Elmore Leonard? Get Real!

[Mark Kohut]

Well, if he ain't no genre writer, mostly "mysteries" , then I shoudda read more of him. 
 
I got to meet him once. At a book party for one of his books.  I compared his unpretentiousness
as a writer--westerns, mysteries {some fer sure), script doctor--with Chekhov's. Chekhov is a 
favorite of mine and I was reading him hard around then. He said nothing to this pretentious stupidity
so I segued into the question I wanted to ask most. I had learned he was the major writer/rewriter on 
"Tell Them Willie Boy is Here"...so I asked about the scene where Redford meets with Blake under
a truce flag on a hill....the talk goes nowhere and then Blake says he has one more question........
 
"How you going to get back down that hill?".....he said it just came to him (and I think Redford's horse gets shot)  
and then spoke engagingly that  watching westerns as a kid
he always wondered why no horses were ever killed....(in the movie and evidently the book, the Blake
character aims at horses to avoid killing men)...... 
 

From: jochen stremmel <jstremmel at gmail.com>
To: Ian Livingston <igrlivingston at gmail.com> 
Cc: Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com>; Carvill John <johncarvill at hotmail.com>; "pynchon-l at waste.org" <pynchon-l at waste.org> 
Sent: Thursday, February 2, 2012 2:54 PM
Subject: Re: Elmore Leonard? Get Real!

Leonard ain't no mystery writer!

And only half Simenon's output are mysteries. Not the better half. And
whoever wants to put Simenon down should read La Marie du Port.



2012/2/2 Ian Livingston <igrlivingston at gmail.com>:
>> P.S. If someone said I could take the collected works of only one mystery
>> genre writer when I was abandoned on a desert island, I think I would
>> choose Simenon.
>
> I think I'd rather drown. Mysteries are nice, light reading, in which
> the unknown becomes somehow known according to minimalist rules. The
> real complexities at work in the daily lives, much more the lives of
> adventure, get reduced to the meanest of actions complicated merely by
> deception, whereas the human mind seeks constantly to reconstruct a
> working model of a world in such rapid transition knowledge of fact
> becomes nigh impossible. THAT mystery will not be solved by linear
> progress, certainly, if it can ever be satisfactorily rectified by any
> means at all.
>
> And it is the wallow of that intellectual swale that puts Pynchon,
> occasionally McCarthy, Murakami, and a sampling of others out ahead of
> Leonard and other mystery writers.
>
>
>
> On Thu, Feb 2, 2012 at 9:57 AM, Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:
>> Jochen,
>>
>> Grass came to mind in the early morning because he won a Nobel and his books
>> were published well in America.
>> I want to read more of him, but I threw him out as a placeholding question
>> mark for WHOEVER international
>> writers our plisters might rate top of the pops...fill it in....
>>
>> And, as I indicated, I am lightly read in Leonard for no better reason than
>> that there are so many good writers, so many
>> good books and I am a slow, albeit voracious, reader.
>>
>> So, refute away. No one has yet argued against my seeing a bit of a shell
>> game at work in the essay-writer,m not Leonard
>>
>> P.S. If someone said I could take the collected works of only one mystery
>> genre writer when I was abandoned on a desert island, I think I would
>> choose Simenon. I'd get a whole society, ala Balzac in the 20th Century.
>> (Unless I was allowed Proust too as non-genre. Then I don't know
>> who I'd choose.)
>>
>> From: jochen stremmel <jstremmel at gmail.com>
>> To: Carvill John <johncarvill at hotmail.com>
>> Cc: igrlivingston at gmail.com; pynchon-l at waste.org
>> Sent: Thursday, February 2, 2012 10:03 AM
>> Subject: Re: Elmore Leonard? Get Real!
>>
>> What do you think is Chandler's best novel? The Long Goodbye? Compare
>> it with the Maltese Falcon. It reconfirms a lot of important things
>> about life in the USA: The business of USAmerica is business; romance
>> is a worthwile delusion; it's hazardous to sleep with your partner's
>> wife; women who engage in serial relationships will lie to you when
>> the truth would do them more good; existentialism is a practical
>> philosophy for urban males to follow; and if a man develops a
>> professional attitude towards his work, he will probably succeed where
>> others fail.
>>
>> And try to find the point of view in The Maltese Falcon and The Glass Key.
>>
>> And Mark, would you be so kind and tell me what you have read from
>> Leonard? And what from Grass?
>>
>> J
>>
>>
>> 2012/2/2 Carvill John <johncarvill at hotmail.com>:
>>>
>>> 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.)Yeah, I've
>>> ecnountered this line of thinking before - that Hammett is better than
>>> Chandler. Never could understand it.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>
>>
>
>
>
> --
> "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
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