MARTIN AMIS:
We're welcoming here Elmore Leonard, also known as "Dutch." And rather less
formally, the "Dickens of Detroit. " It is an apt description, I think, because
he is as close as anything you have here in America to a national novelist, a concept that
almost seemed to die with Charles Dickens but has here been revived. I was recently in
Boston visiting Saul Bellow, and on the shelves of the Nobel laureate, I spied several
Elmore Leonards. Saul Bellow has a high, even exalted view of what literature is and does.
For him, it creates the "quiet zone " where certain essences can nourish what he
calls "our fair souls. " This kind of literature of the Prousto- Nabokovian
variety has recently been assigned the label "minority interest. " There is
patently nothing "minority interest " about Elmore Leonard. He is a popular
writer in several senses. But Saul Bellow and I agreed that for an absolutely reliable and
unstinting infusion of narrative pleasure in a prose miraculously purged of all false
qualities, there was no one quite like Elmore Leonard.
I thought we might begin at the beginning, and talk about your early years as a writer
and how you got started. In my experience, everyone at the age of 14 or 15 (or a bit
earlier) starts to commune with themselves and to keep notes and to keep a diary. It's
only the writers who go on with that kind of adolescent communion. Was it like that for
you? Did you get the glimmer quite early on?
ELMORE LEONARD: Let me ask first: Do you
think if I lived in Buffalo, I'd be Dickens?
AMIS: The "Balzac of Buffalo "
perhaps.
LEONARD: I had a desire to write very
early on but I didn't. I wrote just what I had to write in school compositions and things
like that. It wasn't until I was in college after World War II that I wrote a couple of
short stories. The first one because the English instructor said, "If you enter this
contest "--it was a local writers' club within the University of Detroit-- "I'll
give you a B. " I've always been inspired in this somewhat commercial approach toward
writing. Which is why I chose westerns to begin with. In 1951, I decided to look at the
field. I looked at the market, and I saw westerns in the Saturday Evening Post, Collier's,
almost everything from the Ladies Home Journal down through men's magazines and pulps.
There were then at least a dozen pulps still in business, the better ones paying two cents
a word. So I decided this was a market. What with all of these magazines buying short
stories, this was the place to start--and because I liked western movies a lot, and I
wanted to sell to Hollywood right away and make some money. I approached this with a
desire to write but also to make as much money as I could doing it. I didn't see anything
wrong with that at all. I think the third one sold, and that was it. After that, they've
all sold since then. But then the market dried up, and I had to switch to crime.
AMIS: You were also, as I understand,
writing commentaries for educational films and industrial movies.
LEONARD: Yes: industrial movies about air
pollution, building highways, Encyclopaedia Britannica, geography and history
movies. I did about a dozen of those: the settlement of the Mississippi Valley, the French
and Indian War, the Danube, Puerto Rico. I think they were 27-minute movies. I did that
right after I had left an ad agency where I was writing Chevrolet ads, which drove me
crazy. Because you had to write real cute then. I had a lot of trouble with that. I could
do truck ads, but I couldn't do convertibles at all. So I got out of that. But I still had
to make a living. So I got into the industrial movies and a little freelance advertising.
