Freaky Deaky (33 page)

Leonard:
No, I don’t. I start with a character. Let’s say I want to write a book about a bail bondsman or a process server or a bank robber and a woman federal marshal. And they meet and something happens. That’s as much of an idea as I begin with. And then I see him in a situation, and I begin writing it and one thing leads to another. By page 100, roughly, I should have my characters assembled. I should know my characters because they’ve sort of auditioned in the opening scenes, and I can find out if they can talk or not. And if they can’t talk, they’re out. Or they get a minor role.

But in every book there’s a minor character
who comes along and pushes his way into the plot. He’s just needed to give some information, but all of a sudden he comes to life for me. Maybe it’s the way he says it. He might not even have a name the first time he appears. The second time he has a name. The third time he has a few more lines, and away he goes, and he becomes a plot turn in the book.

When I was writing
Cuba Libre
, I was about 250 pages into it and George Will called up and said, “I want to send out forty of your books” — this was the previous book [
Out of Sight
] — “at Christmastime. May I send them to you and a list of names to inscribe?” I said, “Of course.” He said, “What are you doing now?” I said, “I’m doing Cuba a hundred years ago.” And he said, “Oh, crime in Cuba.” And he hung up the phone. And I thought, “I don’t have a crime in this book.” And I’m 250 pages into it. [Laughter] It was a crime that this guy was running guns to Cuba, but that’s not what I really write about. Where’s the bag of money that everybody wants? I didn’t have it. So, then I started weaving it into the narrative. I didn’t have to go back far, and I was on my way.

Amis:
I admire the fluidity of your process because it’s meant to be a rule in the highbrow novel that the characters have no free will at all.
E.M. Forster said he used to line up his characters before beginning a novel, and he would say, “Right, no larks.” [Laughter] And Nabokov, when this was quoted to him, he looked aghast, and he said, “My characters cringe when I come near them.” He said, “I’ve seen whole avenues of imagined trees lose their leaves with terror at my approach.” [Laughter]

Let’s talk about
Cuba Libre
, which is an amazing departure in my view. When I was reading it, I had to keep turning to the front cover to check that it was a book by you. How did it get started? I gather that you’ve been wanting to write this book for thirty years. It has a kind of charge of long-suppressed desire.

Leonard:
In 1957, I borrowed a book from a friend called
The Splendid Little War
. It was a picture book, a coffee-table book of photographs of the Spanish-American War — photographs of the
Maine
, before and after; photographs of the troops on San Juan Hill; newspaper headlines leading up to the war; a lot of shots of Havana. I was writing Westerns at the time, and I thought, I could drop a cowboy into this place and get away with it. But I didn’t. A couple of years ago, I was trying to think of a sequel to
Get Shorty
. And I was trying to work Chili Palmer into the dress business. I don’t
know why except that I love runway shows. I gave up on that. And I saw that book again,
The Splendid Little War
, because I hadn’t returned it to my friend in ’57. And I thought, “I’m going to do that.” Yeah, the time has come. So, I did.

Amis:
In a famous essay, Tom Wolfe said that the writers were missing all the real stories that were out there. And that they spent too much time searching for inspiration and should spend ninety-five percent of their time sweating over research. The result was a tremendously readable book,
The Bonfire of the Vanities
. Now you, sir, have a full-time researcher.

Leonard:
Yes, Gregg Sutter. He can answer any of your questions that I don’t know.

Amis:
Were you inspired by the research he put into this book?

Leonard:
He got me everything I needed to know. I asked him to see if he could find out how much it cost to transport horses from Arizona to East Texas and then to Havana. And he did. He found a cattle company that had been in business over
100 years ago and was shipping cattle then. He found an old ledger book and copied it and faxed it to me.

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.

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“Exciting . . . . smart and funny . . . . There are so many amusing twists and turns in
Freaky Deaky
that one could almost give the entire plot away without running the risk of spoiling it.”

New York Times

“Cool talk . . . . hot action . . . . a fast read . . . . a craftsman with a sure hand . . . . It’s impossible not to love Elmore Leonard.”

Los Angeles Times

“Amazing . . . .
Freaky Deaky
bears that special Leonard brand: Attention to technical detail . . . . the ‘voice’ of the street, and architectural precision . . . . All of the seemingly unrelated episodes fit like stones in the Great Pyramid.”

Arkansas Democrat-Gazette

“Book by book . . . . Elmore Leonard is painting an intimate, precise, funny, frightening, and irresistible mural of the American underworld.”

The New Yorker

“There’s nobody like Elmore Leonard.”

Cosmopolitan

“This
Freaky Deaky
is some kinda dance. . . . . Elmore Leonard’s brilliant lowlife characters get to make some great moves. . . . . Spontaneous and original . . . . they keep changing the steps, switching partners, cutting in on each other’s action, and dodging—or killing off—whatever human traffic gets in the way. With his uncanny ear for the music of lowlife talk, the author also gives them the liveliest dialogue to dance to, much of it raunchy, every bit of it distinctly character-building.”

St. Petersburg Times

“Wonderfully entertaining . . . . You greedily turn page after fast-paced page . . . .
Freaky Deaky
is so much fun. . . . . The book is silk. There’s nothing wasted. . . . . You can’t beat Leonard for a taste of low-down action and high-toned prose. . . . . His amusement park of thrills remains seductive.”

Newsday

“Cream of the crime writing crop . . . . Leonard’s dialogue and descriptions are so good that they . . . . keep the reader glued to the pages.”

Chicago Sun-Times

“When Elmore Leonard’s people start talking, I can’t help myself, I have to listen.”

Lawrence Block

“Elmore Leonard has the best ear for dialogue in the crime-writing biz.”

Playboy

“His books defy classification. . . . . What Leonard does is write fully realized novels, using elements of the classic American crime novel and populating them with characters so true and believable you want to read their lines aloud to someone you really like.”

Dallas Morning News

“A wonderfully wicked tale . . . .
Freaky Deaky
is a no-frills sprint in a vintage Motor City muscle car. . . . . Leonard creates fascinating characters and gives them interesting things to say. . . . . These violent but hapless villains are drawn with humor and a sense of the absurd, and they help make this book a joy and a breeze to read.”

Chicago Tribune

“While Leonard excels at low-life suspense, he’s also a master fiction writer whose gift for dialogue and cunningly meandering plots any novelist would envy.”

San Francisco Examiner & Chronicle

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

Detroit News

“The hottest thriller writer in the U.S.”

Time

“Quite remarkable . . . . sophisticated, intelligent entertainment . . . . Elmore Leonard delivers what he promises. . . . . A practitioner of both hard-boiled crime fiction and pungent social commentary, he rises well above the limitations of the former genre precisely because he is so adroit at the latter. . . . . In his world nobody gets a free ticket and the victories that people win, such as they are, are limited and costly, which is to say that his world bears a striking resemblance to the real one.”

Washington Post Book World

“Spectacular . . . . Starts out with a bang . . . . How dearly Elmore Leonard loves a scam, a con, a slippery scheme. . . . . The plot of
Freaky Deaky
races along, constantly changing course and doubling back on itself, like a cunning fox in front of the hounds. . . . . [It] is crowded with as many rogues as
The Beggar’s Opera
. . . . . Leonard’s got a feel for their kind of action. His ear is the best in the business. No one writes better or funnier dialogue.”

New York Times Book Review

“The King Daddy of crime novelists.”

Seattle Times

“Leonard does crime fiction better than anyone since Raymond Chandler.”

Cleveland Plain Dealer

“Leonard’s prose is spare but powerful. . . . . Few others in the genre can match his astonishing ear for dialogue.”

Baltimore Sun

“Nobody does it like Leonard. His consummate skill with flint-edged dialogue, kinky characters, and tangled plots have been thoroughly documented—and justifiably praised. . . . . The connections that make up
Freaky Deaky
. . . . are steps in a danse macabre scored in the tick-tick-tick of a timing device, counting down to an ending that indeed makes the earth move.”

United Press International

“Scribe of the downside of the American dream . . . . Elmore Leonard has a knack for humor and dialogue. . . . . Leonard’s also a whiz at telling his story from multiple points of view, slipping from the bad guys to the good guys and back again, getting right inside their heads.”

Christian Science Monitor

“Elmore Leonard’s prose is as good as anything being written in this country. . . . . He grabs you and doesn’t let you go. He delights you, he makes you see.”

Los Angeles Times Book Review

“Leonard tops himself every time.”

Boston Globe