Elmore Leonard, 1925-2013

That’s the opening of Elmore Leonard’s Bandits, and it’s as good an example as any of the way Leonard throws you right in and keeps you reading from the very start. Leonard, who died this morning at the age of 87, was a genre writer who transcended the label in two genres, and whose major flaw was that he made it look so easy that too many people thought they could duplicate it without putting in the effort that made it so rewarding when it came from Leonard himself. (“A line of dialogue is not clear enough if you need to explain how it’s said,” is just one of the many bits of advice that more people would do well to remember.) You have surely read some of his books, but if not you could go with Bandits, my personal favorite Glitz, or inevitably Get Shorty, which is much better than the movie and the funniest book by a man whose humor was top-notch and not even his secondary strength. I mean, read them all: There have been several times I have gotten twenty pages into a Leonard paperback I’ve picked up at someone else’s house before I’ve realized, “Hey, I’ve read this before,” and then gone on and read it again anyway. How many writers can you say that about?