Elmore Leonard? Get Real!

[jochen stremmel]

Balzac IS 19th century. Leonard has a completely different kind of
telling his stories.
That piece about Leonard is great, thanks John. He's better than
Chandler, leaner, not as sentimental. Perhaps not better than Hammett.
(Leonard himself said, Willeford wrote the best crime novels.)

The latest comment to the Guardian article is interesting:

"That quote by Martin Amis is kind of funny. His father years ago said
John. D. MacDonald was better than Saul Bellow. Although Kingsley did
think highly of mystery-detection fiction, especially those of John
Dickson Carr. Life in a way is a mystery. You can't be sure of
anything. To pretend you can, which is what writers do, is part of the
appeal. We want an explanation. One of the best overt
mystery-detection novels may be John Fowles's The Magus. That one
book, all by its lonesome, is better than all of Leonard's books put
together. I would bet. But I can't be sure, not having read, or
wanting to read, all of Leonard's novels."

Here is a quote from a MacDonald novel:
"Bless them all, the forlorn little rabbits. They are the displaced
persons of our emotional culture. They are ravenous for romance, yet
settle for what they call making out. Their futile, acne-pitted men
drift out of high school into a world so surfeited with unskilled
labor there is a competition for bag-boy jobs in the supermarkets.
They yearn for security, but all they can have is what they make for
themselves, chittering little flocks of them in the restaurants and
stores, talking of style and adornment, dreaming of the terribly
sincere stranger who will come along and lift them out of the gypsy
life of the two-bit tip and the unemployment, cut a tall cake with
them, swell them up with sassy babies, and guide them masterfully into
the shoal water of the electrified house where everybody brushes after
every meal. But most of the wistful rabbits marry their unskilled men,
and keep right on working. And discover the end of the dream.
They have been taught that if you are sunny, cheery, sincere,
group-adjusted, popular, the world is yours, including barbecue pits,
charge plates, diaper service, percale sheets, friends for dinner,
washer-dryer combinations, color slides of the kiddies on the home
projector, and the eternal whimsical romance -- with crinkly smiles
and Rock Hudson dialogue. So they all come smiling and confident and
unskilled into a technician's world, and in a few years they learn
that is is all going to be grinding and brutal and hateful and
precarious. These are the slums of the heart. Bless the bunnies. These
are the new people, and we are making no place for them. We hold the
dream in front of them like a carrot, and finally say sorry you can't
have any. And the schools were we teach them non-survival are
gloriously architectured. They will never live in places so fine,
unless the contract something incurable."

I read The Magus with 21. It was certainly a great read for me, not as
great as One Flew Over a Cuckoo's Nest, but great as well. I don't
think I will read it again. But I read at least 10 Leonard novels at
least  twice.

If there is somebody out there who has yet to read his first novel by
Elmore Leonard I would recommend Unknown Man No. 89, for several
reasons, not the least being some very authentic AA meetings.

His first rule of writing is, I believe: "Don't open your book with
weather." But that was not the reason why I stopped reading The
Corrections after the first paragraph.

Happy reading,

Jochen

2012/2/2 Ian Livingston <igrlivingston at gmail.com>:
> So maybe I should read something by Leonard, but nothing in this blog
> captivates my interest enough to put down what I'm in the midst of to
> do it. I'm 'bout ready to go in for another re-dose of the Pynchon
> when I finish 1Q84, which I am very much enjoying.
>
> On Wed, Feb 1, 2012 at 4:08 PM, Carvill John <johncarvill at hotmail.com> wrote:
>> Foax
>>
>>
>> A couple-three people have mentioned Pynchon here, not just me. but really,
>> imagine Elmore Leonard - for all that we do love him - being held above our
>> man:
>>
>>
>> http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/jan/27/elmore-leonard-great-american-novelist?commentpage=last#end-of-comments
>>
>>
>>
>
>
>
> --
> "Less than any man have I  excuse for prejudice; and I feel for all
> creeds the warm sympathy of one who has come to learn that even the
> trust in reason is a precarious faith, and that we are all fragments
> of darkness groping for the sun. I know no more about the ultimates
> than the simplest urchin in the streets." -- Will Durant