LaBrava (41 page)

Amis:
Among the differences from your earlier books, this book is more discursive, less dialogue-driven and, till the end, less action-driven. Toward the end, you get a familiar Leonard scenario where there’s a chunk of money sitting around, and various people are after it and you’re pretty confident that it’s going to go to the least-undeserving people present. And it’s not hard-bitten; it’s a much more romantic book than we’re used to from you. Could your Westerns have had such romance?

Leonard:
No. In my Westerns there was little romance except in
Valdez Is Coming
, which is my favorite of the Westerns. No, I just wanted to make this a romantic adventure story.

Amis:
And there’s a kind of political romanticism, too. You’ve always sided with the underdog, imaginatively; one can sense that. And who could be more of an underdog than a criminal? And your criminals have always been rather implausibly likable and gentle creatures. What is your view about crime in America?

Leonard:
I don’t have a view about crime in America. There isn’t anything I can say that would be interesting at all. When I’m fashioning my bad guys, though (and sometimes a good guy has had a criminal past and then he can go either way; to me, he’s the best kind of character to have), I don’t think of them as bad guys. I just think of them as, for the most part, normal people who get up in the morning and they wonder what they’re going to have for breakfast, and they sneeze, and they wonder if they should call their mother, and then they rob a bank. Because that’s the way they are. Except for real hard-core guys.

Amis:
The really bad guys.

Leonard:
Yeah, the really bad guys. . . .

Amis:
Before we end, I’d just like to ask you about why you keep writing. I just read my father’s collected letters, which are going to be published in a year or two. It was with some dread that I realized that the writer’s life never pauses. You can never sit back and rest on what you’ve done. You are driven on remorselessly by something, whether it’s dedication or desire to defeat time. What is it that drives you? Is it just pure enjoyment that makes you settle down every morning to carry out this other life that you live?

Leonard:
It’s the most satisfying thing I can imagine doing. To write that scene and then read it and it works. I love the sound of it. There’s nothing better than that. The notoriety that comes later doesn’t compare to the doing of it. I’ve been doing it for almost forty-seven years, and I’m still trying to make it better. Even though I know my limitations; I know what I can’t do. I know that if I tried to write, say, as an omniscient author, it would be so mediocre.
You
can do more forms of writing than I can, including essays. My essay would sound, at best, like a college paper.

Amis:
Well, why isn’t there a Martin Amis Day? Because January 16, 1998, was Elmore Leonard Day in the state of Michigan, and it seems that here, in Los Angeles, it’s been Elmore Leonard Day for the last decade. [Laughter]

[Applause]

Editor’s note:
Martin Amis is the author of many novels — including Money: A Suicide Note; London Fields; and Night Train — and many works of nonfiction, including a collection of essays and criticism, The War Against Cliché, in which may be found other interesting observations on the work of Elmore Leonard.

Elmore Leonard
has written more than three dozen books during his highly successful writing career, including the national bestsellers
Tishomingo Blues
,
Pagan Babies
, and
Be Cool
. Many of his novels have been made into movies, including
Get Shorty
,
Out of Sight
,
Valdez Is Coming
, and
Rum Punch
(as Quentin Tarantino’s
Jackie Brown
). He has been named Grand Master by Mystery Writers of America and lives in Bloomfield Village, Michigan, with his wife.

“Have I got a book for you.
LaBrava
is a mean-streets romance, laconic and bittersweet, so thoroughly a film noir in novel form that a twenty-five-year-old Hollywood film noir is itself at the center of the plot. . . . Check it out.”

“Elmore ‘Dutch’ Leonard is more than just one of the all-time greats of crime fiction. He’s fast becoming an authentic American icon.”

“Nobody but nobody on the current scene can match his ability to serve up violence so light-handedly, with so supremely deadpan a flourish.”

“Terrific . . . Leonard’s best book so far.”

“The debate over who’s the all-time king of the whack job crime novelists just ended. Living or dead, Elmore Leonard tops ’em all.”

“Many surprises . . . The tone is dry and mordant, the action well-paced, and the voices of the riffraff convincing. . . .
LaBrava
may be the best of Mr. Leonard’s books; it is about as good as the form allows . . . a thriller whose conclusion is even more satisfying than the crackling exposition, whose denouement plausibly resolves an ironic plot that was fully thought through.”

“A giant among writers of crime fiction.”

“A master of narrative . . . A poet of the vernacular . . . Leonard paints an intimate, precise, funny, frightening, and irresistible mural of the American underworld.”

“A major literary star . . . He defies categorization, and when you do try to categorize him, you are invariably wrong.”

“Very fine . . . Elmore Leonard is truly a great writer.”

“Luridly entertaining . . . the elements congeal into a taut climax . . . Leonard has become a phenomenon. . . . His crime novels [are] grippingly true-to-life tales of double-cross and redemption, with a murky morality that seems to suit the times. . . . Leonard truly shines. He has created a gallery of compelling, off-the-wall villains unequaled in American crime fiction.”

“Leonard is incredible. . . . I am in awe of this guy. His books are sheer entertainment, while at the same time maintaining total respect for the reader. There are days when I know I should be doing something else, but I can’t make myself put down the Leonard book I am reading at the time.”

“Elmore Leonard is arguably the best living writer of crime fiction.”

“The man knows how to grab you.”

“Tough and smart . . . His dialogue is so authentic that it dances off the page. . . . The characters flash on and off in multicolored neon. . . . And the scam that forms the backbone of the novel’s plot is intriguingly mystifying.”

“The Dickens of Detroit . . . He creates colorful characters from the seamier side of life. . . . His style is as strong and personal as Van Gogh’s brush strokes. He has perfect pitch for the street talk you might hear from armed robbers who are not very good at armed robbery.”

“Elmore Leonard has few peers. . . . His work [is] marked by razor-sharp characterizations, wonderful dialogue, quirky humor, and the sort of seductive plots and movie-style editing that allows little time for questions.”

“Leonard’s cinematic grasp of scene and setting, his ability to arouse within us a helpless sympathy for even the lowest of his characters, his quirky pacing and plot twists, and his sly humor and artfully oddball prose sear our eyeballs and keep the pages turning.”

“The best writer of crime fiction alive.”

“Leonard is the best in the business: His dialogue snaps, his characters are more alive than most of the people you meet on the street, and his twisting plots always resolve themselves with a no-nonsense plausibility.”

“Nobody brings the illogic of crime and criminals to life better. . . . Elmore Leonard likes his characters. He knows where they live, how they live, what they will and won’t do, and, especially, how they talk and what they talk about. . . . What makes his work memorable is his uncompromisingly direct prose, his affectionately crafted yet very real characters, and, of course, the fact that Leonard knows that providing entertainment is the novelist’s first commandment. . . . . In
LaBrava
. . . the pace Leonard sets is fast . . . At the end is a double-cross, and a lovely ironic twist.”

“Elmore Leonard is the Alexander the Great of crime fiction.”

“He turns out first-rate thrillers . . . crime books that sketch the dark side of the dollar, a world where street-crazies plot, scams rise and fall . . . Leonard has simply set loose the most frightening psychopaths in the pages of literature. . . . By any standard, ‘Dutch’ Leonard is a rare find.”

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

LABRAVA. Copyright © 1983 by Elmore Leonard. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of PerfectBound™.

PerfectBound™ and the PerfectBound™ logo are trademarks of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.

Mobipocket Reader edition v 1. January 2003 ISBN: 0-0607-6996-3

First HarperTorch paperback printing: February 2003
First William Morrow trade paperback printing: May 1998
First William Morrow hardcover printing: October 1983

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