Elmore Leonard’s Perfect Pitch
Out of interest, could this be the best beginning to the sixth chapter of any book, by anyone, ever?
In case you can’t pin the passage down, it is not from “Mrs. Dalloway,” or even “To the Lighthouse.” In fact, it comes from “Unknown Man No. 89,” a 1977 novel by Elmore Leonard. The man is Jack Ryan, not to be confused with the Jack Ryan dreamed up by Tom Clancy. The woman at the bar is Denise Leary, and she’s not just drinking; she’s a drunk, as we intuit from a single word. A glass of wine is one thing. A water glass, half full, is quite another. It smacks of quaffing. That’s Leonard for you. Like patches of reflected light in a portrait, flecked into life with dabs of pale paint, the smallest details kindle the larger picture.
Thanks to a new book by C. M. Kushins, “Cooler Than Cool: The Life and Work of Elmore Leonard” (Mariner), we know a little more about “Unknown Man No. 89.” We learn from Kushins that “Universal Pictures entered into a purchase agreement with Leonard, with the intention that the book was to be adapted by Hitchcock”—a promise that was never fulfilled, though the idea of it is worth savoring. Kushins has also burrowed in the Leonard archives at the University of South Carolina’s Special Collections Library, truffling up a note that Leonard made in an early draft of the novel. He wanted Ryan, who was once an alcoholic like Denise, to lurch off the wagon and, in every sense, to lose the plot. “To describe why Ryan starts drinking again—to make it natural and believable—will take a little doing,” Leonard wrote, “but it’s important to the story that he does.”
Leonard, who died in 2013, was the author of more than forty novels. A dozen of the best are available in a three-volume boxed set from the Library of America. Far be it from me to propose that you steal such a treasure at gunpoint, a transaction much favored by some of Leonard’s heroes, but you really should get your mitts on the box without delay. The first volume contains “Fifty-Two Pickup” (1974), “Swag” (1976), “The Switch” (1978), and, yes, “Unknown Man No. 89,” which is goaded by a sense of private purpose. Here is Ryan, for instance, recalling old habits. Talk about dying hard:
Leonard knew whereof he wrote. When Denise describes her plight, in a speech that slurs toward the brink of tragedy (“I don’t want to be inside me, but I can’t get out”), her bafflement springs in part from Leonard’s own acquaintance with the bottle. The first of his three marriages was badly disfigured by drink, and not until the age of fifty-one did he take his final swig: Scotch and ginger ale, on January 24, 1977, at half past nine in the morning.
“Cooler Than Cool” is an anatomy lesson. It demonstrates that Leonard, as often as not, was writing close to the bone—much closer than many of us suspected. In the case of most novelists, that would hardly be headline news (“You telling me that Melville went to sea?”), yet the reticence of Leonard’s approach has tended to deflect investigation. On the whole, he prefers to hold back from the arena and let his characters do the yakking. “I don’t want the reader to be aware of me as the writer,” he told The Paris Review in 2002. Such a desire, needless to say, is itself an authorial ruse. Leonard is there, in permanent residence, behind the scenes and between the cracks. You just have to know where to look.
When readers think of Leonard, they think of Detroit. His fiction is set all over the place—genteel backwaters like Miami, Hollywood, and Atlantic City, with excursions as far afield as the Dominican Republic, Italy, and Israel. When you buy “The Complete Western Stories,” a meaty compendium of his work, mostly from the nineteen-fifties, you get a bonus at the front: a map of the Arizona Territories in the eighteen-eighties. Nevertheless, it is Detroit that Leonard made his own, so much so that it could be mistaken for native soil. He was in fact born in New Orleans, in 1925, and his childhood was a restless one. In Memphis, he was photographed with one foot on the running board of a car, jabbing a gun at the camera and aping a pose made famous by Bonnie Parker. He was not yet ten years old.
In 1934, the Leonard family relocated to Detroit. Leonard’s father, Elmore, Sr., worked for General Motors and stayed in the business until he died at his desk in a Chevrolet-Buick-Oldsmobile dealership in Las Cruces, New Mexico, aged forty-six. He had thought about enrolling Elmore, Jr., in the General Motors Dealers’ Son School; the very title, with its pledge of a franchise to be handed down to the next generation, conjures up a vanished era of the U.S. automobile industry. The trouble was that, as Leonard later admitted, “I don’t like cars.” According to Kushins, he drove around Detroit in a Fiat convertible, a VW Bug, and a Saab Turbo. That was like stepping up to the plate with a cricket bat. Yet there’s no denying the chorus of vehicles that rumbles through his prose. In “Glitz” (1985), a creep named Teddy Magyk takes his mother’s Chevrolet for a spin:
The sense of nothing going to waste—of experiences, lowly or intense, being stashed away for creative recycling—resounds through Kushins’s biography. Leonard was educated at Blessed Sacrament School, Catholic Central High School, and the University of Detroit High School, which was run by Jesuits. Deep background, you might say, for two of his novels that appeared in 1987. In “Bandits,” a young woman who used to belong to the Sisters of Saint Francis teams up with a former thief. (“Boy, you come out of the nuns you come flying,” he says to her.) More startling still is “Touch,” about a man who receives the stigmata. Blood truly flows from his hands, his feet, and his side, and he wreaks miracles, though that doesn’t stop the unholy from taking advantage of him. The wounds of Christ are not a scam, in Leonard’s cosmos, but everything else is up for grabs.
