Touch (1987) (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 , 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 characterwho 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 Cliche, in which may be found other interesting observations on the work of Elmore Leonard.

About the Author

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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"Pure joy . . . delicate and subtle . . . elegant and touching . . . Touch is alive with scams and alive, too, with the usual Dutch treat of kinky dialogue and kinkier characters."

Washington Post Book World

"Leonard's dialogue and descriptions are so good that they . . . keep the reader glued to the pages."

Chicago Sun-Times

"Abounds with many of the touches that make Mr. Leonard a national resource."

New York Times

"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."

Miami Herald

"Leonard gets better and better and better. He makes the rest of us green with envy."

Tony Hillerman

"Touch is a classy mystery. It has guns, sex, con artists, intrigue, and what one has come to expect in an Elmore Leonard novel: crackling dialogue gleaned from the stuff of life. But it has more than mystery. It's about 'mystical things' . . . Touch abounds in biting satire and whimsical humor. . . . Best of all is the dialogue . . . By the end of the novel, readers may not believe that Juvenal has the touch, but they will certainly be convinced that Elmore Leonard has it."

Los Angeles Times Book Review

"An offbeat book for Leonard, it has all his enjoyable earmarks, including the kind of opening scene guaranteed to seize the reader's attention."

Cleveland Plain Dealer

"No one can beat Elmore Leonard when it comes to mordant humor and shockingly bizarre situations."

Orlando Sentinel

"His books defy classification. . . . What Leonard does is write fully realized novels . . . populating them with characters so true and believable you want to read their lines aloud to someone you really like."

Dallas Morning News

"Elmore Leonard is as entertaining as they come."

St. Louis Post-Dispatch

"When Elmore Leonard's people start talking, I can't help myself, I have to listen."

Lawrence Block

"Elmore Leonard does it again. But this time he's done it differently. The familiar Leonard touchstones are all there: the taut, precise, and pitch-perfect dialogue, characters from the outer fringes of society who are looking for an easy way in, expertly crafted scenes that live in the memory long after the last page is turned. However, this novel emerges as a story of innocence rather than crime, about the simplicity of love and its survival in the face of greed, avarice, and blind crusaders. . . . A hell of a story from one fine writer."

United Press International

"No one writes better dialogue. No one conveys society's seedier or marginal characters more convincingly. . . . Leonard's sardonic view of the world proves immensely entertaining, and not a little thought-provoking."

Detroit Free Press

"Few fiction writers match the artful ability of Elmore Leonard, first to persuade you to read his next sentence, then to draw you into reading his next chapter, and finally to seduce you into reading his entire book."

Cincinnati Enquirer

"Elmore Leonard may be the last hope for the written word."

New York Observer

"The guy keeps turning these things out, and damned if every one doesn't read better than the last."

New York Daily News

"Elmore Leonard is a distinctive American artist, the way our great jazz musicians are. . . . There is still his sound, and then everybody else's."

Mike Lupica

"Touch has Leonard's fist-hard way with words, dialogue that seems to come straight from a hidden tape recorder, sharply chiseled characters, and a style that compels readers to keep turning the pages."

Philadelphia Inquirer

"Infinitely touching and funny."

San Francisco Chronicle

"His best book . . . It is quintessential Leonard . . . providing page for page as much delight to Dutch addicts as any of his other books. Maybe a little more."

Andrew Greeley

"His most appealing novel . . . A magic Touch."

Detroit News

"The gritty, street-smart dialogue--Leonard's trademark--is as good as it gets."

Newsday

"One of America's foremost literary entertainers . . . Elmore Leonard's writing has become bulletproof."

Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel

"While Elmore Leonard is no slouch when it comes to pulling together a dandy plot, it is for his dead-on characterizations and pitch-perfect dialogue that we read his books."

Atlanta Journal-Constitution

"There's nobody like Elmore Leonard."