‘Try to leave out the parts that readers tend to skip,’ said the great Elmore Leonard, laconic as he always was, on being asked to give tips about writing. Wonderful advice, tough advice, like being told that the trick is just to write one sentence that requires the reader go on and read the next sentence. And having done that, just go on doing it over and over – until you’ve got the blog, the article, the script, the whatever. Sounds simple, right? Not so much!
Many years ago, when I was in my early twenties, about a million years ago, and just beginning to think that I wanted to spend my life writing, I interviewed Leonard in London for the magazine Time Out. This was way before he became such an institution, the guy who would inspire Quentin Tarantino, the dude who both Stephen King and Martin Amis tagged as ‘the great American writer’ – a long time before ‘Get Shorty’ and ‘Out of Sight’ and ‘Justified’ in other words.
The interview happened at in Islington, in North London, where I was living at the time. Leonard rolled up on foot, dressed all in black, sporting a black flat cap like you see in lots of the pictures. ‘A pleasure,’ he said, offering a firm handshake, and sitting down, but not taking off the cap.
Interview done, and being a shameless fan, I asked Elmore to if he’d mind signing a few books. He said sure, and didn’t blink when I plunked down a giant stack: a bunch of hardbacks and about thirty paperbacks, including copies of the Westerns he’d written in the 1950s, and old Avon editions of ‘Unknown Man 89’, ‘52 Pick-Up’, ‘City Primeval’ – those fabulous Detroit-based stories where everybody screws shit up and plans always go wrong, novels that still rank among his best as far as I’m concerned, and books I go back to again and again. Elmore went through the pile, signing each one in a neat hand, demonstrating the same care, I later came to realize, that he brought to any act of writing. This man knew his craft inside-out and went at any part of it with love.