Nothing to it. If changing your life was this simple, why was he ever concerned about the everyday stuff, writing fifteen thousand criminal offenders? He said to Jackie, 'Okay,' and was committed, more certain of his part in this than hers. Until she stood close to him in the kitchen and he lifted the skirt up over her thighs, looking at this girl in a summer dress, fun in her eyes, and knew they were in it together.
-- From "Rum Punch" (1992)

The middle-aged romance of bail bondsman Max Cherry and flight attendant Jackie Burke (nicely brought to life by Robert Forster and Pam Grier in Quentin Tarantino's "Jackie Brown") is a testament to the author's belief in second chances and second acts, Fitzgerald be damned. So it is that certain characters of his reappear in his books, as though one turn upon the stage were not enough. There is Max and Jackie's nemesis, Ordell Robbie and his sorry crew (last seen in "The Switch"); Harry Arno, the hapless bookie of "Pronto" and "Riding the Rap," and Raylan Givens, the steadfast U.S. marshal of the same books; and Chili Palmer, the shylock cum movie producer of "Get Shorty" and "Be Cool." (More on him later.) "I'm writing about the kinds of people that interest me the most," Leonard told Good Housekeeping, "savvy people, people who have a hustle going."

Leonard's hustle has always been writing -- not the easiest way to make a living, granted, but a mostly honest one. His family settled in Detroit in 1934 when Elmore was 9; his father was an executive for General Motors, and his relatively privileged position spared the Leonards the worst effects of the Depression. It was that year that Elmore saw the film version of "All Quiet on the Western Front," based on Erich Maria Remarque's classic anti-war novel, and wrote a play in homage which he performed in his Catholic fifth-grade class. To this day, Leonard approaches violence gingerly, almost reluctantly, in his work. Take this prelude to a fight scene in "The Big Bounce":

It was coming now and Ryan knew it. Every time he had ever been in a fight since he was little, he knew this time when his stomach tightened and he could see in the other guy's eyes they were going to go through with it. He had thought about it a lot, this moment, and he had come to realize the other guy must be feeling and thinking the same thing ...

Leonard is often mentioned as the heir to Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, but Hemingway is his most obvious influence -- in style, at least. "I'd open 'For Whom the Bell Tolls' and start reading anywhere for inspiration," he told the Guardian in 1998. "I loved his work -- the short dialogue, all that white space, his constructions, his use of participles. I realized that I didn't share his attitude. He took himself too seriously."

Poor eyesight kept Leonard out of the action during the Second World War; as a store manager of the SeaBees he spent the duration doling out beer to sailors on an island in the South Pacific. Upon return he enrolled in the University of Michigan where he majored in English and philosophy. He began working for an advertising agency in college, an experience he claims taught him nothing as a writer. He was already writing short stories when he started "writing cute" for clients like Chevrolet ("I could do truck ads, but I couldn't do convertibles at all," he told Martin Amis, one of his many A-list author fans). Argosy, that venerable standard-bearer of hairy-chested prose, published Leonard's first story, "Trail of the Apache," in 1951. He continued to crank out western stories for the pulps and wrote his first novel ("The Bounty Hunters," published in 1953) between the hours of 5 and 7 in the morning, before heading off to work. (His dedication to his craft remains daunting: When working on a book he writes every day, 9:30 to 6, longhand, producing a novel a year.)

But the sales of his western books and stories (two of which, "The Tall T" and "3:10 to Yuma," were adapted for film) were not enough to allow him to quit his day job. His wife, Beverly, and he had five children who recall him toiling away in the basement, surrounded by balled-up sheets of yellow paper. The western market was dying when he wrote "Hombre" in 1960; a film version, starring Paul Newman, appeared in 1966, but the years in between were lean, mean and rather drunken. Leonard was writing scripts for educational films, and there must have been times he felt he'd lost the thread, that his chances were all played out. He would use that sense of desperation to inform his characters' choices in his crime fiction, and the dark undertow of alcohol is felt throughout.

Voted by the Western Writers of America one of the 25 best westerns ever written, "Hombre" reads like a dream -- and I don't mean that the writing is angelic or high-flown. The feel of the book is stark and inevitable, with a handful of characters thrown together in harsh relief against an arid desert landscape: "Stagecoach" as depicted by di Chirico. Despite its concessions to the dime-novel audience ("If there's anything anybody wants to skip, like innermost thoughts in places, just go ahead"), "Hombre" confronted racism head on. Its titular hero (aka John Russell, a horse-breaker of white, Mexican and Indian background) is shunned by his fellow passengers -- until they need him for their survival. And his ultimate sacrifice (a definite bummer for mid-'60s movie audiences) is as puzzling and moving as Billy Budd's, without the Christian overtones.

But by the end of that decade the western was as dead as old John Russell, whereas crime books were back in vogue. "Also, in the western, I had begun to feel as though I were in second gear," Leonard later reflected. "I wasn't using everything around me." The book that became "The Big Bounce," a Cain-like story of a pair of drifters without much of a center, was rejected 84 times, even with the efforts of Hollywood agent H.W. Swanson (who had handled Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Chandler). The book finally sold for six figures, and Leonard said goodbye to ad work for good.

But even as he honed his skills as a crime writer (you can't really call his books mysteries) in the '70s, Leonard's personal life was at sea. In the wake of his divorce from Beverly, Leonard quit drinking in 1977 and began going to AA. Friends describe the sober Dutch as quieter, more introspective but also more attentive. Though by all accounts a happy, voluble drunk, he relearned (like a lot of people in recovery) the importance of listening. One of the people he listened to was his second wife, Joan Shephard (they married in 1979), who read his books in manuscript and campaigned hard for Leonard to develop his female characters. Women in his early crime books often fall into predictable hardboiled categories -- ditzy dame, femme fatale -- while many of the post-Joan novels boast strong, independent female characters, from the defiant defense attorney Carolyn Wilder in "City Primeval" (1980) through the quick-witted probation officer Kathy Baker in "Maximum Bob" (1991) to the revolutionary sympathizer Amelia Brown in last year's "Cuba Libre." When Joan died, suddenly, of cancer in 1993, Leonard must have felt unmoored. (He remarried shortly thereafter.) But in the books that followed there is a sense of regeneration rather than one of defeat. Starting over, Leonard's characters know, is the real American dream.

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