “Blown Away,” was based on Elmore Leonard’s 1996 short story, “Karen Makes Out,” which first introduced the Sisco character.

Developed for television by Jason Smilovic

Additional Notes: Karen Sisco seemed to have everything going for it when it debuted on October 1, 2003. It was spun off from a popular theatrical release, it boasted a most photogenic former model as its star, and Danny DeVito (who had previously brought two other Leonard properties to the silver screen--Out of Sight and Get Shorty) was one of the program’s executive producers. In its 2003 Fall Preview edition, TV Guide called Sisco “easily the season’s coolest new show. Wry, ironic, sexy.” Entertainment Weekly’s Ken Tucker struggled to keep from salivating even harder over this series, writing:

“Karen Sisco” is an old-fashioned crime show, which I intend as a compliment--a welcome alternative to the new-fashioned, is-that-a-bloodstained-rug-fiber-or-are-you-just-glad-to-magnify-me crime shows. “Sisco,” by contrast, is a hunt-the-bad-guys series with a heroine who’s stubborn, charming, bourbon-drinking, and occasionally in need of help from her irascible father and his ex-con friends. Indeed, it’s a lot like “The Rockford Files,” except I doubt James Garner’s gams ever looked this good.

Carla Gugino (“Spy Kids”) plays Miami federal marshal Sisco, taking over Jennifer Lopez’s role from director Steven Soderbergh’s 1998 movie “'Out of Sight” ... Lopez was very good, but a bit too steamy to get on [Elmore] Leonard’s wavelength, which is one of ice-cold serenity. Gugino, however, has that tone down. She’s simultaneously calm and dogged in her pursuit of a bank robber or a German cop killer who likes to look for songs featuring the names of women he admires (he works hard to come up with one that includes “Karen”). ...

It’s fun to watch Gugino, who used to snuggle up to Michael J. Fox on “Spin City,” hold her own on a show in the company of big guys like [Robert] Forster and Bill Duke, the formidable actor-director who plays her boss, Amos. In the two episodes I’ve seen, she’s flirted with Patrick Dempsey (“Once and Again”) and Peter Horton (“Thirtysomething'”) yet managed to maintain her soft-on-the-outside, steel-on-the-inside persona. When still another date (Carlos Ponce), a tad unnerved when he finds out what she does for a living, asks Karen how many men she has killed, she just sighs and asks him to kiss her. “See?” she murmurs, coming out of the clinch. “I’m just a girl.” ...

If you’re looking for the season’s smartest, most comfy and engaging new thriller, “Sisco'” is it.

Yet this series disappeared from the prime-time schedule almost as swiftly as a previous show based on one of Leonard’s novels, the abundantly quirky Maximum Bob (1998). ABC, which had hoped Karen Sisco could take a much larger bite than it did out of the audience for its chief Wednesday-night rival, Law & Order, canceled Gugino’s series in November 2003 after running only seven episodes. Three more installments that had been shot as part of the first-season order weren’t broadcast until Sisco was re-aired on the USA Network during the spring of 2004. Ever since, fans of this show have been waiting for a DVD release, but so far without satisfaction.

Above: The write-up about Karen Sisco from the September 13-19, 2003, Fall Preview edition of TV Guide. (Click to enlarge the image.) Below: The show’s opening, which employed an edited version of the 1969 Isley Brothers funk anthem, “It’s Your Thing,” as its theme.



(The TV Guide spread about Karen Sisco was provided by Brian Sheridan. It’s part of the collection in the Communication Department at Mercyhurst College in Erie, Pennsylvania. It is used with permission.)

REQUIRED READING: In the blog Johnny LaRue’s Crane Shot, copywriter-critic Marty McKee has reviewed--individually--all 10 episodes of Karen Sisco. You’ll find that whole set here.

And the Critics Say ...

Michael Connelly and Elmore Leonard were the most prominent recipients of awards given out this week by Michigan-based The Strand Magazine.

There were two categories of contenders for the 2009 Strand Magazine Critics Awards, and here are the winners:

Best Novel: Nine Dragons, by Michael Connelly (Little, Brown)

Also nominated: The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death, by Charlie Huston (Ballantine Books); Life Sentences, by Laura Lippman (Morrow); The Renegades, by T. Jefferson Parker (Dutton); and The Little Stranger, by Sarah Waters (Riverhead Books)

Best First Novel (tie): Beat the Reaper, by Josh Bazell (Little, Brown), and Starvation Lake, by Bryan Gruley (Touchstone)

Also nominated: The Manual of Detection, by Jedediah Berry (Penguin Press); A Reliable Wife, by Robert Goolrick (Algonquin Books); and Black Water Rising, by Attica Locke (Harper)

In addition, Elmore Leonard was presented with the Lifetime Achievement Award, in a ceremony introduced by editor, publisher, and bookshop proprietor Otto Penzler.

(Hat tip to The Gumshoe Site.)

The Book You Have to Read: “Swag,” by Elmore Leonard

(Editor’s note: This is the 85th installment of our ongoing Friday blog series highlighting great but forgotten books. Today’s selection comes from Las Vegas writer, poker player, and former professional musician Mike Dennis. His crime novel, The Take, is due to be released later this year by L&L Dreamspell Publishing. Dennis’ self-titled noir fiction log can be found here.)

“What’s the best way to make a lot of money fast? Without working, that is.”

Ah, if only Ernest Stickley Jr., aka Stick, had never asked that question. He would’ve saved himself a lot of trouble, because used-car salesman Frank Ryan had the answer. But of course, if Stick had never asked the question, Elmore Leonard wouldn’t’ve written Swag, a fast-moving 1976 novel about two small-time criminals on the make in Detroit.

Frank’s response to the question: “Armed robbery.” And immediately, he and Stick spin off into a life of knocking over liquor stores and supermarkets.

They do pretty well, actually, because they follow Frank’s Ten Rules for Success and Happiness. Those rules include, among other things: “Always be polite on the job,” “Never flash money in a bar,” and “Never tell anyone your business.” The two of them live well, spending most of their free time hanging out at the pool of their apartment complex, hitting on “broads.”

But then they get greedy, and ... well, rules are meant to be broken, aren’t they? Or maybe just bent a little?

Leonard plies readers with his incomparable style and sharp ear for dialogue, as he takes us into stolen cars with Frank and Stick, then right into their heads as they pull job after job. The reader might as well be riding in the back seat, or maybe even be their getaway driver. I almost felt like I deserved a cut of each score, so intimately did I know these two.

The breezy pace of the novel takes them (and us) around the Detroit area, through all of their criminal shenanigans. A couple of bodies show up, but hey, it just couldn’t be helped, right? When they pay a visit to Sportree, the shadowy owner of a ghetto bar, Stick doesn’t like him. “Colored guys” make him nervous, you know. But Frank assures him that Sportree can be trusted, and the first cracks in their partnership appear.

Swag is vintage Leonard, an excellent story of honor among thieves, and a worthwhile read for crime-fiction lovers.

Top of the Stack

It’s been a busy week of celebrating Elmore Leonard here at The Rap Sheet. We announced the winner of our Leonard book giveaway contest, published an abbreviated interview with the octogenarian wordsmith, and of course, polled our readers on the subject of their favorite Leonard crime novels. The results of that survey are now available.

With 254 votes counted, the big winner (earning 25 nominations) is Killshot, Leonard’s 1989 suspenser about a pair of innocent bystanders to a crime, who discover that they’re no safer in the federal Witness Protection Program than they were before. When it came out, Publishers Weekly said of Killshot:

Crime fiction doesn’t get any better than Leonard’s new thriller ... When Carmen Colson and her ironworker husband, Wayne, stumble onto an extortion scheme run by Armand Degas, half Ojibway Indian, half French Canadian hit man, and his temporary partner Richie Nix, a talkative sociopath, the two killers set out to eliminate them, hiding out with Nix’s girlfriend Donna, a former prison guard who collects stuffed animals and believes that Elvis is alive. In detailing the killers’ relentless pursuit of the terrified couple, Leonard builds suspense with a deft, master hand, inducing an instant--and sustained--response of sweating hands and a racing heart. Even the most jaded reader will be swept along on the roller coaster of impending violence punctuated by heart-stopping crises. As always, Leonard writes with a natural ear for offbeat speech and a terrific sense of locale, moving the action from Toronto to Detroit and into Michigan and Ohio, telling the story almost totally through the thoughts and dialogue of the characters. In the Colsons, Leonard presents a more mature and realistic portrayal of a relationship than he has in the past, and he stirs up an uncomfortable fondness for the cruel but mellowing hit man Degas, all the while drawing the reader deeply into these ordinary lives. A bravura performance.

It will be interesting to see what kind of job Hollywood does in translating Killshot into movie form, which it is doing with Diane Lane and Mickey Rourke in starring roles. That feature is due out in 2008, but there’s already a trailer you can watch here.

A bit behind Killshot, our poll shows a tie between LaBrava (1983) and Get Shorty (1990), both of which received 17 votes. LaBrava, which in 1984 won an Edgar Award for Best Novel, numbered among my choices for January Magazine’s long-ago “Essential Mystery Library.” Of that book, I wrote: “It’s the dark-edged tale of a former Secret Service agent whose new start as a portrait photographer is endangered by his encounter with a fading but still sexy actress. She sucks him down into a world of redneck cops, deadly Cuban gunmen, and bizarre, big-bucks scamming.” My enthusiastic endorsement of LaBrava was seconded by screenwriter-novelist Nora Ephron, who, while reviewing a later Leonard novel for The New York Times Book Review, remarked: “[I]f you’re an Elmore Leonard fan what you probably want to know is, is it as good as ‘LaBrava.’ No, it’s not, but what is?”

What’s ironic about Ephron’s comment, at least as it relates to The Rap Sheet’s poll, is that it appeared in a critique of Get Shorty, the frequently funny account of a small-time Miami loan shark, whose pursuit of a hard-luck horror movie producer with bad casino debts and a scam artist who faked his own death, lands him in the flashy but insincere wilds of Hollywood. (John Travolta starred in the 1995 film version of that yarn.) There’s still further irony in the match-up between LaBrava and Get Shorty, because as Mark Reiter, co-author of The Enlightened Bracketologist: The Final Four of Everything, told Times book critic Dwight Garner earlier this year, “Leonard wrote ‘Get Shorty’ to get back at Dustin Hoffman for torturing him during the writing of the ‘LaBrava’ screenplay.”

Eight other crime titles earned 10 or more votes in our survey of Leonard favorites: Swag (16), Fifty-two Pickup (15), Out of Sight (14), Maximum Bob (13), Rum Punch (12), Unknown Man No. 89 (11), and--with 10 nominations apiece--Glitz and The Hot Kid.

The full results of this poll can be found in two parts, here and here.

And the Winner Is ...

When we announced, just over two weeks ago, that The Rap Sheet would hold a contest to give away one signed and numbered copy of Elmore Leonard’s 10 Rules of Writing--which is finally being released today under the William Morrow and Company imprint--we really had no idea how we were going to choose a winner. We finally settled on the concept of a limericks contest, with the book going to the person who sent us the cleverest Leonard-related five-line limerick by this last Saturday, October 27.

As we suggested in our introduction to this contest, “Feel free to integrate the titles of Leonard’s novels or any of his characters into your submission, or you might incorporate one or two of the 10 rules of writing that this author has spelled out before, and about which we assume he has more to say in his forthcoming book. Alternatively, you could set out deliberately to break as many of his rules as possible in your limerick. Anything you can do to make your doggerel distinctly Leonard-esque is fine with us. Extra points will be given for rampant creativity.”

In all, we received 22 submissions. A terrific response. Some of the entries were pretty funny, though a few were overloaded with Leonard book titles (and betrayed little understanding of the author or his work), while others failed to quite capture the precise rhythm of limericks. As one of our judges remarked, “I found myself wanting to rewrite them just to get the rhythm right.”

To help pick a winner, I asked for assistance from two other Rap Sheet contributors: Linda L. Richards, who’s also a novelist and the editor of January Magazine; and Kevin Burton Smith, the creator and editor of The Thrilling Detective Web Site. Individually, we sifted through the submissions, Linda recruiting her partner, graphic designer David Middleton (who reviews art and culture books for January), to help narrow down her choices. In the end, there were three entries that showed up on all of our lists, though not always in the No. 1 position. And from those, I’ve selected the winner. It was sent in by Robert Holland of Toronto, Ontario, Canada, and is entitled “Less Is Elmore”:

At his best, he is not even there.
No descriptions obscure our true care.
All his characters speak
In a voice so unique
That their innermost selves are laid bare.

Publisher HarperCollins, the parent company of William Morrow, should soon be sending Holland a limited-edition copy of Elmore Leonard’s 10 Rules of Writing. We hope he enjoys receiving it as much as we enjoyed giving it away.

Rather than simply dispose of the other entries to this contest, we want to share with you the two runners-up, at least. The first of those comes from Barbara Fister, a novelist (On the Edge) and academic librarian in rural Minnesota. Her entry is called “Elmore Leonard Pens a Break-Out Book”:

When a bullet puts him on the fritz
Vincent Mora relies on his witz.
As soon as he’s able
He goes to the table
And rakes in a helping of Glitz.

“I’m not much for limericks,” Fister admits in an e-mail note, “and I break a lot of the rules, but I find them fun to apply to other people’s writing--especially the ‘try to leave out the parts that readers tend to skip’ one. My appreciation of Leonard started years ago when I picked up a copy of Glitz, which is still one of my favorite books of all time. Killshot is another that is hard to top and has one of the best women protagonists written by a man ever. Leonard is not only a master of understated humor and natural dialogue and the acute detail, like the photo of Jesus that Cruz notices hanging in an apartment in City Primeval (when he shows it to a friend--it’s a photo!--the friend doesn’t get it, but it still cracks me up), but he also has such enormous fondness for all of his characters--the halt, the lame, the wicked, and the truly stupid--that it makes me believe the universe is a more generous place than it appears.”

The second runner-up comes from Michael Chaney, who’s been a criminal defense attorney in Los Angeles for 26 years, and is currently at work on Gator Bait, a novel that he calls “a half-assed rip-off of Elmore Leonard.” Like Holland’s entry, Chaney’s alludes to Leonard’s infamous 10 rules:

Elmore wrote this in red,
“Guy talks, you only use ‘said,’
And never but never
Begin with the weather,
And stay out of the character’s head.”

“I’ve been reading Elmore Leonard since the mid-’80s,” Chaney explains. “I was in a used bookstore on Westwood Boulevard. I picked up a paper copy of Swag and gave it the old first-sentence test and was knocked out. Then [I] read more and couldn’t believe it, the part where Frank’s summer-weight suit is “made out of that material that’s shiny and looks like it has snags in it.” And Frank “has on” a nice smile. I knew more about Frank than most writers could have told me in a long chapter. Pure genius.

“I went on to read all Elmore’s books, some half a dozen times. ...

“Bottom line, for me, Elmore is Hemingway with humor, plus more interesting characters and much better dialogue. He’s written a dozen flat-out masterpieces. Why hasn’t he won the Nobel Prize?”

We want to thank everyone who participated in this contest. And we look forward sometime to reading Elmore Leonard’s 10 Rules of Writing ourselves. Funny thing: Even though we have now given away a copy of this brand-new work, the book has not yet shown up in The Rap Sheet’s mailbox. Go figure.

What Say You, Mr. Leonard?

In association with The Rap Sheet’s contest to win a free, signed and numbered copy of Elmore Leonard’s 10 Rules of Writing, publisher HarperCollins gave yours truly the opportunity to address some brief questions to author Leonard. I e-mailed my queries to HarperCollins assistant publicist James Houston late last week, and received Leonard’s responses--typewritten, on two sheets of paper--yesterday via fax, as the octogenarian novelist doesn’t use a computer.

I’ve woven those two communications together here as an interview:

J. Kingston Pierce: I’m curious. You say you wrote up these 10 rules for Bouchercon a few years back. But in order to come up with 10, I suspect you actually came up with more. So, which other rules didn’t make the cut?

Elmore Leonard: I wrote the rules originally in Denver, there as the Bouchercon 2000 guest of honor, and presented them tongue-in-cheek. But I’ve learned to swear by them. One of the rules on the original list was: Never use a colon or semicolon in lines of dialogue; they don’t look right. Another one, Don’t ever write to a critic or show your manuscript to anyone who isn’t in the publishing business until you’re satisfied with it. ...

JKP: As one your “rules,” you say writers should avoid giving detailed descriptions of characters and places. But there can be great satisfaction in composing a thoughtful, semi-poetic word picture of a locale or player in fiction. Shouldn’t there be a balance struck between what the reader wants and what the writer needs in order to feel satisfied with the quality of the completed work?

EL: I say in the opening paragraph [of Elmore Leonard’s 10 Rules of Writing], “If you have a facility for language and imagery and the sound of your voice pleases you ...” go ahead, skip the rules.

JKP: Are you really arguing against the length or concentration of descriptions, rather than their punchiness? If one can describe a character over the course of a book through a series of telling details, is it then wrong to have more fully described that person?

EL: The length, the style, have nothing to do with it. Descriptions by writers trying to write can be tedious. The reader can already have a picture of the character and the writer’s description ruins it.

JKP: I was surprised, in looking back over your 10 rules (at least as they were presented in The New York Times), not to find you counseling writers against referring too often to a thesaurus. What’s your thinking on writing from one’s own natural vocabulary? And might there be value in reaching for a thesaurus now, if only to avoid close-set word repetitions?

EL: My books are written in scenes from the point of view of a person in the book, with some variety in the points of view to hear different sounds or voices. I avoid close-set word repetition without using a thesaurus.

JKP: An adjunct to that last question: If you have a large vocabulary, should you falsely limit yourself to using words you think everyone else will understand without looking them up, or should you feel free to write from knowledge but without pretension?

EL: Writers don’t want to sound pretentious, but some can’t avoid it. See what I say in the rule banning prologues, quoting one of [John] Steinbeck’s characters.

JKP: I agree with your admonition against using exclamation points. But how do you feel about punctuation of other sorts? Commas, for instance. People nowadays try to limit their use of commas, many times because they don’t really know how and when to use them in the first place. And how about hyphens? There’s been lots of talk lately about people expunging hyphens, again because they were adequately trained in using them, and also because adding a hyphen demands an extra keystroke on the computer. It seems to me that all sorts of punctuation marks are losing ground in the English language, because people would rather not use them than reveal they don’t know how to use them. Do you see that?

EL: My punctuation is consistent. A comma indicates a pause; a dash, something follows that relates, or might be an aside.

JKP: What about the adage, “Rules were made to be broken”? Are your rules for writing made to be broken by people who can do it well?

EL: Again, my opening paragraph. I’m not dumbing down writing, I’m saying let’s try not using so many words. It’s harder.

JKP: You’ve said that it takes you longer to write nowadays. Is that simply because you’re older, or is it because you’re more demanding of your own work now than you used to be?

EL: Both. I still have the desire, but it gets more difficult trying not to repeat myself, keeping it fresh.

JKP: Has your self-definition as a writer changed over the years, in terms of what you think you can and cannot accomplish? And what would still be a challenge for you to do as a writer?

EL: I’ve known for 50 years what I can do and what I can’t. Still, I experiment in ways to write a scene, fooling around with points of view, and the way words appear on the page, say, to give a word prominence without lighting it up.

JKP: If you could have written any one or two books that don’t already appear under your name, which would they be?

EL: [George V. Higgins’] The Friends of Eddie Coyle and the book that started me reading, All Quiet on the Western Front [by Erich Maria Remarque].

JKP: Certainly, there must be other authors working today whose work you admire and would recommend. Can you name a few?

EL: Pete Dexter, Ron Hansen, Russell Banks, Richard Price, Jim Harrison, Margaret Atwood, Annie Proulx. Yes, and Cormac McCarthy.

* * *

Curiously, Leonard either deliberately or inadvertently failed to respond to my 12th and final question, which read:

I have a fond memory to share with you. In 1981, I was just out of college and working at an alternative paper in Portland, Oregon. I sent you a letter, because I was going to write a feature piece about what noteworthy crime writers were reading themselves. You were kind enough to answer, and you also sent me a paperback copy of Gold Coast, with an accompanying note that said something on the order of “I hope you like this book, too bad there aren’t more people reading my work.” I laugh occasionally in thinking back to that note, and how far you’ve come since. Are you amazed, too, to see yourself at age 82, being idolized by all these younger wordsmiths?

Conducting an interview through a third party, as I did this one via HarperCollins, didn’t allow me (at least, not before my deadline) the opportunity to follow up on this or any of the previous questions I put to Elmore Leonard. But I’d still love to hear how the “Dickens of Detroit” would respond to that last query.

(Photo of Elmore Leonard by Dermot Cleary.)

READ MORE: “Kurt Vonnegut’s Rules for Writing a Novel,” by Jude Hardin (Crimespace).

Leonard Rules!*

Ever since we announced recently that The Rap Sheet would host a contest to win a copy of Elmore Leonard’s 10 Rules of Writing, due out at the end of this month, I’ve been contemplating how best to select a winner. I initially liked the proposal put forth by Irish blogger Declan Burke, that the book should go to “the person who pens the best opening paragraph to a novel in the Elmore Leonard style while utilising as many of the ten rules as possible.” But that sounds awfully damn complicated, and might restrict the competition to people who are already writing for their livelihoods.

Instead, I’ve decided that we ought to spin this free book contest off from something we’ve already been doing on this page, which is collecting original crime-fiction limericks.

So here’s the deal: We’ll give a copy of Elmore Leonard’s 10 Rules of Writing to the person who can send us the cleverest Leonard-related five-line limerick. Feel free to integrate the titles of Leonard’s novels or any of his characters into your submission, or you might incorporate one or two of the 10 rules of writing that this author has spelled out before, and about which we assume he has more to say in his forthcoming book. Alternatively, you could set out deliberately to break as many of his rules as possible in your limerick. Anything you can do to make your doggerel distinctly Leonard-esque is fine with us. Extra points will be given for rampant creativity.

All limericks must be submitted to The Rap Sheet by next Saturday, October 27. E-mail them here. And please write “Elmore Leonard Contest” in the subject line.

We’ll announce the winner on October 30, which just happens to be the official publication date of Elmore Leonard’s 10 Rules of Writing.

Is all that clear? Then what the hell are you waiting for? You have less than a week to send in your contest entry. Get writing.

* Editor’s note: Leonard would no doubt hate that headline, as one of his writing prescriptions is “Keep your exclamation points under control.”

Get Sonny

It’s starting to feel like all Elmore Leonard, all the time around here. What with us getting ready to give away a signed and numbered copy of his new book, Elmore Leonard’s 10 Rules of Writing. The next and natural question is: did he teach these lessons to his kids? According to The Bookseller, we’ll soon have the chance to find out:

Elmore Leonard’s son Peter has been signed by Faber in a two-book deal, starting with his début novel, Quiver. ...

“Quiver is a first-rate contemporary thriller,” said [Faber editor Angus] Cargill, who believes that Leonard is a “powerful new voice” in crime fiction.

The same item reported that “Last month, Faber signed up Liam McIlvanney, son of author William.”

You can read The Bookseller piece here.

Elmore Leonard Comes Cheap

Since we heralded Elmore Leonard’s 81st birthday on this date last year, and hate to repeat ourselves annually, we weren’t going to make a big deal of the occasion today. But then we received an e-mail note from HarperCollins representative James Houston, asking if we’d be interested in giving away a free copy of the forthcoming book, Elmore Leonard’s 10 Rules of Writing. It seems HarperCollins is willing to supply us with “one of ten signed, numbered copies,” due for release on October 30. It’s being left up to us to decide how this exclusive edition ought to be disseminated.

Because we just received this invitation (which we promptly accepted, of course), we haven’t determined yet how to choose this book’s lucky winner. Maybe through a trivia contest? Or perhaps a beauty competition, with the signed volume going to whoever looks most captivating in a string bikini? While that latter approach might brighten up our rain-dreary days, it’s altogether too commonplace. There’s got to be a better idea. If you have one, let us know in the Comments section of this post.

We expect to nail down the contest rules by next week.

Meanwhile, having not yet seen Leonard’s slender new book, we’re curious about which 10 “rules” he’s chosen to highlight. After all, in the past, this author has spelled out at least 11 writing recommendations (or restrictions, if you will).

READ MORE: “Leonard Part 41,” by Duane Swierczynski
(Philadelphia City Paper).

Not Fully Loaded

Probably like most Elmore Leonard fans, we enjoyed his last novel, The Hot Kid (2005), kept up with his 2006 New York Times-serialized novella, Comfort to the Enemy, and were looking forward to his newest novel, Up in Honey’s Room. But critic David Abrams, writing today in January Magazine, suggests that Leonard’s latest might be less of a honey than its title suggests. Remarks Abrams:

Leonard is a master at literature-in-transit. By the time you turn to page 1, most of his stories are already careening along with guns a-blazing ...

The author, who cut his teeth in the twilight of the pulp era, doesn’t slow down for the reader--he expects us to make a running leap for the open door and get in, sit down, etc. His emphatic, declarative sentences make it easy for us to keep tumbling forward through the pages. We might not grasp everything, and the cavalcade of characters might start to blur our eyes, but Leonard’s sheer exuberance of language (both inter- and intra-sentence) makes everything compulsively readable, front to back. We don’t even have to care about the characters; Leonard does and that’s all that matters. He loves these flawed, offbeat characters of his. Words lick against their bodies in cool sentences like: “He heard his name called and turned to see a young guy in black holding a big heavy show-off nickel-plate automatic against his leg, the shoulders of his suit wide, zooty, the pants pegged at his light-tan shoes.” Elmore Leonard is the kind of writer who knows when a word like “zooty” will fit and when it will not, and for that we love him.

That kind of charitable forgiveness will carry readers a long way into his newest novel, Up in Honey’s Room, which turns out to be a rather disappointing, fair-to-middling entry in Leonard’s long line of crackling-good yarns. Honey is neither great, nor mediocre. If it was a movie, I’d say, “Wait for it to come out on DVD.”

You can read his entire review here.

“I’m Always Making It Up As I Go Along”

Finally able to poke my head up briefly above myriad assignments, random editing responsibilities, and planning for a Rap Sheet project that will launch later in the month, I want to direct your attention to author-editor Duane Swierczynski’s outstanding interview with Elmore Leonard at the Philadelphia CityPaper’s Web site. What I know after reading this piece that I didn’t know before:

• Manhattan bookseller and editor Otto Penzler makes a cameo appearance of sorts in Leonard’s new novel, Up in Honey’s Room, playing a former German SS officer.

• Three characters from Leonard’s previous novels have parts in his next one, of which he’s written only about 60 pages so far.

• And he writes his books (41 so far!) on a series of “eight-and-a-half-by-11 yellow pad[s], unlined. It’s the same kind of yellow pad they used at the ad agency [where] I worked, so when I left, I would just go to a print shop and order two thousand pages more. I write everything by hand first. And then it goes on the typewriter. I did get an electric typewriter about 15 years ago. I was afraid of it at first.”

A ‘Honey’ of a Tale

Here’s some exciting news for Elmore Leonard lovers: the now 81-year-old is due out next May with his 41st novel, Up in Honey’s Room. The site explains:

The novel is part of what could be called, “The Webster Saga.” The Webster in question is of course Carl Webster, the Hot Kid of the Marshal Service, who in the novel, The Hot Kid, becomes a legendary lawman going after Depression era bandits and the like.

Carl’s legend continued in Comfort to the Enemy, a serial novel published by the New York Times in 2005. In this story, Carl helped the government find escaped German POWs in Oklahoma, particularly at Deep Fork near his family home.

Now, in Up in Honey’s Room, Carl comes to Detroit to find a couple [of] escaped German POWs and finds first a degenerate Nazi spy ring and some hot women who are as dangerous as they are fun. Plenty of surprises in this book.

There’s a bit information to be found in the catalogue copy promoting Leonard’s forthcoming novel. You’ll find that here.

(Hat tip to Campaign for the American Reader.)

Goin’ Dutch

Given the numbers of natural and manmade dangers all around us, anyone’s 81st birthday is cause for commemoration. But the party hats are especially worth breaking out when the person being glorified is Elmore Leonard, the dark poet of Detroit, Michigan.

Born in New Orleans in 1925 (though he didn’t stay there long), Leonard started out in the 1950s writing western stories for pulp magazines in his off hours, while he held down an advertising copywriting job in the Motor City. He graduated from there to penning novel-length Westerns, such as The Bounty Hunters (1953), Hombre (1961), and Valdez Is Coming (1970). But as Westerns began to lose their following in the turbulent 1960s, Leonard turned instead to crime fiction, starting with 1969’s The Big Bounce and moving from there into two score of more familiar titles (many of them made into movies), including Unknown Man No. 89 (1977), City Primeval (1980), La Brava (1983), Get Shorty (1990), Out of Sight (1996), Tishomingo Blues (2002), and last year’s The Hot Kid, a violent gangster tale set in Dust Bowl America. (For a full list of Leonard books, short stories, and films based on his work, click here.)

While it may be a bit extreme to call “Dutch” Leonard “the greatest crime writer of our time,” as The New York Times once did, he certainly sets a high standard for the fictional development of two-bit, workaday crooks and morally ambivalent protagonists; storytelling stripped to the barest and yet most attractive bones; and dialogue that sounds as if it were just raked off some ne’er-do-well’s wet tongue. If you’ve never read Leonard, start out with LaBrava--still my favorite of his novels--or maybe Swag (1976).

Happy birthday, big guy!